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Michelle Obama's history leads one to imagine a black Cinderella, who not only fit into the magical glass slipper, but could if summoned, run the whole castle quite efficiently. An excellent student with sterling academic credits at two Ivy League universities, she graduated cum laude from Princeton in 1995, using a major in Sociology as it dovetails with African American Studies in her senior thesis. "Princeton Educated Blacks and the Black Community." defines her philosophy on American progress toward a more perfect union. She followed up her solid academic foundation, taking a law degree at Harvard in 1988 and immediately proceeded to lay the groundwork for a career uniting law with social service, both in the private and public sectors.
Thus far, nothing of great note to sound alarms in the minds of most Americans of right or left persuasion. But like any human being, turn on TV cameras and subconsciously they become a second pair of eyes revealing subtle clues into real character that go unobserved unless one is finely attuned to body language; one scans for a hook on which to hang a visceral impression. That is the way we, as sentient animals, measure one another.
If the person in question lets down their guard momentarily, the TV lens and the writing gaggle will play, "got cha" without hesitation. Michelle Obama has had her share of those small public revelations--and lived to regret it. Her reaction to Bill Clinton's discussion on her husband's "fairy tale" narrative regard his Iraq War voting record is a case in point; when quizzed about it, she bared her fingers in feigned cat-claws saying she wanted to scratch out Bill's eyes--not too savvy for a woman who pines to scamper up the social ladder via political ropes.
At "Asian Times" online, blogger 'Spengler' ponders on Michelle Obama and Barack's mother, Ann Dunham. Quoting Alexander Dumas, he thinks logically: "When you want to uncover an unspecified secret, look for the woman." Spengler wants to decipher the Obama enigma: the two women most influential in his life are his late mother, an anthropologist with a largely unknown radical left inclination, "and his rancorous wife, Michelle. Obama's women reveal his secret: he hates America." Spengler, like so many political watchers is curious about the illusive Illinois senator. click here Michelle is still exploring her relationship with her husband and with American society. She seems to find both lacking in standards of perfection.
In February, she made a speech in which she confessed she was for the first time in her life proud of her country. The Obama campaign meisters immediately spun her words into cottony confection; but one is left to imagine why sudden pride. One can be cynical and guess she wants to test her intellectual wings as the first black woman to become First Lady of a country she has to this point held in relative contempt. There is the often-cited campaign mantra: change. She longs for it--a change at the top, with her in quick-step only slightly behind her husband to the White House. Of the two, one might speculate Michelle is the more politically inclined.
Spengler translates the above particular Michelle moment, the performance on video tape, he says, "shows eyes hooded with rage," in her declaration of independence from the country's status quo. Rarely does Michelle Obama give credit to the institutions that fostered her rise from working-class school girl to the heights of rank and privilege. She began to stress her black separation in her undergraduate thesis at Princeton:
"My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'Blackness' than ever before. I have found that at Princeton no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus, as if I really don't belong." ( A minority in a majority environment does tend to galvanize our attention.)
She was only twenty-one or twenty-two when she penned that lament. But now she is forty-four. Has her perspective changed? Has she considered the AA twelve-step remedy to social sobriety? Can she countenance their motto of changing what can be changed, accepting what cannot and the wisdom to know the difference? Is she making an attempt to change Michelle Robinson Obama?
Her sarcastic comments have been duly noted during speaking engagements. Michelle often nettles her husband for his domestic shortcomings. It seems all in good fun, her way of making the political couple more human. She confesses she has trouble reconciling Barack's finely-cultivated public persona with the laid-back husband who cannot put away the butter or bread properly. But some miss the humor, especially when he is emanating super-human virtue.
Such lapses led Maureen Dowd (who won't let any glitch go unpunished), Spengler writes, to quip in her op-ed New York Times column, "I wince a bit when Michelle Obama chides her husband as a mere mortal--comic routine that rests on the presumption that we see him as a God...But it may not be smart politics to mock him in a way that turns him from the glam JFK into a Gerald Ford, toasting his own English muffin. If all Senator Obama's peddling is the Camelot mystique, why debunk the mystique?"
Michelle may find Bill Clinton overbearing but she had kind words for Hillary back in 2004, in her bio found at Wikipedia online: "She is smart and gracious and everything she appears to be in public--someone who's managed to raise what appears to be solid, grounded child."
That was, of course, before the campaign dwindled down to two contentious factions bent on poking holes in the other's presidential resume. Michelle Obama is not a bad person; she is accomplished and has made the most of her opportunities. She can't be faulted for trying to be all she can be. But this isn't, contrary to popular sentiment, the time. She and Barack should continue to work on their pitches and batting average in the minors. The country will still be here, hopefully. There's always the next season, as they say....But in the off-season, they might jetison their affilliations with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright--as a gesture to white Americans who don't like to hear the country is no damn good. We prefer to make those decisions on our own, thank you very much.
