122 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized BiographyNever underestimate the influence of a wife who bitch-slaps her husband in public. Early in
Obama’s campaign, Michelle Obama could not restrain herself from belittling the senator.
“I have some difficulty reconciling the two images I have of Barack Obama. There’s Barack
Obama the phenomenon. He’s an amazing orator, Harvard Law Review, or whatever it was, law
professor, best-selling author, Grammy winner. Pretty amazing, right? And then there’s the
Barack Obama that lives with me in my house, and that guy’s a little less impressive,” she told a
fundraiser in February 2007.
“For some reason this guy still can’t manage to put the butter up when he makes toast, secure
the bread so that it doesn’t get stale, and his five-year-old is still better at making the bed than
he is.” New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd reported at the time, “She added that the TV
version of Barack Obama sounded really interesting and that she’d like to meet him sometime.”
Her handlers have convinced her to be more tactful since then.
“Frustration” and “disappointment” have dogged Michelle Obama these past 20 years, despite
her US$300,000 a year salary and corporate board memberships.... Obama’s choice of wife is a
failsafe indicator of his own sentiments. Spouses do not necessarily share their likes, but they
must have their hatreds in common. Obama imbibed this hatred with his mother’s milk.’
(Spengler, Asia Times, Feb. 26, 2008)MICHELLE OBAMA: THE THESIS OF SELF-ABSORPTION
In 1985, in order to graduate from Princeton with her AB in sociology, Michelle had to submit a
senior thesis, which was entitled “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.” It is filed
under her maiden name, Michelle LaVaughn Robinson. It is 96 pages long, and reposes in the Mudd
Library on campus. This thesis attracted much attention when it was “temporarily withdrawn” from
Princeton’s library until after the November 2008 election. Some extracts had appeared previously
in the Newark Star Ledger. Because of Obama’s standard vapid rhetoric about hope, change, and
the new politics, the attempt to suppress Michelle’s thesis appeared at once as a cynical act of
stonewalling. Michelle looked very much like the super-secretive George Bush. Jonah Goldberg
reported on National Review Online, “A reader in the know informs me that Michelle Obama’s
thesis ... is unavailable until Nov. 5, 2008, at the Princeton library. I wonder why.” “Why a
restricted thesis?” chimed in Louis Lapides on his site, Thinking Outside the Blog. “Is the concern
based on what’s in the thesis? Will Michelle Obama appear to be too black for white America or not
black enough for black America?” Princeton librarians were so pestered by those wanting to see the
infamous thesis that they started reading their refusal from a script. Princeton media officers joined
in the stonewall claiming it is “not unusual” for a thesis to be restricted and refusing to discuss “the
academic work of alumni.” The embarrassment for Obama became so great that he decided to
release the thesis to the Politico, which is controlled by the reactionary Allbritton interests.^26
The thesis deals mainly with Michelle’s own cahier de doléances of racist slights and her race-
based world outlook. “My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my
‘blackness’ than ever before,” she states in the introduction. “I have found that at Princeton, no
matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward
me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong. Regardless of the
circumstances under which I interact with whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will
always be black first and a student second.” “I feel” is her pole star and compass as she goes
through life. She is an extreme example of the radical subjectivist world view of late Anglo-