The Vast-Right Wing Conspiracy and Republican Attack Machine may have thought that they “beat the bitch,” but it appears likely that their sights were pointed in the wrong direction. While Hillary Rodham Clinton has endured the bulk of criticisms from stalwarts of the Right from Pat Buchanan to Robert Bork for nearly two decades, it is now clear that everything that the Republicans said and thought that Hillary Clinton was, Michelle Obama is. In fact, in recent weeks, Michelle Obama has unveiled her true identity as everything that her husband is not: a smug, unpatriotic, spoiled, limousine liberal.
Typically, candidates spouses are rightly considered off limits to media scrutiny. However, like Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Edwards, and Theresa Heinz Kerry in the past, Michelle Obama is not a typical wife of a candidate. Although she has claimed on a number of occasions that she has not interest, and in fact dislikes politics, her actions and words expose her true liberal bona fides.
Don’t let yourself be convinced otherwise.
Of course, most of the criticism directed at Michelle Obama came as a result of her comments that “for the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback” while speaking on behalf of her husband in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Of course, Obama supporters were quick to point out that she was taken out of context and according to Senator Obama, “What she meant was, this is the first time that she’s been proud of the politics of America…Because she’s pretty cynical about the political process, and with good reason, and she’s not alone. But she has seen large numbers of people get involved in the process, and she’s encouraged.” Typically that response would be sufficient, but this case it does not wash because her comments in Milwaukee were not an isolated event. In fact, on the same day, speaking in Madison, Wisconsin, Michelle Obama said, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country, and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change.” To believe Senator Obama’s explanation would require more than an audacious quantity of hope, it would truly require a “willful suspension of disbelief.” As the saying goes, lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice.
That was not an isolated incident. In fact, while acting as a surrogate for her husband on the campaign trail, Michelle Obama has made a number of statements that, at the very least, cast doubts on her supposed lack of interest in politics. For instance, while stumping for Senator Obama on April 16, 2007, Mrs. Obama discussed the struggles of being a Princeton grad, Harvard trained lawyer, and wife of a Senator. Speaking to a large group of women, Michelle Obama said: “But seriously, with the exception of the campaign trail and life in the public eye, I have to say that my life now is not really that much different from many of yours. I wake up every morning wondering how on earth I am going to pull off that next minor miracle to get through the day. I know that everybody in this room is going through this. That is the dilemma women face today. Every woman that I know, regardless of race, education, income, background, political affiliation, is struggling to keep her head above water.”
Would you believe that a woman whose combined household income was, according to the L.A. times, in excess of $430,000 in 2006 and whose husband earned an additional $551,000 in book royalties, living in a $1.6-million home in Chicago can really connect with “Every woman….struggling to keep her head above water.”? Beyond the unbelievability of that statement, can I point out that such rhetoric sounds more like John Edwards class-warfare rhetoric than a candidate’s wife who is disinterested in politics.
However, perhaps more important than the obvious political fire that burns deep inside that daughter of a Democratic precinct captain, is the contrast that Senator Hillary Clinton provided over what she and Michelle Obama viewed as “struggling.” During the February 21 Democratic Debate at the University of Texas, Senator Clinton said:
…with all of the challenges that I’ve had, they are nothing compared to what I see happening in the lives of Americans every single day. [I was proud to be] along with Senator McCain, as the only two elected officials, to speak at the opening at the Intrepid Center at Brooke Medical Center in San Antonio, a center designed to take care of and provide rehabilitation for our brave young men and women who have been injured in war.
And I remember sitting up there and watching them come in. Those who could walk were walking. Those who had lost limbs were trying with great courage to get themselves in without the help of others. Some were in wheelchairs and some were on gurneys. And the speaker representing these wounded warriors had had most of his face disfigured by the results of fire from a roadside bomb.
You know, the hits I’ve taken in life are nothing compared to what goes on every single day in the lives of people across our country. And I resolved at a very young age that I’d been blessed and that I was called by my faith and by my upbringing to do what I could to give others the same opportunities and blessings that I took for granted.
Senator Clinton demonstrated that, despite years of criticism, the kind of criticism that Michelle Obama has not yet even begun to imagine, she appreciates the meaning of sacrifice and patriotism in a way that Michelle “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country” Obama does not.
Whether all women are struggling or not, Michelle Obama did make it clear that one woman would have to significantly struggle to gain her vote. During an interview in February 2008, Michelle Obama was unclear whether or not she would support Hillary Clinton if she was the Democratic nominee, Mrs. Obama said “I’d have to think about that. I’d have to think about policies, her approach, her tone.” That type of political cannibalism is rare even among Washington insiders and should make people wonder about what type of fiery rhetoric the American people can expect if Michelle Obama was to spend more time in Washington. This also points out the media’s bias in covering the democratic presidential candidates. Mrs. Obama’s comments got almost no media coverage. Could you imagine if Former President Clinton had said he wasn’t sure if he would vote for the democratic nominee if it wasn’t his wife and how much coverage that would have gotten?
If recent weeks have been any indication, we are just beginning to get a picture of who Michelle Obama really is. This picture was made more visible by the Obama campaign’s decision to release Michelle Obama’s senior thesis, “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community,” despite the previous decision, as reported by Jonah Goldberg of the National Review, by officials at Princeton to restrict access to her thesis at Princeton’s Mudd Library until November 5, 2008. The document is a startling exposé by a woman who strongly believed in a separate racial identity. In the thesis, the future Mrs. Obama stated that “I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong. Regardless of the circumstances underwhich I interact with whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second.” But perhaps the most startling piece of the thesis was Michelle Obama’s reporting of the results of an 18-question survey that she had sent to 400 black graduates of Princeton. The then young Michelle Robinson wrote: “I hoped that these findings would help me conclude that despite the high degree of identification with whites as a result of the educational and occupational path that black Princeton alumni follow, the alumni would still maintain a certain level of identification with the black community. However, these findings do not support this possibility.”
That thesis may finally reveal how Barack Obama, a man raised by a white mother and white grandparents, was led to attend a Church whose mission statement reads like an Afro-centrist tome. According to its website, the Obama’s home church, led by Pastor Jeremiah Wright, the mission of the Trinity United Church of Christ reads: “We are a congregation which is Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian… Our roots in the Black religious experience and tradition are deep, lasting and permanent. We are an African people, and remain “true to our native land,” the mother continent, the cradle of civilization. God has superintended our pilgrimage through the days of slavery, the days of segregation, and the long night of racism. It is God who gives us the strength and courage to continuously address injustice as a people, and as a congregation. We constantly affirm our trust in God through cultural expression of a Black worship service and ministries which address the Black Community.”
If the Senator has aimed to unite the country, a country he is proud of, by transcending race, then his wife’s history and recent comments can only call into the question how authentically he could deliver on that aim once in the White House.
