The latest from Michelle Obama: “They tell you to raise money, you raise money,” she said. “They tell you to build an organization, and you build an organization.”
“And you work hard and you reach that bar. Sometimes you surpass the bar and you look around and all of a sudden the bar has moved. The bar has changed on you and you wonder what happened.”
And cf. the AP News explanatory note that accompanies the direct quotations: “Obama told the crowd that when she and her husband left law school, the monthly payments on their school loan debt was (sic) more than their monthly mortgage payment.”
Some questions. Who are “they”? Those who made her husband the best-funded Presidential candidate in election history? And what is “the bar”? The need to pay back Ivy-League law school loans when at the same time one must also contribute over $20,000 to the cause of Rev. Wright? And is it written in stone that one must live in a $1.6 million home, go to Harvard, or give to a church to facilitate the hate-speech spewing pastor’s acquisition of a 10,000 sq. ft. gated estate?
Unfortunately, I doubt there are too many Americans who are sympathetic to the dilemma that when a couple earns $1 million per year, their appetites and expenses likewise adjust. Is that the always elevating “bar”—private school tuitions for kids? Elite summer camp? An extra adjoining parcel to expand the garden? Rev. Wright’s justified need for decent housing?
All this proverbial “they” rhetoric in the past has worked well among Chicago neighborhood audiences, and perhaps even among head-nodding white elites. But the Obama campaign should really put it under wraps, since the whiny Ivy-Leaguer with a six-figure income will not play well in the general election in Bakersfield. Apparently her Princeton and Harvard experiences with the philosophy of victimization seem to have given the message that race always trumps class, or that her own present angst of a professional African-American lawyer earning a third-of-a-million dollars is comparable to the anxieties of a poor white single mom with children or a Vietnamese immigrant or rural Hispanic farm worker.
It’s going to be a long campaign, and the Obama staffers need to write out the script, insist she sticks it, and expunge from her vocabulary “they” and the “bar”.