First she came for my daughter's chocolate syrup with a splash of milk.  Then she came for my child's BMI.  Then my French fries and shaker of salt.  J.Crew sweater sets, gym class, my breast pump -- all tainted.  Now this?!

Target.  Really?  The last refuge of bargain-shopping moms, has-been designers, and ingenious knock-offs -- is nothing safe from tyranny-lovers?  In the words of our youngest at this morning's breakfast table, "I thought you were the First Lady of Target, mom!"  I did, too, dear -- I did, too.

The Obama campaign has been booty-calling all week -- asking me to dinner, telling me to just relax, assuring me how needed I am, asking me to believe the campaign is living on coffee and bad takeout all on my behalf.  Maybe the Obama for America office, headquartered appropriately in Chicago, is in an actual food desert -- or more than one mile from a suitable grocery -- which is why the people there have had to resort to food delivery...and talking to me like I'm a 5^th-grader.

Posturing at Target is a new low, and it hurts.  It hurts like having to take a rain check at Christmas, or leaving the store with everything you never knew you needed, and without the one item you did.

I don't blame the First Lady for wanting to make a Target run.  She must long for the days when she could loathe this country with some anonymity.  Most of us could never imagine giving up life as a private citizen -- the joy of wandering through the aisles of Target with a warm, seasonal Starbucks latte, dark glasses perched on our head as nothing more than a hair accessory -- which is why we have the utmost respect for those who selflessly sacrifice to serve as honorable public servants.

But here's what sticks in a citizen's craw.  As the Obamas lecture, tax, pit class against class, race against race, producers against takers, they'd like us to think of them as benevolent saviors of the common man, not his destructor.  But their desire to look like one of the little guys comes at enormous expense to the little guy.  Michelle Obama doesn't just pop into Target.  She comes following a Secret Service sweep, with a motorcade and a taxpayer-funded assistant.  Oh, and some AP photographer who just happened to be in aisle 7 picking up some digital photo cards and a toothbrush, apparently.

The president, who was hard at work campaigning on the West Coast with the wealthy he both demonizes and courts -- while trying to make enormous tax increases look like a jobs bill -- popped into a hotel gym in Los Angeles earlier this week.  He took with him a "40-strong motorcade comprised of blacked-out SUVS, Cadillacs and two armoured limousines ... parked outside the building. SWAT teams lined the rooftops -- their black balaclavas just visible in the sunlight -- and above, a Vietnam-style helicopter presence was starting up," according to witness Celia Walden of the UK Telegraph.

So I guess they are just like us, save the millions it costs taxpayers each year to enable them to travel, shop, work out, party, entertain, and stage photo ops. If the Obamas were anything like us, they would be budget stewards like the rest of us.  Most importantly, they would be stewards of other people's -- commonly known as taxpayers' -- money.

The First Lady at Target with a baseball cap and sunglasses, and the president at the gym -- the common man -- with a slightly larger entourage and someone else's checkbook.