The chip on Michelle Obama's shoulder

Howl at this if you like, but Spengler picks up on something that, if Barack Obama wins the Democratic nomination, could be an element in the fall campaign: Michelle Obama's inner conflict. Excerpt:

But his wife's anger at America will out, for it is a profound rage amplified by guilt.

Mrs Obama averred that she could not recall the contents of the thesis she composed in 1985, but that cannot be quite true, for it is a poignant cry from the heart. It explains her controversial outburst during the campaign to the effect that she felt proud of her country for the first time in her adult life in 2008, after "feeling so alone" in her "frustration" and "disappointment" at America.

There's a fascinating psychodrama revealed by Mrs. O's senior thesis (which has spelling errors frankly shocking for an Ivy Leaguer on the verge of graduation). Spengler susses out the heart of it here:

Black students who reject white society, she concluded, understand the desperation of the black lower class, and therefore feel hopeless, whereas assimilated blacks ignore this desperation and therefore are more cheerful. It is hard not to admire the young black woman whose indignation over the predicament of the black lower class bursts out of the bland style of academic sociology, and who throws the condescension of her white liberal professors back in their faces. But that is not what afflicted the future Michelle Obama.

To the young Michelle's sense of hopelessness about the prospects for the black lower class, Princeton added something even worse, namely guilt over "striving for many of the same goals as my White classmates - acceptance to a prestigious graduate or professional school or a high paying position in a successful corporation". Despite her black separatist sympathies, Michelle [LaVaughn] Robinson succumbed to the temptations of which she wrote in her thesis and got a law degree from Harvard, earning around $400,000 a year in salary and corporate director fees by 2005.

Her "hopelessness", "frustration" and "disappointment" remain, exacerbated by guilt over her own success. That is not speculation, but a precis of her own account. One might speculate that the guilt became all the more poignant to the extent her success was unearned. Michelle Obama's employer, The University of Chicago Hospitals, paid her $121,910, a reasonable sum for the skill level evident in her thesis, but raised this to $316,952 shortly after her husband was elected US senator.

So when you read Byron York's account of being on the trail with Mrs. Obama in Ohio, and you come across this passage from her session with working-class women in an economically hard-hit town --

“I know we’re spending — I added it up for the first time — we spend between the two kids, on extracurriculars outside the classroom, we’re spending about $10,000 a year on piano and dance and sports supplements and so on and so forth,” Mrs. Obama tells the women. “And summer programs. That’s the other huge cost. Barack is saying, ‘Whyyyyyy are we spending that?’ And I’m saying, ‘Do you know what summer camp costs?’”

-- and you may wonder, Hmm, phony. She goes on, by York's account, to talk about how she and her husband left the corporate world to serve in the "helping industry," and are encouraging others to do so too. Conveniently left out is the fact that she's raking in a huge corporate salary because she's the wife of a U.S. Senator.

Here's a generally sympathetic profile of Michelle Obama from the current New Yorker. Note this:

From these bleak generalities, Obama moves into specific complaints. Used to be, she will say, that you could count on a decent education in the neighborhood. But now there are all these charter schools and magnet schools that you have to “finagle” to get into. (Obama herself attended a magnet school, but never mind.) Health care is out of reach (“Let me tell you, don’t get sick in America”), pensions are disappearing, college is too expensive, and even if you can figure out a way to go to college you won’t be able to recoup the cost of the degree in many of the professions for which you needed it in the first place. “You’re looking at a young couple that’s just a few years out of debt,” Obama said. “See, because, we went to those good schools, and we didn’t have trust funds. I’m still waiting for Barack’s trust fund. Especially after I heard that Dick Cheney was s’posed to be a relative or something. Give us something here!”

First Ladies have traditionally gravitated toward happy topics like roadside flower beds, so it comes as a surprise that Obama’s speech is such an unrelenting downer. Obama acknowledged to me that some advisers have lobbied her to take a sunnier tone, with little success. “For me,” she said, “you can talk about policies and plans and experience and all that. We usually get bogged down in that in a Presidential campaign, over the stuff that I think doesn’t matter. . . . I mean, I guess I could go into Barack’s policies and rattle them off. But that’s what he’s for.” In Cheraw, Obama belittled the idea that the Clinton years were ones of opportunity and prosperity: “The life that I’m talking about that most people are living has gotten progressively worse since I was a little girl. . . . So if you want to pretend like there was some point over the last couple of decades when your lives were easy, I want to meet you!”

Phony. A Princeton-and-Harvard-educated, $400,000 a year phony, whining about her privilege. What I find interesting about this is its comparison to John Edwards. He never shut up about that damn mill his father worked in, but he also had the personal grace and political sense to realize that he had been very, very blessed by life, and only wanted more opportunity for those farther down the ladder. Michelle Obama, who lives in a $1.6 million home in Chicago, still seems to think she's oppressed.

But you're not going to get her to stop talking:

“Occasionally, it gives campaign people heartburn,” David Axelrod, the Obama campaign’s chief strategist, admits. “She’s fundamentally honest—goes out there, speaks her mind, jokes. She doesn’t parse her words or select them with an antenna for political correctness.”

She's going to be real interesting come fall.