Michelle Obama: America Is ‘Just Downright Mean’
- 03.05.2008 - 3:44 PMAfter Michelle Obama was caught on camera saying that her husband’s presidential bid had made her “really proud of my country for the first time in my adult lifetime,” we were assured by a source no less august than her own sainted husband that she had been misunderstood. Well, guess what? She wasn’t.
In a profile of Michelle Obama published in this week’s New Yorker, Lauren Collins catches her subject out in standard anti-American boilerplate in an appearance at a South Carolina church:
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. “We have become a nation of struggling folks who are barely making it every day,” she said, as heads bobbed in the pews. “Folks are just jammed up, and it’s gotten worse over my lifetime. And, doggone it, I’m young. Forty-four!”
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.) 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.”
It is one thing to say that many people have it tough. Many people do have it tough. But for a 44 year-old woman to tell a black audience that things have “gotten worse during my lifetime” is astonishing. When Michelle Obama was born, racial intermarriage was against the law in at least two dozen states. Governors were standing in front of university and classroom doors, attempting to bar black children and teenagers from entering white-only institutions. The per capita income of African Americans has risen sixteen-fold over the past 40 years. Black homeownership has risen tenfold. The black poverty rate has declined from 75 percent to 25 percent.
Over the past 13 years, a breathtaking drop in the crime rate has made poor black neighborhoods safe and habitable in cities across the country for the first time in Michelle Obama’s lifetime — since the crime spiral that made them intolerable places to live began in the year of her birth, 1964. There are about 350 different categories in which life for black people in particular is so far superior to what it had been in her infancy — even as one has to acknowledge, in the areas of family breakdown in particular, ways in which it is at the very least no better than it was.
But all of this is to take Michelle Obama at her word that her problem with this country’s downright meanness has to do with the sufferings of those who better not get sick in America (because, you know, it’s so much better to get sick in another country). She seems at least as bitter, if not more so, about the fact that she and Barack had student loans to pay off and didn’t have a trust fund. So maybe what is bugging her is not that so many people are poor, but that her life in the Ivy Leagues and as a political wife has placed her in proximity to an entire class of people vastly more wealthy than she — from enormously rich classmates to colossally rich donors whose life of easy privilege apparently induces a degree of resentment in the striving daughter of a terrifically impressive working-class family that succeeded in sending its progeny from a four-room bungalow on the South Shore of Chicago through the nation’s finest schools and into marriage with the man who may prove to be the most notable African-American in this country’s history.
There used to be a term for what ails Michelle Obama: She has a chip on her shoulder. For her sake and for the country’s, she really ought to brush it off. “First Ladies,” writes Collins, “have traditionally gravitated toward happy topics like roadside flower beds, so it comes as a surprise that Obama’s speech is such an unremitting downer.” Now imagine eight years of it. In the relationship between America and Michelle Obama, America may not be not the “downright mean” one.
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March 5th, 2008 at 4:08 PM
Michelle Obama could be married to John Edwards. They both sing the same tune — America is bad, America is mean, America is unfair, blah, blah.
Yet …. millions risk everything to get here, but somehow, these domestic America-bashers like Mrs. Obama and Edwards never get around to explaining that.
Sorry, but I will only tolerate people in high position who love America and recognize this country’s unique greatness.
March 5th, 2008 at 4:36 PM
You know, my wife never used to even approach neo-conservative sentiments until she began listening to me. (Of course, the difference being that she is now thinking right as to Mrs. Obama thinking left (wrong)). Whether she has rubbed off on him or he has rubbed off on her, there is always alot of rubbing going on in a marriage.
March 5th, 2008 at 5:12 PM
Snippets from the article. Obama’s mother-in-law, Marion Robinson, didn’t know for a long time that his Obama’s mother was white.
They have a wine cellar in their basement, a full-time housekeeper, and Michelle’s mom quit work to take care of her grandaughters. Michelle’s mom never had to work when she and her brother Craig were children.
What the heck is she bitching about? Don’t answer me
March 5th, 2008 at 5:13 PM
Michelle Obama’s comment, “for the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country” speaks volumes about her attitudes (and perhaps, her husband’s?) about America. As one person put it, “it may have been a gaffe, but a gaffe can sometimes be a window into the soul.” Her comment bespeaks a soul boiling with resentment and anger. We have to ask, what kind of first lady would she be? Can we imagine her being an inspiration to the American people? Or would she be, instead, a constant rallying point for malcontents who feed constantly on the dark and the negative?
March 5th, 2008 at 6:01 PM
How much money is Karl Rove slipping under the table to Michelle Obama? Is George W. Bush behind this attempt to subvert American democracy? Mrs. Obama cannot be this crazy. It is obviously some sort of Republican trick.
March 5th, 2008 at 6:48 PM
Yeah, I don’t get it either Jan in Amherst. Most women would love her gig, you know? I mean, the entirety of it: Nice husband, nice kids, nice home, excellent salary and good job, mother close-by to tend kids…..that’s a home run.
I wonder if she ever put the inflation in medicine and her cushy University of Chicago Hospitals administrative job at a $300,000 salary together? Okay, healthcare inflation is due to a lot of things, but the administrative inflation is the most annoying. Some university hospitals now have flat screen tvs in hallways, full-fledged marketing departments and loads of Dean of this and Dean of that. Oh, Michelle, you could have done good had you wanted to, you know? You were in the right place to do health-care good, you really were……
March 5th, 2008 at 7:01 PM
My mother, may God rest her soul, raised me up to never speak ill of the dead. Mrs. Obama strikes me as having a dead spot where her heart should be, so that’s all I’ll write.
The New Yorker piece simply confirms what we all can see in her unguarded moments. A very mean and ungrateful woman. They say like attracts like in marriage…
March 5th, 2008 at 7:35 PM
Blame America First
They said that saving Grenada from terror and totalitarianism was the wrong thing to do - they didn’t blame Cuba or the communists for threatening American students and murdering Grenadians - they blamed the United States instead.
But then, somehow, they always blame America first.
When our Marines, sent to Lebanon on a multinational peacekeeping mission with the consent of the United States Congress, were murdered in their sleep, the “blame America first crowd” didn’t blame the terrorists who murdered the Marines, they blamed the United States.
But then, they always blame America first.
When the Soviet Union walked out of arms control negotiations, and refused even to discuss the issues, the San Francisco Democrats didn’t blame Soviet intransigence. They blamed the United States.
But then, they always blame America first.
When Marxist dictators shoot their way to power in Central America, the San Francisco Democrats don’t blame the guerrillas and their Soviet allies, they blame United States policies of 100 years ago.
But then, they always blame America first.
The American people know better.
They know that Ronald Reagan and the United States didn’t cause Marxist dictatorship in Nicaragua, or the repression in Poland, or the brutal new offensives in Afghanistan, or the destruction of the Korean airliner, or the new attacks on religious and ethnic groups in the Soviet Union, or the jamming of western broadcasts, or the denial of Jewish emigration, or the brutal imprisonment of Anatoly Shcharansky and Ida Nudel, or the obscene treatment of Andrei Sakharov and Yelena Bonner, or the re-Stalinization of the Soviet Union.
The American people know that it’s dangerous to blame ourselves for terrible problems that we did not cause.
They understand just as the distinguished French writer, Jean Francois Revel, understands the dangers of endless self- criticism and self-denigration.
He wrote: “Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself.”
http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1996/conventions/san.diego/facts/GOP.speeches.past/84.kirkpatrick.shtml
March 5th, 2008 at 10:25 PM
Mrs Obama may have to take a break from the campaign scene sort of like Mr Clinton has had to in recent times - ironic isn’t it?
March 5th, 2008 at 10:47 PM
THE must read article on the Obamas and the most insightful is this:
A mother’s revenge
http://atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/JB26Aa01.html