THE WEIRDNESS FACTOR:

Michelle is Barack’s weak link (Charles Laurence, 2/27/08, First Post)

America might have gone gooey for Barack, but there is something about the missus that raises the national hackles. [...]

[T]he remark still stinks in a nation in thrall to a jingoistic sense of patriotism. Just because she is black, does she not feel proud of WWII, men on the moon, truth, justice and the American way?

Michelle comes across as a bit prickly. She doesn't have Barack's charm or politician's polish. Early on, she revealed that she made him quit smoking as a condition for being allowed to run for the presidency, and would kick him out of bed in the morning for being 'stinky'.

Many a true word is said in jest, and it seems that the potential future president needs his wife's permission. That jibes with the charismatic leader on a mission for change.

Michelle Obama And The Rage Of A Privileged Class (Steve Sailer, 2/25/08, V-Dare)

Two weeks ago, I noted:

"Now, Obama is a smooth operator. But the two people who have had the greatest influence on his adult life—his wife Michelle and his spiritual advisor, Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.—are not. They feel a deep racial anger and are not terribly good at hiding it."

Right on cue, Michelle Obama has now begun attracting skeptical attention for the first time after making hundreds of speeches on her husband's behalf. In Milwaukee last week, she proclaimed:

"Hope is making a comeback, and let me tell you, for the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country."

It's not so much that Michelle has a tin ear for rhetoric as that her husband's ear could be made out of the same mimetic poly-alloy as the liquid metal shape-shifting cyborg from the future in Terminator 2. Like most human beings, however, Michelle is prone to the occasional gaffe in which she lets us know what's really on her mind.

For example, in an early February speech she let herself sound like the Khmer Rouge Minister of Propaganda. While this excerpt may resemble an old Dead Kennedys punk rock parody of leftist authoritarianism, such as Holiday in Cambodia or California Uber Alles, she was serious:

"And Barack Obama will require you to work.

He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism, that you put down your division, 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..."

More people are beginning to notice that the candidate's superbly crafted image as the postracial uniter doesn't quite add up. He is supposed to bring us together to overcome our tragic history of racial enmity, etc. Yet his role-model magic doesn't seem to have worked on his own wife, who continues to vent her anger over the racial indignities she feels she endured more than two decades ago at ultra-liberal Princeton and Harvard Law School. She remains perennially peeved by her relatively poor performance on standardized tests.

Or, perhaps, what he tells her in private isn't what he tells us in public?

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 27, 2008 8:46 AM