116 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biographyof Obama’s key backers. Minow is still widely known today for belaboring the obvious: it was
Minow who popularized the phrase “vast wasteland” for American broadcast television in 1961,
when he was the head of the Federal Communications Commission under Kennedy. Minow spoke
as an elitist, perhaps preparing the way for the foundation-funded PBS system, a Rockefeller idea
which expresses the view of the foundation oligarchy. Now in advanced age, Minow can be seen as
a patriarch of the Chicago oligarchy, a leading grandee of the Chicago establishment. Minow may
be one of the case officers working Obama on behalf of the Trilaterals, Bilderbergers, and the
banking establishment in general. Minow’s political judgment is very much open to question: he
was a prominent backer of Adlai E. Stevenson, the liberal Illinois governor and supercilious elitist
who lost the presidency to Eisenhower not once but twice, in 1952 and 1956 as well. Minow’s
fortunes improved when he battened on to the Kennedy bandwagon. We read in a recent account:
At 81, sitting in his law office at Sidley Austin, in the Loop, above a stretch of street christened
Honorary Newton N. Minow Way, Minow is talking about the young man his daughter Martha,
a professor at Harvard Law School, recommended for a summer associate’s job two decades
ago. At Minow’s firm Obama fell in love with a young lawyer, Michelle Robinson, who would
become his wife. “I adored Jack Kennedy,” Minow explains, “and I saw the 21st-century
version of Jack Kennedy in my mind. He is astonishing. I think the fundamental point is the
country wants a different kind of politics.” He adds, “I also believe the race issue and the
gender issue are yesterday, particularly with young people.” One-upping Justice Oliver Wendell
Holmes’s famous summary of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s gifts, Minow, a former Supreme Court
clerk, says, “I believe as the country sees Barack, gets to know him, they will see the same thing
I see: really a combination of a first-class mind and a first-class temperament, all in the same
person.” (Purdum, Vanity Fair, March 2008)
For our present purposes, the point is that Barry met Michelle thanks to the mediation of old
Newt Minow in the Sidley Austin law firm one summer.
MICHELLE OBAMA REVEALED
Sharon Churcher, writing for the right-wing London paper The Daily Mail, provides a
penetrating look at Michelle Obama as she really is as a person and as a life story. The emphasis is
on Michelle’s attempt to deceive the public, always for the purpose of painting herself as a victim.
Churcher observes that
Michelle’s pitch is far from sophisticated, playing heavily on her humble beginnings and
traditional values: “I was raised in a working-class family on the south Side of Chicago. That’s
how I identify myself, a working-class girl,” she has told the voters, time after time. It helps that
she cuts a fine figure on the stump, tall and slender with a hair ‘flip’ reminiscent of Jackie
Kennedy. And it does no harm that, while Barack, 46, comes from mixed Kenyan and white
parentage, Michelle, 44, is authentically African-American, giving the Obamas an unmatched
breadth of appeal. Last week it seemed the mask had slipped when, speaking unscripted for
once, a sharper, less emollient Michelle emerged. “For the first time in my adult life I feel really
proud of my country,” she said, an apparent lack of patriotism immediately seized on by her
Republican opponents. When The Mail on Sunday went back to the gritty district of Chicago
where Michelle LaVaughn Robinson was raised, we found a rather different picture from the
one so single-mindedly promoted by Camp Obama. Instead of the one-room tenement that now
appears in most accounts of her upbringing, we found a well-kept neighbourhood of red-brick
Arts and Craft-style houses which have long been home to respectable black families.’ (Sharon