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Reflections

Poor, Poor Michelle

by Ralph R. Reiland,
Professor of Free Enterprise

"We don't need a world full of corporate attorneys and hedge-fund managers,"
Michelle Obama told a crowd in a Baptist church in South Carolina in January. "But see, that's the only way you can pay back your educational debt!"

It's true, exactly 20 years after graduating from Harvard Law School, she's still complaining about her tuition payments, even while living in a $1.65 million house and with a household income that puts her firmly in the top 1 percent of U.S. families.

"The couple's combined salaries were more than $430,000 in 2006, according to their tax return," reported Los Angeles Times writer Robin Abcarian in February. "In addition, Barack Obama earned $551,000 in book royalties."
In 2007, the year prior to Mrs. Obama's perpetual bellyaching on the campaign trail about her tuition bill, Barack Obama was paid $4 million in book royalties, as reported on his financial disclosure report in June.

The philosophy? We wouldn't need "a world full of corporate attorneys and hedge-fund managers," i.e., a world full of self-seeking individualism and capitalist compromises, if tuition were free and we could all be debt-free community organizers, working the streets to make everything "free."

As it now stands, according to Michelle Obama, we're stuck in a pre-Obama nation that's "just downright mean," a country of "broken souls" that never much made her proud.

And the salvation, the way to mend our mean and busted spirits? Times writer
Abcarian reports Mrs. Obama's answer: "She talks about how brilliant he is and often implies that voters would be crazy not to vote for her husband, calling him 'the only rational choice.' She calls his candidacy a 'once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us to be graced with a man like him.'"

We will have "to sacrifice for one another to get things done," explains Mrs. Obama, and "Barack Obama is the only person in this who understands that" -- not only the "only person" who understands, she says, but also "one of the smartest people you will ever encounter who will deign to enter this messy thing called politics."

The definition of "deign": "to condescend, to do something that one considers to be below one's dignity." One wonders if Michelle also thinks that Barack's 20 years with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was below his level of elevated dignity.

Just as "our souls are broken in this nation," non-economist Michelle Obama claims that we've been going straight down economically for four decades. "The life that I am talking about that most people are living has gotten progressively worse since I was a little girl," she asserts. "And this is through Republican and Democratic administrations. It doesn't matter who was in the White House."

And her challenge if you disagree? "If you want to pretend there was some point over the last couple of decades when your lives were easy, I wanna meet you!"

She might wanna meet Pat Toomey, a former member of the House of Representatives from Pennsylvania and currently the president of the Club for Growth.

"The fact of the matter is that we in the United States, and to a lesser degree the entire world, have just lived through -- and continue to live in -- the greatest period of prosperity in human history," stated Toomey in a January speech at Hillsdale College. "Over the last 25 years, more wealth has been created, more people have been lifted out of poverty, standards of living have been elevated more dramatically, and the quality and length of life have improved more than ever before in recorded history."

That's something Mrs. Obama probably didn't learn from Rev. Wright, who's now set to retire in a church-bought $1.6 million mansion complete with a rubberized exercise room, butler's pantry, four-car garage, elevator and whirlpool. Building plans also show, reports the Chicago Sun-Times, a large spare room for "a future theater or swimming pool."

For those who faithfully cheered from the pews at Trinity United Church of Christ, Rev. Wright preached salvation via a "disavowal of the pursuit of middle-classness," warning against "middle-incomeness" and the "psychological entrapment" of money. In other words, cancel your greed and give Jeremiah Wright the money so he can jump right past the entrapping middle class and onto a well-appointed cul-de-sac on a disproportionately-white golf course.

They should cancel the hymns at Trinity and just play Patsy Cline's "Crazy" over the loudspeakers.

"Ralph R. Reiland is the B. Kenneth Simon Professor of Free Enterprise at Robert Morris University, the owner Amel's Restaurant, and a columnist with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review."