Michelle Obama's gospel of bitterness

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 nakedly 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 supporters. "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.

PAUL adds: 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.

She’s bitter because she knows she didn’t earn on her own skills and intelligence anything she has in life - her education or her job. She knows she only has them because of her skin color.

Thomas Sowell wrote a good piece on why affirmative action harms the recipients, and she’s a poster child for his words.

http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=1329

In general, Sowell writes, preferential admissions mismatch the minority student with the university, creating an artificial failure.

This phenomenon has several effects. First, quite competent minority students are admitted into schools whose normally admitted students’ learning paces are somewhat beyond their own, resulting in what Sowell calls “wholly needless failures among highly qualified students” in the name of racial representation. Furthermore, as is stated in a Wall Street Journal article excerpted by Sowell, it leads to “a widespread if rarely stated perception that black students somehow lack what it takes to make the grade.”

As top schools overdraw their available pool of minority students, they must dip into the students credentially suited for lower-tier colleges.

“The problems of mismatching and artificial failing proceed on down the academic pecking order,” Sowell writes. “Nationwide, 74 percent of black students have failed to graduate, five years after entering college.” Sowell argues that most of those failures are artificial, caused by affirmative action’s mismatching the students with the schools.

When some schools recognize this problem, Sowell explains, they seek to rectify it with grade inflation (which he calls “affirmative grading”) for minority students. This move leads to the perception mentioned in the Wall Street Journal and also causes highly qualified minority students to defend their academic reputation needlessly to teachers and employers.

• High attrition rates of minority students on “white campuses” is evidence of racism. Again, Sowell points to mismatching students with the university’s standards. At Berkeley, Sowell found that only 22 percent of Hispanic students admitted under preferences had graduated five years later, whereas over half the Hispanic students admitted normally had graduated in the same period. He found similar figures for black students. “If the all-purpose explanation is racism,” Sowell asks, “then why did this racism have such radically different effects on people of the same race with different test scores?”

• Tests such as the SAT do not measure minority students’ abilities fairly, so basing admission on them unfairly discriminates against minority students. Sowell explains that this argument is 20 years old, thus there is empirical evidence by which to judge it. Examining that evidence, Sowell finds that “SAT scores have in fact proven empirically to be better predictors (of academic performance) than high school grades for blacks.”

• The “new racism” that started cropping up in the 1980s and ’90s means affirmative action is even more necessary because without it minorities might be further discriminated against. Sowell posits that the “new racism” itself is a derivative of affirmative action and the double standards (i.e., “affirmative grading”) of which “neither black nor white students are unaware.” According to Sowell, the double standard created resentment among whites and blacks, and even campuses with no history of racial unrest were suddenly inundated with waves of tension and activism. Relatively poor academic performance by the mismatched minority students served to instill them with a sense of intellectual inferiority, and colleges unwilling to admit their culpability blamed the “vestiges” of racism. Sowell shows that many graduating seniors reported increases in racial tensions over their years on campus. Saying that a “growing vestige” is a contradiction in terms, Sowell explains that colleges “wholly ignore the very possibility that the policies and practices of the colleges themselves may have been responsible for the hostile racial climate on campus.”

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