May 6, 2008
This past Friday Michelle Obama gave essentially the same stump speech
in Charlotte, North Carolina that she had given the week earlier in
Fort Wayne, Indiana. Based on the stump speech, Yuval Levin calls Mrs.
Obama "The unhappiest millionaire." Levin's NRO column carries a link
to the C-SPAN video of Mrs. Obama's North Carolina speech. It is well
worth watching.
Levin characterizes the pervasive themes of Mrs. Obama's stump speech
as the "gospel of bitterness." Levin finds Barack Obama to be
preaching a similar gospel, albeit one that benefits from "a peppier
and more upbeat stump speech[.]" Senator Obama's enormous political
skills make it much more difficult to discern the somewhat repulsive
views and attitudes that are ****dly on display in Mrs. Obama's stump
speech.
Michelle Obama seethes with bitterness. While she preaches the gospel
according to Barack, she wears resentment and bitterness on her
sleeve. It is therefore painful to listen to her. She's apparently
even still angry about her SAT scores. She didn't test well in school,
she explains. Somehow, she has overcome.
Mrs. Obama seeks to convey convey the impression -- she expands on the
theme at great length -- that Senator Obama's campaign is, to borrow
Joe McCarthy's formulation, the victim of "a conspiracy so immense..."
It is not clear whether the Obama campaign can overcome the power of
these sinister forces.
According to Mrs. Obama, the Obama campaign has been constrained by
nameless forces constantly changing the rules of the game and thereby
preventing Senator Obama from securing the nomination. Who are "they"?
Mrs. Obama says just enough about these nameless forces for us to
infer that "they" include the Clintons and their sup****ters. "They"
seem also (incredibly) to include the mainstream media. These nameless
forces have approximately the same specificity as the names on Joe
McCarthy's list.
In her North Carolina speech Mrs. Obama reiterates the condescending
political sociology that she elaborated in her Fort Wayne remarks and
that Barack Obama preached at his closed-door fundraiser with the San
Francisco Democrats. Given the modesty of her and her husband's family
backgrounds, Mrs. Obama denies that she or her husband could be
elitists.
Yet Mrs. Obama's political sociology comfortably fits the What's the
Matter With Kansas? school of thought held by the Demoratic Party's
liberal elite. Indeed, it was an elite group of wealthy San Francisco
Democrats to whom Barack Obama was preaching the gospel of bitterness
in San Francisco.
Mrs. Obama mocks the notion that she and her husband are elitists. She
implicitly asserts that only those born to wealth are capable of
looking down their noses at their fellow citizens. She does not think
highly of those of us who want to be left alone by advocates of the
administrative welfare state such as she and her husband. Moreover,
she finds us guilty of making our children the victims of our fears.
We are raising "young doubters." (I confess!)
But aren't those in her audience afraid of the sinister forces
struggling to hold the Obamas down? Apparently not any more than she
is. If her remarks were to be believed, they would by themselves
instill deep fears. Her audience seems to understand that her
impassioned whining is not to be taken seriously.
She says that she and Barack were born to parents of modest means, not
with "silver spoons" in their mouths. Nobody knows the trouble they've
seen. The burden of paying for her undergraduate education at
Princeton and her law school education at Harvard has scarred her. It
remains a motif of her stump speech. No one is accorded a chance to
ask her if she thought about attending the University of Illinois, or
if she's grateful for any of the financial assistance that facilitated
her and her husband's attendance at the finest institutions of higher
learning in the United States.
It appears that no one in the Obama campaign has the nerve to speak
frankly with Mrs. Obama about how her stump speech might be improved.
She could benefit from constructive criticism, because she is woefully
deficient in the ability to see herself as others see her. She has
just enough self-awareness to omit her admonition to the Los Angeles
disciples of Barack:
Barack Obama 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 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.
As I said last week about Mrs. Obama's Fort Wayne remarks: As long as
Senator Obama won't require us to listen to the missus, I might be
willing to settle for the compulsory mental readjustments.
So Michelle Obama didn't do very well on her SATs but was admitted to
Princeton? No wonder she's sore.
One of the problems with lowering the bar pursuant to "affirmative
action" is that placing the bar back where it was requires raising it.
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-C-
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