Wife of US Senator Disavows Pride in America

This prospective First Lady wants you to know - America SUCKS, from her point of view.

America provides her only “frustration and disappointment,” as the wife of a United States Senator.

What a wonderful First Lady she will make!  

  

The Divider

By Jacob Laksin
FrontPageMagazine.com | Thursday, February 21, 2008

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It was a jarring statement. Did the candidate’s wife really mean to suggest that the country had been hopeless until her husband emerged as the Democratic frontrunner? Indeed she did, and just a few hours later, she reiterated the point in nearly identical terms. “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country — not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction and just not feeling so alone in my frustration and disappointment.” There was no mistaking her message: Until it found the wisdom to rally around her husband, America had been a source of constant disappointment for Mrs. Obama.

When her remarks justifiably aroused outrage, the unenviable task of explaining them away fell to the senator himself. On the one hand, Obama said, his wife’s words had been taken “out of context.” But at the same time, Sen. Obama continued, “she’s pretty cynical about the political process, and with good reason, and she’s not alone.” And sure enough, it was this cynicism that landed her in trouble in the first place.

Yet it’s hard to see what Michelle Obama has to be cynical about. Though it is true that she was born on the South Side of Chicago, there is no shortage of Americans who start from humble beginnings. The difference is that, unlike many, Michelle Obama is also a child of privilege. In a recent interview with Newsweek, Obama reveals that she got into Princeton University not on the strength of her grades, which she admits were unexceptional, but thanks to her brother Craig, a star athlete and gifted student who preceded her to the school. As a “legacy” candidate and a beneficiary of affirmative action, Michelle Obama was granted an opportunity that others more accomplished were denied. Nor, according to friends quoted in the article, did Obama object when she was later accepted to Harvard as part of the school’s outreach to minority students. “She recognized that she had been privileged by affirmative action and she was very comfortable with that,” her friend recalls.

Comfortable, perhaps, but certainly not content. A more humble personality might have appreciated the unearned advantages she had been afforded. Michelle Obama seems instead to have developed an abiding sense of racial resentment. This resentment finds its most bitter expression in her 1985 Princeton senior thesis, conveniently blocked from public viewing by the school until after next year’s presidential election, titled “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.” In it, the young Michelle LaVaughn Robinson paints a grim portrait of her future prospects, warning against “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.” Regardless of the opportunities that had been offered her, Obama continued to see herself as a victim of a racist white society, trapped in the divide that her husband’s campaign now seeks to breech.  

(Whole article here)