March 6, 2008

Michelle Obama Just Won’t Shut Up (But She Does Want to Meet Me, Right After She Rips Out Bill Clinton’s Eyes)

As we observed in Part 2 of If You’re An Obama Supporter… / If You’re A Clinton Supporter…:

If you’re an Obama supporter, you can’t comprehend how Michelle Obama’s remark, “For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback,” could possibly be perceived as a dismissal of every American achievement of the past 25 years.

If you’re a Clinton supporter, you wonder, as Sasha Issenberg put it, “So what did Michelle Obama think of the United States before her husband decided he wanted to run the place?”

Now, thanks to Lauren Collins in the March 10, 2008, issue of The New Yorker, we know what Michelle Obama thought — and thinks — of the United States.

It isn’t pretty.

Collins’ article, “The Other Obama: Michelle Obama and the politics of candor,” depicts Michelle Obama in a generally positive light, both praising her “lack of pretense” and attempting to explain why Michelle says the things she does.

Problem is, Michelle comes across as angry and bitter — especially at the lousy hand she’s been dealt (never mind her superior private education and income, both personal and household, which is more than most Americans could ever dream of grossing) — angry at everyone and everything. This is not a role her husband’s campaign advisers want her to portray. (”‘Occasionally, it gives campaign people heartburn,’ David Axelrod, the Obama campaign’s chief strategist, admits.”)

She also just can’t seem to shut the hell up. While we’re all for outspokenness, especially from a woman (and especially from a woman belonging to a minority group; remember, yours truly is an outspoken woman who belongs to a minority group, too), she is the spouse of a presidential candidate, who, every time she opens her mouth, manages to insult a wide swath of the electorate.

It’s not difficult to envision the way her tendency — no, her compulsion — to shoot from the hip would play in her role as First Lady, especially when the precarious art of international diplomacy demands discretion.

Unfortunately, Michelle Obama hasn’t the first clue about discretion.

Beyond the cringe-making spectre of Michelle’s tactlessness offending some less-than-understanding head of state (can you say “international incident”?), the United States cannot afford to be represented by a First Lady (the official “hostess of the nation”) who repeatedly denigrates her own country. Our standing in the international community is on life support as it is; we do not need a First Lady who agrees with our detractors that the United States is a hellhole of greed and hate.

It doesn’t matter what Michelle thinks she means, or how her nebbish husband (who, notes Collins, has been “working the hapless-hubby routine for a long time”) or his campaign advisers try to “clarify,” explain, spin, or dismiss her words; it’s how her words come across. Anyone who thinks the American public is going to sit down, parse out those words, and spend any time trying to find a deeper layer of meaning (assuming there is one) is a fool; Americans have been conditioned to make snap decisions on first impressions and sound bites.

Worse, it appears Michelle is unlikely to be reined in; Collins writes that she knows what to say and what not to say, but “her pride visibly chafes at being asked to subsume her personality.”

Here’s a newsflash: “Personality” does not preclude tact. And if one’s “personality” is so literally compulsive that one cannot contain one’s unthinking brashness, there are bigger issues involved than mere pride.

Michelle Obama, Collins writes after witnessing a speech at a little South Carolina church, “acknowledged … that some advisers have lobbied her to take a sunnier tone, with little success.”

When Michelle made her “really proud” remark, a casual online acquaintance suggested, in a public forum, that perhaps it was indeed time someone in the Obama camp take her aside and advise her in the art of finesse. Barack supporters, predictably, flew into a rage at the idea of putting a gag on the irrepressible missus; most spat out accusations of “sexism” (ironic, as genuine sexism is usually the first resort of offense against Hillary Clinton), and more than a few attacked my acquaintance as a racist “threatened by an uppity black woman.”

This reaction was, apparently, not atypical, as it is echoed by Collins in her re-cap of the wider fallout over Michelle’s gaffe:

The sentiment — that America was in a mess, and Mrs. Obama was not happy about it — was not a new one, but her unfortunate formulation instantly drew charges that she was unpatriotic. Bill O’Reilly spawned his own scandalette, remarking, “I don’t want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there’s evidence, hard facts, that say this is how the woman really feels.” Victor Maltsev, of Rego Park, wrote to the Post, “Obama wants to be our next first lady? Watch out, America!” Cindy McCain seized the opportunity to draw a sniffy contrast between the Obamas and her and her war-hero husband, telling a cheering crowd, “I don’t know about you — if you heard those words earlier — I’m very proud of my country.”

It was a manufactured controversy, but it reflected a real cavalierness on Obama’s part — not toward the Blue Angels and 9/11 and the Berlin Wall and America’s armed forces, as her various critics had it, but toward the reality that it might be wise for a person whose spouse is running for President not to say something that could be construed that way. The controversy over her brand of household humor may have been a matter of cultural misinterpretation. But Obama’s blitheness about politics may have less to do with race than it does with class — conservative commentators pegged her as a paragon of élitist leftism — or, more likely, for a daughter of blue-collar Chicago, with personal disposition.

Of course, the Obamacans missed the point. As usual.

The point, again, is: Michelle’s unbridled derision of the United States makes Barack look bad. If she becomes First lady, she’s going to make the United States itself look bad.

If you think that assessment is a knee-jerk overreaction, consider this exchange between Collins and Michelle:

In Wisconsin, I asked her if she was offended by Bill Clinton’s use of the phrase “fairy tale” to describe her husband’s characterization of his position on the Iraq War. At first, Obama responded with a curt “No.” But, after a few seconds, she affected a funny voice. “I want to rip his eyes out!” she said, clawing at the air with her fingernails. One of her advisers gave her a nervous look. “Kidding!” Obama said. “See, this is what gets me into trouble.”

“I want to rip his eyes out!”

I’m sorry, but there’s no “clarifying” a remark like that, no “kidding” away a remark that, made by you, Mr. or Ms. Average Citizen, would bring the Secret Service to your doorstep. (Don’t laugh; law-abiding Americans have been hauled in for a lot less than wishing physical harm — “kidding” or not — to a President of the United States.)

It is clear, however, that not all of Michelle Obama’s outrageous remarks are unrehearsed. Collins observes:

Pundits have portrayed Obama as an oversharer and a taskmaster, demeaning her husband by acknowledging his morning breath and his body odor. But the domestic carping that commentators have taken as some sort of uncontrollable T.M.I. tic serves Obama’s husband well, and this may account for her frequent recitation of the mundane details of their housekeeping arrangements. …

. . .

The ordinary card, in fact, may be one of the Obamas’ best assets. It assuages fears of difference — “We’re just like you” is the cumulative message of all the back-and-forth about the breath and the bread — and inoculates against jealousy, a smart bit of self-deprecation on the part of a young, gifted, attractive couple whose fortunes have risen quickly, like movie stars insisting that they were unpopular in high school.

But the Obamas are anything but “ordinary.” By now we all know the basic facts about Barack Obama’s life:

The product of a brief marriage between a black Kenyan scholar and a white Kansan mother, fellow students at the University of Hawaii, Barack was abandoned at age two by his father, but, despite his standard stump-speech sob story of being “raised by a single mother,” was hardly fatherless; his mother was remarried to an Indonesian student, and when Barack was six, the family moved to his stepfather’s homeland.

Barack’s “critical boyhood years,” Hank De Zutter reminds us, “from two to ten — were spent neither in white nor black America but in the teeming streets and jungle outskirts of Djakarta.”

By the time Barack was ten, his mother divorced again, and sent Barack to live with her parents in Honolulu. Barack’s grandparents enrolled him in the prestigious (and expensive), racially diverse Punahou prep school. From there it was onto Columbia University (he earned his bachelor’s in political science in 1983), and then Harvard Law School, graduating magna cum laude in 1991.

The former Michelle Robinson wasn’t exactly raised on food stamps in a tenement slum, either. A graduate of the Whitney M. Young Magnet High School, a highly selective, highly competitive Chicago public college preparatory requiring “special application and entrance testing” for admission to its 450 student openings.

She went on to Princeton (majoring in sociology), and then, writes Collins:

Obama went straight from Princeton to Harvard Law School. After graduating, she became a junior associate, specializing in intellectual property law, at the Chicago firm of Sidley & Austin. She worked there for three years, eventually becoming, as she says in her stump speech, disenchanted with “corporate America.” Valerie Jarrett hired her as an assistant to the mayor, Richard Daley.

Collins also crunches the numbers:

The Obamas’ financial standing has risen sharply in the past three years, largely as a result of the money Barack earned from writing “The Audacity of Hope.” In 2005, their income was $1.67 million, which was more than they had earned in the previous seven years combined. …

. . .

Just after Barack was elected to the United States Senate, Michelle received a large pay increase — from $121,910 in 2004 to $316,962 in 2005.

What’s more, the Obamas have no need to worry about such mundane things as daycare, housework, or having to actually go outside to get some exercise:

Last summer, Obama’s mother retired from her job as a bank secretary in order to look after Malia and Sasha when Barack and Michelle are on the road. (The Obamas employ a full-time housekeeper, and Michelle tries to see a personal trainer four times a week, but they do not have a nanny.)

Yet, Michelle still complains about the “struggle” to “balance work and family.” Never mind that having people to babysit your kids, clean your house, and make you work out four times a week are the kinds of luxuries completely off-limits to Joe and Jane American as they struggle to balance work and family.

It’s not lost on Collins (or on the reader) that Michelle Obama sees the world through a deeply-tinted lens of self-absorption:

Her frame of reference can seem narrow. When she talks about wanting “my girls to travel the world with pride” and the decline of America “over my lifetime,” you wonder why her default pronoun is singular if the message is meant to be concern for others and inclusiveness.

The question is: How genuine is that message of “concern for others and inclusiveness”?

Perhaps the sentiment is, but the “just plain folks” schtick makes the message ring hollow. The Obamas are not “just plain folks” by any stretch of the imagination — they just play them on television.

And in speeches.

At the Pee Dee Union Baptist Church, in Cheraw, South Carolina, “a hamlet of about six thousand known as ‘The Prettiest Town in Dixie,’ Michelle Obama pulled out all the stops to connect with her “mostly elderly, almost all-black crowd,” to prove she was just like them.

“On behalf of my church home and my pastor, Reverend Wright, I bring greetings,” Michelle began, and then went on to talk about her “people” (they’re from from South Carolina, too), and her grandparents’ membership in “an A.M.E. Baptist church in Georgetown.”

Notes Collins:

Obama was playing to her audience — later she riffed on “those relatives who have plastic on the furniture” and reminded the churchgoers to get “ten other triflin’ people in your life” out of bed and down to the polls on Saturday. Her appearances at the church, and many like it, were a key point of strategy in a state that would be the first real test of whether or not Barack could attract significant numbers of black voters. “In South Carolina in particular, because she had family from there, it made a lot of sense for her to speak in the African-American community,” David Axelrod said.

That’s fine, but even in print, the “plastic on the furniture” and “triflin’ people” business sounds as empty — and condescending — as her husband’s frequent — and phony — “lapses” into Southern-fried preacher-man talk. (Oh, it’s phony, all right; the man who spent his entire childhood outside the continental United States, and never knew “the black experience” during his most crucial formative years, admitted in his book, Dreams from My Father, that he had no clue what it meant “to be a black man in America.” And with precious few African-Americans around him in Hawaii, he learned how to “be black” from “TV, movies, the radio; those were places to start. Pop culture was color-coded, after all, an arcade of images from which you could cop a walk, a talk, a step, a style.” Which tells you his racially-charged “Cousin Pookie” remark is utterly and completely meaningless, and merely calculated stagecraft aimed at drawing a connection between himself and a version of Black America to which he has no real connection at all.)

It’s right at the beginning of her speech to the Pee Dee Baptists that Michelle Obama, true to form, gets herself “into trouble” again.

Writes Collins:

Obama begins with a broad assessment of life in America in 2008, and life is not good: we’re a divided country, we’re a country that is “just downright mean,” we are “guided by fear,” we’re a nation of cynics, sloths, and complacents.

A nation of “cynics, sloths, and complacents”?

A country that is “just downright mean”?

I don’t care if you agree with her or not; these remarks fly right in the face of her husband’s frothy, ethereal “hope and change” meme. In fact, she answers Barack’s oft-repeated question: “Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or do we participate in a politics of hope?”

It’s clear what kind of politics his wife is participating in. (Hint: It ain’t hope.)

“We have become a nation of struggling folks who are barely making it every day,” she said, as heads bobbed in the pews.

Who are “we,” Michelle? You have no idea what it means to be “struggling folks who are barely making it every day.” None.

“Folks are just jammed up, and it’s gotten worse over my lifetime. And, doggone it, I’m young. Forty-four!”

Conditions have gotten worse for other people over your lifetime, Michelle. Your family has experienced nothing less than meteoric success, year after year — and your children have never known, nor are they ever likely to know, what it means to go without… or what it feels like to hear their parents arguing over money.

From these bleak generalities, Obama moves into specific complaints. Used to be, she will say, that you could count on a decent education in the neighborhood. But now there are all these charter schools and magnet schools that you have to “finagle” to get into. (Obama herself attended a magnet school, but never mind.)

So did you have to “finagle” your way into Whitney Young, Michelle? Or did you earn your way in?

Health care is out of reach (”Let me tell you, don’t get sick in America”), pensions are disappearing, college is too expensive, and even if you can figure out a way to go to college you won’t be able to recoup the cost of the degree in many of the professions for which you needed it in the first place. “You’re looking at a young couple that’s just a few years out of debt,” Obama said. “See, because, we went to those good schools, and we didn’t have trust funds. I’m still waiting for Barack’s trust fund. Especially after I heard that Dick Cheney was s’posed to be a relative or something. Give us something here!”

“Give” you “something here”? Thanks, Michelle, for making “us” (whoever “us” is supposed to be, but I’ll generously assume you mean Americans who don’t have it as easy as you and your husband) sound exactly like the worst right-wing stereotype of “entitlement mentality” liberals.

(The point isn’t lost on Collins: “Some observers have detected in Obama an air of entitlement. Her defenders attribute these charges of arrogance to racist fears about uppity black women. While it’s a stretch to call the suggestion that Obama projects an air of self-satisfaction bigoted, it may at least reflect a culture gap: last April, after Maureen Dowd wrote a column criticizing Obama for undermining her husband’s mystique, a blog riposte, circulated widely on the Internet, was titled ‘The White Lady Just Doesn’t Get It.’”)

It’s not that I’m too concerned with the damage you’re inflicting on your husband’s campaign, Michelle; I don’t like his positions, I don’t trust him as far as I could throw him, and I want to see him lose the Democratic nomination to Hillary Clinton. But if Barack does win the party’s nomination, this idiocy you’re spewing is going to help guarantee a win by President McCain.

Even more damaging is the longlasting pall you’re casting over the Democratic Party — to which I still belong. You’re making Democrats look spoiled, and demanding, and unreasonable.

Yet you just go on and on. And if your crack about ripping out Bill Clinton’s eyes weren’t enough, you go on to denigrate the very real, measurable gains of the entire Clinton administration:

In Cheraw, Obama belittled the idea that the Clinton years were ones of opportunity and prosperity: “The life that I’m talking about that most people are living has gotten progressively worse since I was a little girl. . . . So if you want to pretend like there was some point over the last couple of decades when your lives were easy, I want to meet you!”

Then you want to meet me, Michelle. I grew up without a trust fund, too, and worked crap jobs throughout my young adulthood in the 1980s. Even after I finished school, my whiz-bang computer-programming skills languished while I had to take anything I could find to pay the rent — I was a school photographer in the very worst, violence-ridden schools in the Los Angeles Unified District, and off-season I jumped at the chance to proctor the state bar exam, or the state cosmetology licensing exam, from one to three days at a time — because there was nothing else available.

Then came “the Clinton years” you disparage so easily. Almost overnight, I was awash in offers to put my professional skills to work. I climbed the ladder at breakneck speed, and my salary rose practically exponentially. Just before George W. Bush was sworn in for the first time, I was earning $110,000 a year.

Then I was laid off. The jobs dried up, and the industry I loved so much (information technology, primarily for medical manufacturing — an area in which I felt, sincerely, that I was contributing to a greater good) has never come back.

Today, I eke out a very meager living doing what I can. Two-week vacations to Hawaii are just a memory. I stay home a lot. And when something breaks, I fix it myself.

Michelle, have you ever soldered a loose wire back into place when a burner on your stove stopped working? (Have you ever even opened the top of your stove to see what’s inside, or would that get your hands too dirty?) Would you even know how to do that?

Yesterday, I fixed the silverware drawer in the kitchen. It’s the most used drawer in the house, and it finally warped to the point that it couldn’t be pulled in or out. So I took it apart and, with nails my late father had squirreled away in a cigar box, put it back together again, and made it work. I even rubbed a wax candle along the runners to make it slide in and out more easily.

Could you do that, Michelle? Would you do that, Michelle? Especially when it’s just too easy for you to pick up the phone and call a repairman — or have someone call a repairman?

I’d rather call a repairman, too. But I don’t have the money to call a repairman.

So I guess you want to meet me, Michelle, because that “point over the last couple of decades” when my life was easy was hardly a single “point”; it was eight long years of “opportunity and prosperity.” Eight years.

But your revisionist history of the first Clinton era is no surprise, Michelle. Your husband does it all the time, even going as far as venerating Ronald Reagan and praising the GOP as “the party of ideas … over the last ten, fifteen years.”

As David Greenberg put it in his bookmark-worthy Memo to Obama Fans: Clinton’s presidency was not a failure:

“Barack Obama’s upscale white supporters (and those too young to recall the 1970s and 1980s) tend to describe Clintonism as a betrayal of liberalism, a sellout to Wall Street, and proof that ‘the Clintons’ won’t bring about change — a view encapsulated in the Daily Kos blog’s visceral aversion to Terry McAuliffe’s mug. Yet while the courting of big donors with stays in the Lincoln Bedroom left a bad odor, as a historical matter, the Clinton years were unquestionably a time of progress, especially on the economy. And it seems that as Obama mania sweeps the educated classes, the party’s struggling lower-income base still prefers Hillary. One reason is that they’re less prone than their better-off party mates to vote out of an enthusiasm for stirring rhetoric or viral videos or a wish to play their part in a grand narrative of racial reconciliation. Having been battered by globalization, rising health care and education costs, and the subprime mortgage disaster, they’re remembering the Clinton years and voting for who they think will help them. …

“Clinton detractors … like to grouse about “triangulation.” This was pollster Dick Morris’ cynical term for the election-year opportunism behind Clinton’s moderate-seeming but mostly inconsequential ideas in 1996, like the V-chip (to screen out television violence) and school uniforms. On economics, however, Clinton’s construction of policies that defied traditional left-right categories was substantive. The Earned Income Tax Credit, which originated in a pilot form in the 1970s, attracted conservative support in the 1980s as an alternative to transfer payments as a way to help the working poor; Clinton made it a signature policy, expanding it in his 1993 bill to an additional 15 million families — a result that added up to the most significant anti-poverty measure since the Great Society. The virtuous cycle engendered by Clinton’s balanced budgets — which by paying down the debt won the confidence of bond traders and helped bring down interest rates — eventually won over many who had doubted the strategy. …

“By the end of the Clinton presidency, the numbers were uniformly impressive. Besides the record-high surpluses and the record-low poverty rates, the economy could boast the longest economic expansion in history; the lowest unemployment since the early 1970s; and the lowest poverty rates for single mothers, black Americans, and the aged. Real wages, after declining over the course of the Reagan and Bush years, rose under Clinton. To be sure, the gap between the very rich and everyone else widened — as it has continued to do since — but gains for the rich, for once, didn’t leave behind the poor and lower middle class. …

“It’s the economic achievements of the Clinton years that people recalled when they scratched their heads at Obama’s claim that during the last 10 to 15 years — i.e., the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush presidencies — Republicans had the “new ideas.” On the contrary, while it’s possible to argue that the GOP claimed the mantle of newness in the 1980s, when Democrats were still groping for their postindustrial vision, it was precisely in 1992 — with the emergence of Clinton’s fusion of populism and neoliberalism — that Democrats did find a program for the globalization age. And it worked.”

Nevertheless, the Obamas, and their supporters, continue to disparage “the Clinton years” — even despite Barack Obama’s own rather schizophrenic admission: “I think there’s no doubt that there were good things that happened during those eight years of the Clinton administration. I think that’s undeniable. … And, particularly, when looked at through the lens of the last eight years with George Bush, they look even better.”

To both Obamas, and to their supporters, I ask the old bumper-sticker question: So, what was it, exactly, about eight years of peace and prosperity that pissed you off so much?

Yet while attempting to stay on-message and deny everything good about the first Clinton era, Michelle Obama suffers from her own schizophrenic treatment of the Obama campaign’s “out with the old, in with the new” meme:

She exudes a nostalgia, invoking the innocence and order of the past, as much as her husband beckons to a liberating future. Listening to her speeches, with their longing for a lost, spit-shine world, one could sometimes mistake her, were it not for the emphasis on social justice, for a law-and-order Republican. “It’s not just about politics; it’s TV,” she says, of our collective decay. And, wistfully: “The life I had growing up seems so much more simple.”

Michelle, honey, you grew up when I did — you’re all of two years younger than I am.

I do agree that life was indeed simpler when we were younger, and I long for it too.

But you need to make up your mind: Do you want a return to a secure, more orderly past, or do you want to gamble what tenuous hold we have on that past and barge into the future with a set of half-baked — and often contradictory — ideas about what to do with that future?

There’s much more in Collins’ lengthy profile, well worth the full read if you want a clearer picture of the outspoken and often outrageous Michelle Obama, as well as her family (in response to Michelle’s brother Craig’s complaint about Michelle’s overbearingness in college, their mother advised: “Just pretend you don’t know her”), her marriage (”…[Barack] got me into one of these discussions again, where, you know, he sort of just led me down there and got fired up and it’s like you’ve got blah blah blah blah, and then dessert comes out, the tray comes out, and there’s a ring!”), the Tony Rezko mess, and the Obamas’ close relationship with their highly controversial, Louis-Farrakhan-admiring, racial-separatist pastor, Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. (who portrays America as “a Eurocentric wasteland of lily-white lies and outright distortions”).

But we’ll end with one last quote from Collins — two paragraphs buried between pages eight and nine of the piece — which sum up the problem with Michelle Obama:

The self-assurance that colors Obama’s assumption that her personal feelings are some bellwether of American achievement is also palpable in her forceful declarations that her husband is the only person who can solve the country’s problems. “I tell people I am married to the answer,” she said, in a speech in Harlem. “The man . . . who I am willing to sacrifice,” she called her husband, in Iowa. In November, on MSNBC: “Black voters will wake up and get it.” There is a hectoring, buy-one-while-supplies-last quality to Obama’s frequent admonitions that Americans will have only one chance to elect her husband President. Someone who has spent a good portion of her life gaining purchase has suddenly been asked to sell something, and she seems to find it slightly beneath her.

Perhaps Obama’s high-handedness is preëmptive, her way of “claiming a seat at the table” — as she is fond of calling enfranchisement in the power-brokering structure — rather than waiting to be offered one. It’s as though she figures she might as well say that she and her husband are all that before someone can say that they aren’t. And there’s a sort of strategic genius to her presentation of campaigning as grinding work that takes her away from her family, rather than a glorious tour of the world’s greatest country that she would be thrilled to be undertaking even if she didn’t have to. … By loudly voicing her distaste for retail politicking, Obama makes people feel as though, by showing up, she were doing them a favor.

It’s not that Michelle Obama isn’t “grateful” for her high socioeconomic status in this country (on the contrary, she needn’t be grateful to anyone; there is no question she worked for it, and earned it), or her constant dismissal of what’s right with America, or even her deliberate blindness to how much better we had it with Bill Clinton at the helm.

It’s that she has little love for her country, and even less dedication to service to her country. She “makes people feel as though, by showing up, she were doing them a favor.”

You’re not doing anyone any favors, Michelle.

Don’t do me any favors, either… unless, of course, you really do want to meet me for a real-life lesson in how good the Clinton years really were.

But you’ll have to pay my plane fare.

Posted by: Sapphocrat

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