Begrudging His Bedazzling
Maureen Dowd New York Times February 28, 2008
A huge Ellen suddenly materialized behind Hillary on a giant screen, interrupting her speech Monday night at a fund-raiser at George Washington University in Washington. What better way for a desperate Hillary to try and stop her rival from running off with all her women supporters than to have a cozy satellite chat with a famous daytime talk-show host who isn’t supporting Obama? “Will you put a ban on glitter?” Ellen demanded. Diplomatically, Hillary said that schoolchildren needed it for special projects, but maybe she could ban it for anyone over 12. Certainly, Hillary understands the perils of glitter. The coda of her campaign has been a primal scream against the golden child of Chicago, a clanging and sometimes churlish warning that “all that glitters is not gold.” David Brody, the Christian Broadcasting Network correspondent whose interview with Hillary aired Tuesday, said the senator seemed “dumbfounded” by the Obama sensation. She has been so discombobulated that she has ignored some truisms of politics that her husband understands well: Sunny beats gloomy. Consistency beats flipping. Bedazzling beats begrudging. Confidence beats whining. Experience does not beat excitement, though, or Nixon would have been president the first time around, Poppy Bush would have had a second term and President Gore would have stopped the earth from melting by now. Voters gravitate toward the presidential candidates who seem more comfortable in their skin. J.F.K. and Reagan seemed exceptionally comfortable. So did Bill Clinton and W., who both showed that comfort can be an illusion of sorts, masking deep insecurities. The fact that Obama is exceptionally easy in his skin has made Hillary almost jump out of hers. She can’t turn on her own charm and wit because she can’t get beyond what she sees as the deep injustice of Obama not waiting his turn. Her sunshine-colored jackets on the trail hardly disguise the fact that she’s pea-green with envy. After saying she found her “voice” in New Hampshire, she has turned into Sybil. We’ve had Experienced Hillary, Soft Hillary, Hard Hillary, Misty Hillary, Sarcastic Hillary, Joined-at-the-Hip-to-Bill Hillary, Her-Own-Person-Who-Just-Happens-to-Be-Married-to-
a-Former-President Hillary, It’s-My-Turn Hillary, Cuddly Hillary, Let’s-Get-Down-inthe-Dirt-and-Fight-Like-Dogs Hillary. Just as in the White House, when her cascading images and hairstyles became dizzying and unsettling, suggesting that the first lady woke up every day struggling to create a persona, now she seems to think there is a political solution to her problem. If she can only change this or that about her persona, or tear down this or that about Obama’s. But the whirlwind of changes and charges gets wearing. By threatening to throw the kitchen sink at Obama, the Clinton campaign simply confirmed the fact that they might be going down the drain. Hillary and her aides urged reporters to learn from the “Saturday Night Live” skit about journalists having crushes on Obama. “Maybe we should ask Barack if he’s comfortable and needs another pillow,” she said tartly in the debate here Tuesday night. She peevishly and pointlessly complained about getting the first question too often, implying that the moderators of MSNBC — a channel her campaign has complained has been sexist — are giving Obama an easy ride. Beating on the press is the lamest thing you can do. It is only because of the utter openmindedness of the press that Hillary can lose 11 contests in a row and still be treated as a contender. Hillary and her top aides could not say categorically that her campaign had not been the source on the Drudge Report, as Matt Drudge claimed, for a picture of Obama in African native garb that the mean-spirited hope will conjure up a Muslim Manchurian candidate vibe. At a rally on Sunday, she tried sarcasm about Obama, talking about how “celestial choirs” singing and magic wands waving won’t get everybody together to “do the right thing.” With David Brody, Hillary evoked the specter of a scary Kool-Aid cult. “I think that there is a certain phenomenon associated with his candidacy, and I am really struck by that because it is very much about him and his personality and his presentation,” she said, adding that “it dangerously oversimplifies the complexity of the problems we face, the challenge of navigating our country through some difficult uncharted waters. We are a nation at war. That seems to be forgotten.” Actually it’s not forgotten. It’s a hard sell for Hillary to say that she is the only one capable of leading this country in a war when she helped in leading the country into that war. Or to paraphrase Obama from the debate here, the one who drives the bus into the ditch can’t drive it out.
Michelle Obama and the Rage of a Privileged Class By Steve Sailer February 25, 2008 For a year now, I've been pointing out that, while Sen. Barack Obama's brain may be in the center, his heart is on the far left. So it might be of some interest to find out more about whether his head or his heart is likely to prevail if he becomes President. Curiously, the Main Stream Media has shown little appetite for this task. Obama himself may not know the answer. As he has bragged (or warned, depending upon your point of view): "What I am constantly trying to do … is balance a hard head with a big heart." We're not accustomed to politicians as smart as Obama. White voters would likely find his supple intelligence too elitist in a white candidate. But they are so desperate for a positive role model for blacks that many of them have embraced Obama without knowing much about what he wants to do with all that brainpower. Two weeks ago, I noted: "Now, Obama is a smooth operator. But the two people who have had the greatest influence on his adult life—his wife Michelle and his spiritual advisor, Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.—are not. They feel a deep racial anger and are not terribly good at hiding it." Right on cue, Michelle Obama has now begun attracting skeptical attention for the first time after making hundreds of speeches on her husband's behalf. In Milwaukee last week, she proclaimed: "Hope is making a comeback, and let me tell you, for the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country." It's not so much that Michelle has a tin ear for rhetoric as that her husband's ear could be made out of the same mimetic poly-alloy as the liquid metal shapeshifting cyborg from the future in Terminator 2. Like most human beings, however, Michelle is prone to the occasional gaffe in which she lets us know what's really on her mind.
For example, in an early February speech she let herself sound like the Khmer Rouge Minister of Propaganda. While this excerpt may resemble an old Dead Kennedys punk rock parody of leftist authoritarianism, such as Holiday in Cambodia or California Uber Alles, she was serious: "And Barack Obama will require you to work. "He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism, that you put down your division, that you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones, that you push yourselves to be better, and that you engage. "Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual - uninvolved, uninformed..." More people are beginning to notice that the candidate's superbly crafted image as the postracial uniter doesn't quite add up. He is supposed to bring us together to overcome our tragic history of racial enmity, etc. Yet his role-model magic doesn't seem to have worked on his own wife, who continues to vent her anger over the racial indignities she feels she endured more than two decades ago at ultra-liberal Princeton and Harvard Law School. She remains perennially peeved by her relatively poor performance on standardized tests. Or, perhaps, what he tells her in private isn't what he tells us in public? It's not [my] job to endorse political candidates. And I certainly don't have a dog in what's left of this fight. But it is our job to help educate the public on crucial topics where the MainStream Media won't. I have little to add to the discussion of such shopworn old pols as Hillary Clinton and John McCain. In contrast, I believe I understand Obama better than most pundits because the mixed-race candidate has been brooding for 35 years about "race and inheritance," to quote the subtitle of his autobiography. Mrs. Obama's attitudes about race are significant for multiple reasons. First, Mr. Obama says she's important to him. Newsweek's gushing 2/25/08 cover story on Michelle, Barack's Rock by Richard Wolffe, reports:
"Onstage, Obama has introduced Michelle as 'my rock'—the person who keeps him focused and grounded. In her words, she is just making sure he is 'keeping it real.'" Second, because Michelle Obama lacks her husband's remarkable verbal facility, she provides a keyhole into how the stealth candidate actually thinks and feels on those rare occasions when he can be himself. She's more of a regular person with a normal human desire to be understood. Third, she's a classic example of what affirmative action, which her husband promises to give us more of, does both for and to blacks. She is a hard worker and is of above-average intelligence, but racial preferences have repeatedly lifted her out of her intellectual league, with traumatic psychological consequences. All the breaks she received from white people merely stoked what Ellis Cose of Newsweek calls The Rage of a Privileged Class. Early in the New Journalism classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Dr. Gonzo, Hunter S. Thompson's "300-pound Samoan attorney," questions whether Sports Illustrated would actually be so trusting as to provide them with "unlimited credit" for a trip to Sin City, which they will obviously squander in a drug debauch. Thompson answers: "'You Samoans are all the same,' I told him. 'You have no faith in the essential decency of the white man's culture.'" Few individuals have enjoyed more palpable and repeated evidence of the essential decency of the white man's culture than Michelle Obama. She was educated at the top public high school in Chicago, Whitney Young, which only accepted the highest scoring applicants on the entrance exam— within each race. Time reported in 1975: "… the $30 million Whitney M. Young Jr. High School will open as a magnet in the fall with—among other things—an Olympic-sized swimming pool, a special center for the performing arts and a separate curriculum for medical studies. Whitney Young also has a strict admissions quota: 40% white, 40% black, 10% Latin, 5% other minorities and 5% at the discretion of the principal." Michelle was overshadowed by her smart and athletic older brother Craig Robinson, who is now the head basketball coach at Brown University of the Ivy League. Newsweek's cover story recounts:
"For Michelle, Craig's easy success was intimidating. 'She was disappointed in herself,' her mother tells NEWSWEEK. 'She used to have a little bit of trouble with tests …'" Her poor performance on tests remains a sore point with Michelle, who brings it up in odd contexts, such as when discussing her husband's standing in the polls last November: "You know, [I've] always been told by somebody that I’m not ready, that I can’t do something, my scores weren’t high enough." Newsweek describes her career at Whitney Young: "… but she was not at the top of her class. She didn't get the attention of the school's college counselors, who helped the brightest students find spots at prestigious universities. … Some of her teachers told her she didn't have the grades or test scores to make it to the Ivies. But she applied to Princeton and was accepted." Not surprisingly, just as Thomas Sowell would have predicted, four years spent in over her head among white liberal elitists who see themselves as better than the rest of America because (A) they loudly proclaim their belief in equality; and (B) they have above average IQs left Michelle's sizable but fragile self-esteem in tatters. Suffering the selfconsciousness common to the young, she felt that everybody was secretly putting her down for her intellectual shortcomings, and focused her anger on whites. Newsweek says: "There weren't formal racial barriers and black students weren't officially excluded. But many of the white students couldn't hide that they regarded their African- American classmates as affirmative-action recipients who didn't really deserve to be there." Ironically but inevitably, Princeton's diversity sensitivity programs just exacerbated Michelle's racial paranoia: "Angela Acree, a close friend who attended Princeton with Michelle, says the university didn't help dispel that idea. Black and Hispanic students were invited
to attend special classes a few weeks before the beginning of freshman semester, which the school said were intended to help kids who might need assistance adjusting to Princeton's campus. Acree couldn't see why. She had come from an East Coast prep school; Michelle had earned good grades in Chicago. "We weren't sure whether they thought we needed an extra start or they just said, 'Let's bring all the black kids together'." Princeton racialized Michelle's consciousness. She majored in Sociology and minored in African-American Studies. Newsweek says: "Michelle felt the [racial] tension acutely enough that she made it the subject of her senior sociology thesis, titled "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community." The paper is now under lock and key … (Today, Michelle says, not quite convincingly, that she can't remember what was in her thesis.)" Hilariously, the Princeton website where all her classmates' senior theses are made freely available for the edification of humanity until the end of time listed hers as being "Restricted until November 5, 2008," which just happens to be the day after the election. Newsweek went on: "Michelle wrote that Princeton "made me far more aware of my 'blackness' than ever before." She wrote that she felt like a visitor on the supposedly openminded campus. "Regardless of the circumstances under which I interact with Whites at Princeton," she wrote, "it often seems as if, to them, I will always be Black first and a student second."" On Friday, the Obama campaign released her thesis. Here's a highlight, in which the potential First Lady explains how much she wants to be, well, "Black first:" "These experiences have made it apparent to me that the path I have chosen to follow by attending Princeton will likely lead to my further integration and/or assimilation into a White cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society; never becoming a full participant. This realization has presently, made my goals to actively utilize my resources to benefit the Black community more desirable."
Predictably, the same feelings of personal and thus racial inadequacy manifested themselves when she got into ultra-competitive Harvard Law School on another quota. The Newsweek reporter explains: "At Harvard, she felt the same racial divide. … 'She recognized that she had been privileged by affirmative action and she was very comfortable with that,' [friend Verna] Williams recalls. Michelle recalls things differently. … Her aides say Michelle earned her way into Harvard on merit by distinguishing herself at Princeton." When she graduated from HLS in 1988, she was hired by the high-paying Chicago corporate law firm Sidley Austin (which, perhaps not coincidentally, posts a 2,000-word statement describing their "Commitment to Diversity" on their website). One problem remained: the Illinois bar exam. It appears that in 1988 she either failed it or was unready even to try it. She eventually passed and was admitted to the bar in May 1989, almost a year after graduation. (In contrast, her husband was admitted only a half year after graduating from Harvard Law School three years later). There's nothing shameful about failing the bar exam. Hillary Clinton, for example, failed the Washington D.C. bar exam. According to blogger Half Sigma, 19 percent of applicants failed the July 1988 Illinois test. But, whiffing even once is not the kind of thing that is supposed to happen to Harvard Law School students. (Similarly, Hillary only told her Yale friends that she passed the Arkansas bar exam; she kept covered up until 2003 that she had failed the D.C. exam.) Being admitted to the bar is public, so word of Michelle's no-show on the list of new lawyers likely spread among her old Harvard classmates in late 1988, leaving another wound upon her pride. If, however, she'd gone to the kind of law school where graduates frequently take a few tries to pass, she would have felt better about herself and less bitter at the white race. After a few years at Sidley Austin, she let her law license lapse and began working as go-between for Mayor Daley's Machine. She enjoyed the kind of vague but well-paid career made possible by affirmative action. The description on the candidate's website of what exactly she's been doing for the U. of Chicago Medical Center is eye-glazing but ultimately revealing: she's in the diversity racket.
"She also managed the business diversity program. Michelle has fostered the University of Chicago's relationship with the surrounding community and developed the diversity program, making them both integral parts of the Medical Center's mission." With great power comes great rewards. A couple of months after her husband was sworn in as U.S. Senator, Michelle's salary at the Medical Center was raised from $121,910 to $316,962. A cynic might say that this rather resembles a $195,000 annual … uh, investment by a large private medical institution in the good will of a U.S. Senator and potential President who may well play the crucial role in deciding whether or not there will continue to be large private medical institutions. Another way of looking at it is that Michelle's value on the influence market went up $200,000 when her husband moved up, so the Medical Center had to ante up or lose her to somebody else who would pay the going rate for the wife of a political superstar. Still, to say that would be to suggest that Michelle Obama on her own isn't worth $316,962, which, like any and all skepticism about the Obamas, would be racist. So, almost nobody in America is saying it. The Daily Mail of London has taken a more jaundiced view: "An acquaintance of Obama's family compares her with another political wife, another lawyer as it happens, with a keen interest in making money. "Michelle is very much like Cherie Blair [wife of former Prime Minister Tony Blair]. She is a middle-class girl who has discovered that money is nice and doesn't see that as a contradiction with having radical beliefs," he said. Chicago's veteran political consultant and pundit Joe Novak agrees, saying: "She [Michelle] is now motivated more by personal gain than by social consciousness. She saw her opportunities, and she took them." … I suspect, on no particular evidence, that Michelle's desire for a stately home pushed the normally ascetic Barack into involving in his 2005 purchase of an expensive mansion the notorious white collar crook and slumlord Tony Rezko, a Levantine Christian immigrant who goes on trial March 3rd. Obama and Rezko had been doing each other Chicago-style favors for years. Yet, surely by 2005, Obama must have known that it was time to shed his more
unseemly associates if he wanted to move to the really big house in Washington.
Let me finish by speculating even more irresponsibly on what the cautious Barack might be telling Michelle in private: that he'll have to play the moderate during his first term. But when he's home free in his second, then he'll be keeping it real. For her. Best wishes, Steve
[Steve Sailer (email him) is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute . His website www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily blog.]
.
__,_._,___