Damn it, I knew I should have saved that Taiwanese animation for a separate post.

Laugh if you want, but even after the queen’s royal excursion to Spain, it’s still a no-brainer to have her out on the trail in October. Who else are they going to send out there? Captain Wonderful’s approval rating is halfway down the toilet and Bill Clinton’s more likely to turn out Clinton-haters than Obama fans. You’ve got basically two options for big name, widely popular Democrats: Hillary, who almost certainly won’t campaign, and FLOTUS, who was pulling a 66 percent favorable rating as recently as last month. Even assuming that she’s taken a hit from her recession-defying luxury vacation, she’s still the only game in town.

In fact, her plans to campaign for Democrats in the upcoming mid-term elections are still on schedule, White House aides say. Obama would be making appearances on the campaign trail for Democratic candidates, they acknowledge, stopping shy of announcing exactly where and when the first lady would hit the trail…

“In my opinion, I don’t see any reason why the first lady would pull back,” McBride said. “As far as the political effort goes, she is the first lady of the United States and she is going to be very popular particularly with the party faithful. Her presence at any of these events guarantees a good turnout.”

Still, McBride acknowledged that Obama’s luxury trip to Spain and the images it produced “struck a chord across party lines.” Photos of the first lady strolling along cobblestone streets in a jet-set vacation paradise as the nation struggles through a recession, she said, was “perceived as something most people can’t do right now.”

But “every first lady makes a mistake,” McBride said. “There’s always at least one event or occurrence that isn’t particularly helpful.”

MObama won’t bring any of the voters they’ve lost back into the fold, but she might goose turnout among The One’s base to mitigate the damage. Unless she decides to incorporate into her speeches a slide show of all the expensive things she did and saw and bought on the Spain trip, she should be okay.