New York Magazine profile of Michelle......wtf?!?!

[Jackeens]

The Hero’s Foil - Normalizing the president.

By David Samuels

Gifted with the security that her parents gave her in childhood, Michelle Obama seems to have been both thrilled and discomfited by her husband’s radical self-invention and his desire to stand out from the crowd. His character was shaped in a quiet but tense struggle with his mixed parentage and the fact that both his parents abandoned him for other pursuits. Michelle will always remain the queen of a precious square block of middle-class black Chicago where her parents loved her and her brother was a basketball star.

There are clear limits to Michelle’s ambition. She went to excellent schools, got decent grades, stayed away from too much intellectual heavy lifting, and held a series of practical, modestly salaried jobs while accommodating her husband’s wilder dreams and raising two lovely daughters. In this, she is a more practical role model for young women than Hillary Clinton, blending her calculations about family and career with an expectation of normal personal happiness. Now her mother is coming to live in the White House.

The fact that Barack remains so publicly in thrall to her is a tribute to the Obamas’ shared genius for putting other people at their ease. Barack Obama alone would make us uncomfortable. Michelle neutralizes our response to her husband’s existential estrangement by sharing our discomfort while still being in love with him. She found his literary and political ambitions wildly impractical. She tested him before she married him, made fun of his weird-sounding name, tried to make him go to bed on time, and worried that he didn’t get a normal job. She convinced her husband, whose mastery of political calculation extends to seven or ten extra dimensions, that she was the ultimate catch.

The trick of attributing superhuman characteristics to a protagonist and then making him vulnerable through love is a literary trick as old as the Greeks. F. Scott Fitzgerald would have loved the Obamas, though one suspects that he would have edged Michelle into crazy territory or made her into a black Jordan Baker type, mysterious and cool with a borderline lesbian vibe. Love is the great equalizer, and it makes the reader less resentful of a supremely gifted hero.

http://nymag.com/news/politics/55366/

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I love the first reply under the article:

Honestly, could there be a more patronizing description of the First lady than your paragraph which begins, "There are clear limits to Michelle's ambition..."? There have been a few dozen First Ladies. Do you honestly believe that most Americans consider making it to the White House an example of modest ambition?

Describing her nearly $300,000 per annum salary as modest, defies credulity. Describing her cum laude graduation from Princeton as "decent grades," is equally ridiculous. This woman earned a juris doctorate FROM HARVARD for goodness sakes. Inasmuch as you attended the same schools as she, one imagines your blithe dismissal to be a by-product of Ivy League frisson. WHATEVER, dude!


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Another response here:

New York Magazine's wretched Michelle Obama profile

http://majikthise.typepad.com/majikthise_/2009/03/new-york-magazines-wretched-michelle-obama-profile.html

[babylonsister]

1. "Barack Obama alone would make us uncomfortable."

:wtf: And "She found his literary and political ambitions wildly impractical." Now how in the hell would he know that?


This guy is no fan of either of them.

[shireen]

2. just reading those 4 paragraphs was enough!

who is this guy and where did he get these deep insights into the Obamas?

:wtf:

[rvablue]

3. Something tells me that David Samuels does a lot of gazing at himself in the mirror.

and probably sleeps with his MFA from an ivy league school under his pillow.

What a bunch of over worked and unsubstantiated bunk!

[noiretextatique]

4. what an insulting, stupid, condescending article

:wtf: was he thinking?

[Stephanie]

5. To be fair, that's one of 18 essays, all from different POVs

I read them all last night and they say more about the writers than they do about Michelle. She's the muse.

http://nymag.com/news/politics/55382/

[Hekate]

6. I hope the others are better, because this one made me nauseous. What a twit. nt

[firedupdem]

7. What a crock of shit said in such a "know it all" way. n/t

[Beacool]

8. Who the hell wrote this crap??????????????

Patronizing and insulting to both Hillary and Michelle.

"There are clear limits to Michelle’s ambition. She went to excellent schools, got decent grades, stayed away from too much intellectual heavy lifting, and held a series of practical, modestly salaried jobs while accommodating her husband’s wilder dreams and raising two lovely daughters. In this, she is a more practical role model for young women than Hillary Clinton, blending her calculations about family and career with an expectation of normal personal happiness. Now her mother is coming to live in the White House."

So, according to this idiot, Michelle is a more "practical" role model for young women than Hillary because she supposedly "stayed away from doing any intellectual heavy lifting"????

What's more insulting, treating Michelle as if she were June Cleaver or implying that Hillary's political ambitions are unseemly and not conducive to personal happiness?

Yeah, why should a woman who is as bright as her husband pursue her own dreams? I guess Hillary should have never ran for the senate, the presidency or now be SOS. How dare she have ambitions of her own, only men are allowed to run for public office!!!

What a sexist jerk!!!!!!!!

:grr:

[appleannie1]

9. He sounds like a typical rw"r that cannot stand when a woman betters him.

If you look at any picture of the Obama family, you can see pure love and adoration in their eyes. The writer of this crap is jealous. Pure and simple.

[Kaleko]

10. Heh. I hope Mr. whatshisname... Samuels will read some of your reactions to his

shit.

[Undercurrent]

11. Drivel and drool!

Sheesh!

[Number23]

12. Wow. Just when you think they've figured the old gal out, they deliver a line like this:

"But for the most part: so far so great. Michelle Obama cuts a pretty figure in her big-and-tall gal ready-to-wear, and she has Joe Kennedy’s understanding of the power of family photographs to advance a political career. Like Hillary she lacks taste; her consumer preferences seem to have been rendered into being by the Mall at Short Hills."

I think the comments about Michelle's ambitions not being as high as her husband's because she was openly loved and adored by her family may have a ring of truth; there is no question that many of the world's most successful people are "tortured souls."

But just when I start to applaud sentences like this:

"Hers doesn’t seem like a marriage in which one has traded all of one’s commodities (beauty or supportiveness or cash) for an unequal partnership in which you get to pick your own china pattern and shake your head in disbelief that this is what your Ivy League degree and hard work has brought you to."

They churn up something like this:

"So, finally, we get Michelle Obama, a woman who seems to be loved and respected and enjoyed by her admirable husband, toward whom she feels the same way."

I love Pres. Obama. But I ADORE his wife because of her own beauty, strength, intelligence and hard work. It's not just because of her husband.