03.03.08
Michelle Obama mocked for her class warfare rhetoric
When she’s not busy being ashamed of her country, Michelle Obama is telling our college kids about how life sucks and how they should not enter the private sector. From Reason:
The Times piece details another series of ill-conceived, faux-populist remarks that might just play better with the voters:
We don’t need a world full of corporate attorneys and hedge-fund managers,” she told a crowd in a Baptist church in Cheraw, S.C., last month. “But see, that’s the only way you can pay back your educational debt!
“The life that I am talking about that most people are living has gotten progressively worse since I was a little girl. And this is through Republican and Democratic administrations. It doesn’t matter who was in the White House. . . . So if you want to pretend there was some point over the last couple of decades when your lives were easy, I wanna meet you!”
Her rhetoric is jarring given that the Obamas themselves are a stunning embodiment of the American dream. Michelle Obama and her brother, Craig Robinson, the men’s basketball coach at Brown University, attended Princeton University. Barack and Michelle Obama both earned law degrees from Harvard, another of the nation’s most prestigious schools, and are facing the possibility of raising their two daughters in the White House.
The couple’s combined salaries were more than $430,000 in 2006, according to their tax return. In addition, Barack Obama earned $551,000 in book royalties. The family lives in a $1.6-million home in Chicago.
This kind of talk really rubs me the wrong way. Not only is it self-evidently bullsh#t when it implies that living standards for most people are imperiled (or that college-loan debt is crushing the poor young suckers graduating from the Ivies), it undercuts and ignores exactly the sort of steps that strivers everywhere can take to get ahead: get more education, work hard, etc. (No, really, she and her brother mystically appeared at Princeton.) Congrats on her success, but why can’t she talk about it more forthrightly? …
Quips Coyote Blog:
I think it’s so cute when my fellow Princeton grads who pull down nearly a half million dollars a year complain about being put down by “the man.”
Blaming your student debt on the structure of the economy when you chose to go to the most expensive school in the country is a bit like trying to get sympathy for the size of the note on your Lamborghini.
By the way, lost in all this is the fact that Princeton is one of the two schools in the country that now help students graduate debt-free. In most cases, Princeton has replaced student loans with outright grants. Somehow she kind of forgot to mention that Princeton solved this problem years ago, without even a whiff of government intervention.
That reminds me of an NBA strike in the 1990’s, when Patrick Ewing said about the efforts of millionaires to hold out for more money: “This is about feeding our families.” Nice job of appealing to the common man, huh? Shelly O has borrowed a page from the Ewing Public Speaking Faux Pas instruction manual.
TheBad said,
March 3, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Shelly isn’t even a bit original. You can read almost all of her notions nearly word-for-word right in the 1848 document written by Karl Marx. Rehashing the Communist Manifesto does very little to impress me, but it doesn’t surprise me that the most “elite” academia is pumping out lefty drones spewing communist dribble.
PabloD said,
March 3, 2008 at 1:10 pm
Well, this explains why all of those poor, unemployed “women’s studies” majors are pouring across the border into Mexico to look for jobs.
Jenn said,
March 3, 2008 at 7:54 pm
I understand the liberal-at-all-costs bs, but can’t there be at least a small amount of concession to the massive tax pool created by big business? If everyone became teachers or nurses and lived to serve the rest of the community, who in the hell would be able to pay for their services? Michelle Obama: The audacity of martyrdom. How can anyone stand on that podium and ask others to sacrifice so greatly when those salaries are a mere percentage point of her own? I’d give her more credit if she asked of people to give as mentors or volunteers to their community to make a difference.
Student loan payments? I’d love to burden my children with student loan payments for a degree to put on their resume that will nearly guarantee their employability in their lifetime from an ivy league school.
Just when John Edwards finally stfu about being poor too, Mrs. Obama takes his place and dares to tell us all how she knows what it’s like to struggle.
Sigh.
Alli said,
March 4, 2008 at 11:22 am
Well, hopefully she will help put the kabosh on universities whose tuition, room & board and book costs rise 100 times faster than the rate of inflation. My tax dollars have helped fund some gorgeous new building at UCONN yet it currently costs residents $20,000 for one year of education.