124 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biographybefore they went to Princeton, while they were on campus, and after graduation. Michelle also
asked about their religious beliefs, living arrangements, careers, role models, economic status, and
attitudes towards the black underclass. She asked the respondents to specify whether they agreed
more with a “separationist and/or pluralist” viewpoint or an “integrationist and/or assimilationist”
ideology. About 90 alumni sent back the questionnaires, yielding a response rate of about 22
percent. Michelle wrote that she was disappointed with the answers, since they indicated a
weakening of the race-based or Völkische Identität of the black Princetonians surveyed. Michelle
complained: “I hoped that these findings would help me conclude that despite the high degree of
identification with whites as a result of the educational and occupational path that black Princeton
alumni follow, the alumni would still maintain a certain level of identification with the black
community. However, these findings do not support this possibility...” (Politico.com, February 23,
2008)^27
With this, Michelle had discovered that social reality was not in conformity with the race-based
view of life she had assumed as part of her quest for upward mobility under conditions of
affirmative action. Even her small sample suggested that race was an empty construct, that racial
solidarity could not function as the organizing principle of life, and that racialist or racist thinking
was above all alien to lived social reality. She was not pleased. Concerning the abysmal quality of
her work in the strict academic sense, the less said the better.
Michelle Obama is thus revealed to have been a self-absorbed, self-centered, self-obsessed, self-
serving, and self-righteous undergraduate. We can perhaps detect here an egomania or megalomania
which is evidently the psychological basis of her marriage with Obama: they both imagine
themselves as the centers of the world. The questionnaire was of course a mere formality, serving to
mask Michelle’s intense preoccupation with her own radically subjective feeling states. She was
interesting in delving into herself, and the forms she sent out and compiled were but a fig leaf in
that obsessively introspective process. She lacks any sense of reality, since she forgets that she is in
a position where she is envied by the vast majority of college youth; she needs to portray herself as
a victim of something, be it slights real or imagined. She also has no gratitude for the special
privileges that have been given her through no merit of her own.
Michelle Obama’s odious personality may well emerge as a telling argument in any future
debate about the viability of affirmative action as against color-blind, class-based programs that
recognize class, poverty, and exclusion, and no longer racial discrimination, as the critical problem
of US society. Michelle will become the poster child for abolishing quotas, preferences, set asides,
and the entire affirmative action apparatus. The argument will be that no system which has
produced such a person deserves to be perpetuated, while 60% or 70% of black America remains in
the despair of the inner city ghetto. Michelle can thus safely be said to constitute a huge
vulnerability among the many huge vulnerabilities of the Obama campaign. If we look back to
Jimmy Carter, we can perhaps see how dangerous a person like Michelle can become when she is
unleashed on the national stage, as she necessarily will be.
MICHELLE OBAMA: HATING THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
Speaking at a rally in Wisconsin on February 18, 2008 Michelle delivered the lines which have
made her infamous: “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country, and
not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change.” This was
an element in her standard stump tirade on several subsequent occasions, leaving no doubt that she
really meant it and meant to say it. If nothing else, it was a catastrophic failure of deception and