Posted on 05/08/2008 9:25:36 AM PDT by The_Republican
As the tall, poised black woman takes the stage in the vast indoor sports stadium, an extraordinary wave of sound runs through the 8,000-strong crowd and bounces off the rafters: a sort of deafening ululation, a wild, excited keening unlike anything I have heard at a political rally.
“Good Ev-En-Ing Pittsburgh,” says Michelle Obama, with a rising cadence, and then a pause. “Are you ready?”
After his victory in North Carolina, Barack Obama seems to be building an unassailable lead in the see-sawing Democratic primary race, and for months Mrs Obama has criss-crossed America as the warm-up act for her husband.
Yet for many in the crowd tonight - more than half of them African-Americans, and of those more than half women - she is the main attraction. Obama himself stands almost diffidently to one side, with his hand in his pocket.
“You go, girl!” screams the matronly black woman standing next to me, tears streaming down her face. “You go!”
Michelle Obama has already gone places in this election where no American politician has ever been, helping to galvanise black support for the Democratic contender as never before. Her story is one that millions of black Americans can relate to instantly. She has humanised the Obama image with the domestic detail of their lives, while bringing greater glamour to this campaign than any candidate's wife since Jacqueline Onassis.
Michelle Obama would be not only the first black First Lady in history, but the youngest (at 44) and the tallest (at nearly 6ft, she has at least an inch on her husband). In one other, crucial respect she is also different from any previous First Lady: she says exactly what she thinks, when she thinks it, with a caustic sense of humour that is both very amusing and very dangerous.
For while Mrs Obama is her husband's greatest asset, she could also, potentially, become his biggest liability.
On stage on the night before the Pennsylvania primary, the air vibrating around her with the adoration of the multitude, she cannot suppress a look of wry disbelief.
“I'm not supposed to be standing here.” She says this at almost every campaign stop. “I am a statistical oddity. A black girl, brought up on the South Side of Chicago ... I'm certainly not supposed to be standing here.” There is more than false modesty in this. Michelle LaVaughn Robinson was raised in a one-bedroom apartment in a notoriously tough and impoverished area of Chicago, “the baddest part of town” in the words of the old country and western song. Her father, who had multiple sclerosis diagnosed when he was in his twenties, worked at the city water plant. The Robinsons were never dirt poor but they were far from rich, and nothing came free.
With hard work and determination she made it to Princeton University and Harvard Law School, then on to a career in corporate law (while working at a blue-chip law firm she met Barack Obama, who was working there on an internship); then a stint in public service, most recently as a highly paid hospital executive.
Hers is an African-American success story that is far easier to comprehend than the more complex journey of her half-white, half-African husband. But getting here was not easy. In an essay written at Princeton, she laid out in stark terms the alienation she felt as a young black student: “No matter how liberal and open-minded some of my White professors and classmates try to be towards me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong ... regardless of the circumstances under which I interact with Whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be Black first and a student second.”
That sense of being in the wrong place - at Princeton, on stage in Pittsburgh, perhaps even on the campaign trail itself - may help to explain Michelle Obama's edginess, the sharp, self-defensive wit, the tendency to make her husband the butt of her humour. Time and again the Obama spokesmen have been wheeled out to perform damage limitation after another outspoken remark from the candidate's wife.
She was accused of being unpatriotic when, in an unguarded moment, she declared: “For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country ... because I think people are hungry for change.” Even more damaging, when asked whether she would support Hillary Clinton if her husband's opponent eventually wins the nomination, she could not hide her antipathy: “I'd have to think about that - I'd have to think about her policies, her approach, her tone.”
Perhaps most controversially of all, she has gone out of her way to put a little homemade tarnish on the halo over her husband's head. She has spoken of his snoring, his bad breath in the morning, how he fails to put the butter back in the fridge or replace the plastic grip on the bread packet to keep it fresh.
To many, this may sound like the normal joshing of a happy couple, but coming from a potential First Lady the remarks were seen as positively risqué, even disrespectful. First Ladies tend to fall into one of two categories - policymaker or home-maker: either they are political operatives in their own right (as Hillary Clinton was), or they are expected to look pleasant, back some worthy causes and avoid saying anything either controversial or interesting (in the manner of Laura Bush). First Ladies are not expected to hold forth on the subject of their husbands' smelly breath.
The image of Obama as a hen-pecked husband has done him no harm, and he plays up to it repeatedly: “She basically tells me what to do, and I do it. With pleasure. Because it usually works out.”
Mrs Obama has been equally frank in discussing the problems of establishing a work-life balance when your husband is running flat-out in the most ferocious primary race for a generation: she worries about food additives, and whether her children see their father enough, and what may or may not be in the fridge when she gets home to Chicago. She points out that when she is not giving speeches to thousands of people she is at the supermarket, buying loo paper.
Her most often-stated ambition is not political, but the determination to retain a grip on normal life for her two daughters, aged 6 and 9: “I think there's a level of connection that gets lost the farther you get into being a candidate.”
Mrs Obama is said to have considered long and hard before agreeing that her husband should run. She has apparently ruled out running a second time if this attempt fails. Her own interest in politics, while profound, is of the practical rather than the policymaking kind. As a former public servant and a hospital administrator, her concerns are the solving of immediate problems, not ideological positions in what she refers to as “this messy thing called politics”.
When she was asked, only half in jest, whether she might run for the Illinois senate seat that would be vacated if her husband wins the race to the White House, her response was unequivocal and typically blunt: “Ugh, no thanks.”
Her role in the campaign has been to play on the dark side of US life, while her husband emphasises the “audacity of hope”. At rally after rally, she paints a picture of an America “guided by fear”, increasingly beset by poverty and alienation. “We have become a nation of struggling folks who are just barely making it every day,” she says.
The Obamas could hardly be said to be struggling: before she left her job to campaign full-time, she was earning the equivalent of £140,000 a year; they live in a mansion worth £800,000. But it is Michelle Obama's link to a hardscrabble past that allows her to make such effective common cause with Americans in economic pain.
As she steps away from the microphone, another huge roar reverberates around the hall, and she pauses to lay a hand on her husband's cheek before stepping offstage and vanishing. It takes a full minute before Barack Obama can make himself heard: “She is the love of my life, my rock, my foundation, the person who keeps me on track, who has put up with my nonsense not just for 15 months but for 15 years...”
This may be partly an aw-shucks act, a riff on the heartstrings for the cameras, but it is also a statement of fact: without her, he would probably not be heading for the next round in this marathon primary battle, probable victory in the fight for the Democratic nomination and, quite possibly, the White House. Mrs Obama is black in a way that her husband is not, spontaneous as he can never be, but also unfettered in a way that he, most certainly, is not.
“I am trying to be as authentically me as I can be,” she said recently. That may explain the extraordinary sound that greets her in this huge hall, but it is also what keeps her husband's advisers awake at night.
Extract from the introduction of Michelle LaVaughn Robinson's thesis on Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community, presented to Princeton University, New Jersey, in 1985.
(c) Michelle LaVaughn Robinson, 1985
My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my “Blackness” than ever before. I have found that, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my White professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong. Regardless of the circumstances under which I interact with Whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be Black first and a student second. These experiences have made it apparent to me that the path I have chosen to follow 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 realisation has, presently, made my goals to actively utilise my resources to benefit the Black community more desirable. At the same time, however, it is conceivable that my four years of exposure to a predominantly White, Ivy League University has instilled within me certain conservative values ... I find myself striving for many of the same goals as my White classmates ... is it possible that other Black alumni share these feelings?
Michelle will make Terayzuh Kerry seem like Jacqueline Kennedy.
bitter affirmative action quota queen turned overpaid diversity bureaucrat
To paraphrase Jack Nicholson, Michelle is going “to need a lot of drinks.”
I heard her on the radio yesterday. Methinks she’s the reason the Obamas attended Rev. Wright’s church.
She will blow a hole in the bottom of Obama’s boat.
I’m missing Hillary already.
Yep, but, lets shorten that....BAAQQTODB.....she is soooo full of herself and her whining.
That woman scares the Hay-ell out of me.
As usual the dimwits offer up another brilliant, poised and lovely woman only to find out that woman has been superimposed over a raving lunatic.
Yes, you go girl. Tell America what you REALLY think!
There now. That's more like it.
(Sorry, couldn't help myself. LOL!)
Somebody please psychoanalyze me:
Why do I despise the MOHo even more than her racist, class-warfare driven, thoroughly unaccomplished Marxist husband?
bitter affirmative action quota queen turned overpaid diversity bureaucrat
bingo.
How can you get away with writing a thesis that is all about your feelings? What kind of scholarship is that? Affirmative action at its finest has produced yet another totally self absorbed grievance monger.
People, smart people, in my office are like, “She’s so brilliant.” as if she invented a cure for cancer. She’s a dingbat w/ a Harvard degree.
Please.
She grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Chicago and her father had a high-paying, unionized job-for-life thanks to his connections with local ward politicians.
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