Clay <clayonline@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in news:b1ae9e0f-7cdc-4f2d-aa28-
d87dee277400@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 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.
>
> ---------
>
> -C-
>
She's going to make a great First Lady, though, doncha think?
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