(Image Source: Biography)
 

BY RUISHA QIAN


Spotted: First Lady Michelle Obama going shopping at Target.

ABC has the details...

“That there is First Lady Michelle Obama behind sunglasses and a baseball cap, shopping at Target. The First Lady spent about half an hour browsing through the Alexandria, Virginia, store unnoticed, until photographers snapped these photos as she checked out.”

It looks like she’s trying to get out of the White House bubble as often as she can.

But radio host Rush Limbaugh doesn’t think so. He said in his Friday show...

“It has gotten so bad they had to send Moochelle out there in a Lady Gaga-type getup... What a phony baloney plastic banana good time rock-and-roller optic photo op this was!...The White House tipped off an AP photographer. How else did AP have a photographer stationed outside of a Target waiting for Moochelle to show up?”

Conservative blogger Michelle Malkin also mocked the shopping as “snortalicious”...

“She left the bling at home. But her shirt and sunglasses are about as ‘incognito’ as Lady Gaga’s outfit at her younger sister’s graduation.”

Howard Fineman, Huffington Post senior politics editor, disagrees. He tells NBC the First Lady doing bargain shopping can be a good public image...

"It's great PR for them, because they can say, 'Look, on this trip and others, we know what's going on outside the gates of the White House.'"

Mrs. Obama is in a major fund-raising push in the run-up to her husband's 2012 re-election efforts.The Daily Mail says the bargain shopping may be an attempt to counter perceptions of her love of the extravagant.

“With Obama’s domestic popularity at one of its lowest ebbs, she seems determined to her fight her husband's re-election battle by her self-proclaimed campaign wife motto of ‘Do no harm'. Show the world that she really can do recession chic, Mrs Obama headed to a Target store.”

A White House statement issued Friday says the First Lady often runs errands, and there’s nothing unusual about her Target trip.