III: Foundation-Funded Racism: Jeremiah Wright and Michelle 121nervous look. “Kidding!” Obama said. “See, this is what gets me into trouble.”’ (New Yorker,
March 11, 2008) For Michelle, Bill was obviously a monster.
Michelle is famous for her diagnosis that America is a mean country, which appeared for the
first time in the New Yorker: ‘Obama begins with a broad assessment of life in America in 2008,
and life is not good: we’re a divided country, we’re a country that is “just downright mean,” we are
“guided by fear,” we’re a nation of cynics, sloths, and complacents. “We have become a nation of
struggling folks who are barely making it every day,” she said, as heads bobbed in the pews. “Folks
are just jammed up, and it’s gotten worse over my lifetime. And, doggone it, I’m young. Forty-
four!”’ (New Yorker, March 11, 2008) It is of course true that the US standard of living has been cut
by about two thirds over the last four decades, so Michelle is doubtless correct in that abstract sense.
It is the part about “cynics, sloths, and complacents” that needs examination. If you want to attack
the causes for the immiseration of America, then you should get busy attacking Wall Street, the
Federal Reserve, and their political puppets. But Michelle does not do this at all. She attacks the
supposed moral inferiority of the American people, while letting Wall Street off the hook along
with all the other power centers. The decline of the country becomes a matter of purely individual
responsibility, setting the stage, one senses, for a demand of austerity and sacrifice so as to make
expiation.
Spengler of the Asia Times argues that the real nature of Obama’s emotional makeup can be seen
most readily by looking at Michelle. Obama has learned to dissemble, but could not hide the criteria
that he used when choosing a wife. Michelle is a bubbling cauldron of racial hatred, and this pot has
boiled over from time to time during the campaign. This is the most important evidence that Obama
himself is also a compulsive hater. Obama, says Spengler, tries to hide this,
but Michelle Obama is a living witness. Her February 18 comment that she felt proud of her
country for the first time caused a minor scandal, and was hastily qualified. But she meant it,
and more. The video footage of her remarks shows eyes hooded with rage as she declares:
“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. And I have been
desperate to see our country moving in that direction and just not feeling so alone in my
frustration and disappointment.”
The desperation, frustration and disappointment visible on Michelle Obama’s face are not new
to the candidate’s wife; as Steve Sailer, Rod Dreher and other commentators have noted, they
were the theme of her undergraduate thesis, on the subject of “blackness” at Princeton
University. No matter what the good intentions of Princeton, which founded her fortunes as a
well-paid corporate lawyer, she wrote,
“My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‘Blackness’ than ever
before. 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.” (Spengler, Asia Times, Feb. 26, 2008)OBAMA BITCH-SLAPPED IN PUBLIC BY MICHELLE
Michelle has also been prodigal in her public abuse of Obama – a jarring note which was
extremely incongruous during the earlier, more seraphic phase of Obama’s campaign, before the
scandals and dossiers began to emerge. For the cynical central European Spengler, an experienced
man of the world, this is an index of Michelle’s vast power. Spengler observes: