"How did your husband do last night?"
Mika Brzezinski interviewed Michelle Obama for the November 13th morning show on MSNBC. The transcript belongs in the case history of leftism as a mental block for couples like the Obamas — intelligent, successful, attractive and yet in disbelief as to how they got where they are. Dispensation of trials is not, in life, equal but it is pretty varied and wide. People who write memoirs or offer advice have first forborne, and second overcome; the implication being that as disadvantage inheres (step one) it has never killed ambition, and if it is hereditary (step two) can't prevent an escape from caste.
Asked about her education, Mrs. Obama ratiocinated. Painfully, one sees that she almost correctly answered her questions. Aside from her casting of the 1980s as the 1950s, in Brzezinski's words, when "your father worked a blue-collar job...Yet he was able to put two kids through Princeton" — the two women missing the forty-year rise in degreed Americans as a redress of the blue collar's loss in value — Obama found her way on track. If "kids are now looking at whether they should go to college," she wondered, "are they going to come out with so much loan debt?" Well? "This was the situation that Barack and I saw ourselves in." And, and — "And the only reason that we're not in debt today is that Barack wrote two bestselling novels."
So? "But that paid off unexpectedly." No! Mrs. Obama, such is the essence of calculated risk. Barack made an investment in his talent as a writer; what he reaped wasn't guaranteed and, were it worthwhile, couldn't possibly have been. This is the experience for those earning in every licit way other than confiscation. When did higher education become other than a down payment for greater means to wealth? When the diploma was reprinted as a ticket to eudaemonia, an impossible transaction Michelle Obama suggests in spite of her and her husband, wisely, never attempting it.
Later in the interview, Brzezinski lured Obama into a discussion of the electorate as paint-by-numbers. A pollster found Hillary Clinton leading Barack among blacks: "What is going on?" Obama started as would any candidate's spouse — "First of all, I think that that's not gonna hold" — and then veered. "What we're dealing with in the black community is just the natural fear of possibility, OK," she said, and the inquiry follows: a) is Team Obama relying on this demographic to vote along racial lines; b) what is different about Illinois, where Barack was elected to the Senate in 2004 by 70 percent of voters; c) if Illinois is no anomaly, could the senator's separate appeal as president maybe play a part?
One exchange further, Obama gave a half-sentence of lucidity. "It's one of the horrible legacies of racism and discrimination and depression," she warned, and "you know it keeps people down." But she didn't quite mean a subcultural inferiority complex, and then went back into the muddle. Seventy-five, fifty years ago, this would have validity. Today, there are too many examples of the aforementioned two-step solution.
"Barack has been told in every race that he's ever run that he shouldn't do it," his wife recounted, that "he couldn't raise the money, that his name was too funny, his background too exotic." Michelle Obama, meet Bobby Jindal, first-generation Punjabi Indian, birth name "Piyush"; a name thrown around by opponents like a dysphemism because to local ears it sounds funny. Jindal is the Republican governor-elect of Louisiana, until now de facto property of the Democratic Party. He is archetypically self-made. Proposed in this space is an experiment in contrast, namely the Senator from Illinois henceforth introduce himself as "Barry."
It would draw a sharper parallel. That may help Michelle Obama, who protests that "we've desperately tried to do is not to allow our political lives to change who we are fundamentally," and who doesn't "want Barack to be anyone other than who he is, because we certainly don't want to spend the next 4 or 8 years in the White House trying to live up to a persona that isn't true" — when the merits and achievements of Barack Obama stand at odds with Obama and his wife's design for genuine politics.