By Jack Kelly
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com
| Campaigning
for her husband in Zanesville before the Ohio primary,
Michelle Obama described to a group of women how hard it
had been for her and Barack to make ends
meet:
QUOTE:
"We
spend between the two kids, on extracurriculars outside
the classroom, we're spending about $10,000 a year on
piano and dance and sports supplements. And summer
programs...Do you know what summer camp
costs?"
The
burden was especially heavy because she and Barack had
to repay the student loans for college and law school
at Princeton and Harvard:
"The
salaries don't keep up with the cost of paying off the
debt, so you're in your 40s, still paying off your debt
at a time when you have to save for your kids,"
Michelle Obama said.
Actually,
Michelle's salary has kept up pretty well. The
University of Chicago Hospital, where she is vice
president for community affairs, bumped her pay from
$121,910 in 2004 to $316,962 after her husband was
elected to the U.S. Senate that year. National Review's
Byron York, who covered her remarks at the Zanesville
Day Nursery, noted that her new salary is roughly ten
times the median household income in Muskingham County
.
The
Obamas also have Barack's salary as a U.S. Senator
($169,300), royalties from his two best selling books,
and an undisclosed amount of income from her service on
six corporate boards. But this hasn't brightened
Michelle's outlook:
"We
have become a nation of struggling folks who are barely
making it every day," Michelle had said at a black
church in South Carolina in January. "Folks are just
jammed up, and it's gotten worse over my lifetime...
The life that I'm talking about that most people are
living has gotten progressively worse since I was a
little girl."
Mrs.
Obama was counting her husband and herself among the
folks who are just jammed up, reported Lauren Collins
of the New Yorker, who was at the Pee Dee Union Baptist
Church in Cheraw when Michelle spoke
there.
"You're
looking at a young couple that's just a few years out
of debt," Mrs. Obama said. "See, because we went to
these good schools, and we didn't have trust funds." It
is, apparently, America 's fault that the Obamas didn't
have trust funds, and unfair that they had to repay
their student loans. We're a country that is "just
downright mean," Mrs. Obama said.
It
is true that some people in America are having trouble
making ends meet. Some people in America always are
having trouble making ends meet. But what Michelle
Obama said is astounding. She was born in 1964. At the
time, segregation was still legal. Governors in Alabama
, Arkansas and Mississippi stood in schoolhouse doors
to prevent blacks from attending
college.
Husbands and wives often have different political views, so we should not assume Barack shares the chip on Michelle's shoulder.
But "Spengler," the erudite cynic who writes for the Asia Times, thinks the women in his life are a clue to the inner Barack. His mother, Ann Dunham, was a communist sympathizer, he noted. A childhood mentor who Barack praised in his autobiography was Frank Marshall Davis, a prominent member of the Communist Party USA. "Radical anti-Americanism, rather than Islam, was the reigning faith in the Dunham household," Spengler said.
"Barack Obama is a clever fellow who imbibed hatred of America with his mother's milk, but worked his way up the elite ladder of education and career," Spengler said "He has the empathetic skill set of an anthropologist who lives with his subjects, learns their language, and elicits their hopes and fears while remaining at an emotional distance. That is, he is the political equivalent of a sociopath."
Spengler's is a minority view. But if he's right, we shouldn't wonder why Barack won't wear an American flag pin in his lapel.