printI suspect I’ll be proven correct down the line when it’s discovered that the militant Michelle Obama was a big motivator in her husband’s racial radicalization. As I’ve written, “to me, Obama has always seemed a reluctant recruit to racial politics; driven more by expediency and fear—fear of his overbearing wife and the Reverends Jackson, Sharpton,” and Wright, of course.
The more I hear Michelle, the less I like this rather handsome, Amazon-like, statuesque woman. She’s both belligerent, banal, and not very bright.
And, at every opportunity, Mrs. Obama rabbits about “our under-funded school system.”
Wrong. “The education system is a hog of huge proportions. In 1890, ‘annual current spending per pupil was $275.’ In 1999-2000, it was $7,086. ‘Adjusted for inflation and expressed in year 2000 dollars,’ that’s ‘25-fold.’ If GDP has since increased on average by only 1.9 percent per year, the spending on education has outpaced it, increasing 3 percent per year.”
“Simultaneously, the student-to-teacher ratio has been declining – there are ever more teachers compared to the number of students. One of the union’s goals is to pile on the personnel – this means more members and more union dues. Consequently, the teacher-to-student ratio is now down to an astonishing 1:16.5. (Include non-teaching staff, and there is now one adult for every eight or nine children in government schools.)”
Much to the approval of menstrual media interviewing her, Mrs. Obama recently shared another of her unmoored yearnings. She had been praising her poor little girls. You know, the tiny mites suffering for daddy and mommy’s ambitions. The prolix Mother Obama waxed on expressing the hope that we could all become more like children in their eternal equanimity and wisdom. (Okay, she didn’t put it quite like that; I’ve said she’s not very intelligent.)
Michelle’s “notion of childhood innocence” and wisdom is Rousseauist rubbish—as “fresh” and “new” as the ideas Jean-Jacques Rousseau proclaimed in Emile, according to which
“‘[T]here is no original perversity in the human heart’ and children were naturally good, perverted only by society.”
As I’ve observed, “Government schools [do help] produce misguided, mediocre and frightfully monolithic minds.” Michelle’s is one.
Update (May 7): back in March of 2007 and again early this year, I voiced my sense of Michelle Obama as the woman who steered Obama in the direction of Wright and other crackpots. Christopher Hitchens is coming to the same conclusion: Mrs. Obama is a radical fool, who’ll have considerable sway in the White House:
“I direct your attention to Mrs. Obama’s 1985 thesis at Princeton University. Its title (rather limited in scope, given the author and the campus) is “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.” To describe it as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be “read” at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn’t written in any known language. Anyway, at quite an early stage in the text, Michelle Obama announces that she’s much influenced by the definition of black “separationism” offered by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton in their 1967 screed Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. I remember poor Stokely Carmichael quite well. After a hideous series of political and personal fiascos, he fled to Africa, renamed himself Kwame Toure after two of West Africa’s most repellently failed dictators, and then came briefly back to the United States before electing to die in exile. I last saw him as the warm-up speaker for Louis Farrakhan in Madison Square Garden in 1985, on the evening when Farrakhan made himself famous by warning Jews, “You can’t say ‘Never Again’ to God, because when he puts you in the ovens, you’re there forever.” I have the distinct feeling that the Obama campaign can’t go on much longer without an answer to the question: “Are we getting two for one?” And don’t be giving me any grief about asking this. Black Americans used to think that the Clinton twosome was their best friend, too. This time we should find out before it’s too late to ask.”
Steve Sailer disagrees.
Sad: All the political hot air.
Sadder: The public has been Hollywooded and McDonalded so stupid, they don’t even see it coming.
Princeton, with its countryside setting and “eating clubs” is the penultimate snotty elitist school. What Michelle (who does have a nice body) attributes to RACISM is the same phenomena that I and many others found visiting that haven of pomposity. Assuming that she was 1 or 2 standard deviations below the average of the hoity-toity Princetonian, that would only contribute to her alienation.
Raising a daughter now near the uber-competitive High School ranked # 1 by US NEWS, I could think of no worse nightmare than if she wound up in a school as a near-bottom student. People fail to understand the downside of “affirmative action”.
The other interesting part is how the half-white B. Hussein Obama, raised by a white mom, Indonesian step-dad, white grandparents, Hawaiian prep school, Columbia, and Harvard Law had to forge a “black identity” with Mama Michelle, Rev. Wright, and the South Side Ghetto Politics. It is similar to my secularly raised brother of German-Czech Jewish ancestry turned himself into Tevye with an acquired Yiddush accent to boot.