126 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized BiographyI were in that position. The only reason we’re not in that position is that Barack wrote two best-
selling books... It was like Jack and his magic beans. But up until a few years ago, we were
struggling to figure out how we would save for our kids.” “We left corporate America, which is a
lot of what we’re asking young people to do,” Michelle typically says, adding that “many of our
bright stars are going into corporate law or hedge-fund management.”
Michelle talks a good rap about hard times in America, but she makes it all turn on what has to
be done for her personally, not for the voters; For Michelle, the axiomatic point of view is always
but always herself: ‘Her frame of reference can seem narrow. When she talks about wanting “my
girls to travel the world with pride” and the decline of America “over my lifetime,” you wonder
why her default pronoun is singular if the message is meant to be concern for others and
inclusiveness.’ (New Yorker, March 11, 2008) For obvious demagogic reasons, Michelle also fails
to distinguish between the relative stabilization of falling real wages under Clinton, and the
precipitous decline that resumed under Bush the younger: ‘In Cheraw, Obama belittled the idea that
the Clinton years were ones of opportunity and prosperity: “The life that I’m talking about that most
people are living has gotten progressively worse since I was a little girl.... So if you want to
pretend like there was some point over the last couple of decades when your lives were easy, I want
to meet you!”’ (New Yorker, March 11, 2008)
MICHELLE OBAMA: BOUNCER FOR
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO HOSPITAL
Michelle’s job is that of a bouncer or gatekeeper for the University of Chicago Hospital, which
is located close to the edge of the black ghetto. The problem faced by the University of Chicago
managers is that too many sick and dying indigent black people come to their emergency room in a
desperate attempt to get some kind of treatment. Michelle’s job is to push these poverty-stricken
black people back into the ghetto to die in nondescript waiting rooms in poorly-equipped doctors’
offices or dingy substandard clinics there. Her qualifications of this job were that she had to be
black, and she had to be cruel, with no hint of the racial solidarity that she has hypocritically
paraded in public for most of her life. Michelle has made out like a bandit in this cruel and inhuman
line of work. In 2006, the Chicago Tribune reported that Mrs. Obama’s compensation at the
University of Chicago Hospital, where her title is vice president for community affairs, jumped
from $121,910 in 2004 (just before Barry was installed in the Senate), to $316,962 in 2005, just
after he took office. This does not include the honoraria Michelle takes in from serving on corporate
boards.^29
Michelle’s rapidly expanding personal income has raised more than eyebrows: ‘“Mrs. Obama is
extremely overpaid,” one citizen wrote in a letter to the editor of the Tribune, after the paper
published a story questioning the timing of the award. “Now, what is the real reason behind such an
inflated salary?” Her bosses at the University of Chicago Hospitals vigorously defended the raise,
pointing out that it put her salary on a par with that of other vice-presidents at the hospital. (As it
happens, Obama has spent most of her life working within the two institutions for which she most
frequently claims a populist disdain: government and the health-care system.)’ (New Yorker, March
11, 2008)
Michelle’s role in excluding indigent patients from the University of Chicago Hospital where she works
has also drawn attention from congressional investigators. One such instance: ‘The ranking minority member
on the Senate Finance Committee is seeking information from the non-profit University of Chicago Medical
Center about jobs held by Sen. Barack Obama's wife and one of his best friends,’ reported Joe Stephens of the