Michelle, ma belle: These are words that go together well. She looks fabulous, like a presidential spouse out of some dream movie — glossy hair, triple strand of pearls, vaguely retro suits that subtly remind you she’d be the most glamorous first lady since Jackie Kennedy.
Michelle, “fear,” “cynicism”: These are words that go together more problematically. Mrs. Obama is most famous for declaring, about her husband’s candidacy, that “for the first time in my adult lifetime I’m really proud of my country.” Just a throwaway line reflecting no more than the narcissism and self-absorption required to mount a presidential campaign in the 21st century? Possibly — were it not for the fact that almost every time the candidate’s wife speaks extemporaneously she seems to offer some bon mot consistent with that bleak assessment.
‘YOU MUST WORK,’ DECLARES DEAR LEADER
And when she stops looking back across the final grim despairing decades of the 20th century (“Life for regular folks has gotten worse over the course of my lifetime”) and contemplates the sunlit uplands of the new utopia, it doesn’t, tonally, get any cheerier. Pretend for a moment that the name of the candidate had been excised from the following remarks. Would it seem part of the natural discourse of a constitutional republic of citizen legislators? Or does it sound more appropriate to the leadership cult of Basketkhazia or some other one-man stan?
“[INSERT NAME OF MESSIANIC LEADER HERE] will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zone. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. [LEADER] will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”
The above words were his wife’s vision of life under the administration of Barack Obama, the transformative presidential candidate offering change you can believe in — or else. I hate to sound like I’m walled up in the Shed of Cynicism, but the constitutional right to be “uninvolved” and “uninformed” is one of the most precious, at least if the alternative is being “required” to work at coming out of your isolation and engaging with fellow members of the uninvolved, uninformed masses as we push ourselves to move out of our comfort zone.
Fortunately, none of that seems to mean anything in real English, though it has the makings of a totalitarian therapeutic rewrite of “Put on a Happy Face”:Gray skies are gonna push off
Move out your comfort zone
Barack will work your tush off
Move out your comfort zone
Give up your gloomy lives so uninvolved
It’s not allowed
Barack requires every one involved
So join the crowd . . .
I’m willing to cut presidential spouses a lot of slack. When Senator Obama said Jeremiah Wright was like a goofy uncle, it was pointed out that your relatives are a given but you get to choose your pastor. It’s true that you also get to choose your wife, but, unless you’re particularly far-sighted, you don’t always choose with a presidential run in mind. I found Teresa Heinz’s tone-deafness to the rhythms of democratic politics one of the more charmingly genuine features of John Kerry’s phony-baloney populist campaign. Who wouldn’t love a woman who, shanghaied into lunching at Wendy’s, demands to know what “chili” is and has to have it explained to her by the clerk that it’s a meat-based food dish widely consumed around the United States?
Oddly enough, despite being a couple of decades younger and several gazillion dollars poorer, Mrs. Obama has a tin ear even Mrs. Kerry must marvel at. Addressing a group of struggling women in economically torpid central Ohio, Michelle Obama eschewed the usual I-feel-your-pain shtick and invited her audience to feel hers, lurching into a long riff on the expense of extracurricular activities for her daughters, piano and dance and summer camp, and somehow she and Barack are expected to figure out how to pay for it on a combined salary of 500 grand a year, not including his book royalties and her corporate directorship. (Nor the house they bought for $1.6 million.) Mrs. Obama’s plaint was worryingly reminiscent of the time the Prince of Wales, attempting to bond with some of the British Army’s black recruits, said that he too knew what it was to suffer prejudice: At his boarding school some of the boys had been prejudiced against him because he was a prince. (“The people in my dormitory are foul,” he wrote to the Queen in 1964. “They throw slippers all night long or hit me with pillows.”)
Part of the article from National Review. Will try to find the rest.
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