Michelle Obama is ready for her closeup, working hard to help the media forget her unfortunate truthiness on what a rotten country this is until we hand it over to her husband. So she's going to "reintroduce" herself--which means she'll just be repackaging the same distortions about her "working class" childhood, her mother staying home, her dad working shifts on the city boiler.
So when she does, just remember that this:
is the house that the "working class" Robinsons lived in (her mother still lives there).
The Truth About Michelle Obama's Working Class Credentials:
"Michelle was from a middle-class family," confirmed one of her long-time friends, Angela Acree."She came from a regular family. They had a nice home. It wasn't a mansion, but it was just fine. It was a decent neighbourhood."
Angela is a huge Obama booster who attended Princeton with Michelle Obama, clearly going way off-message.
Moving on...
The Robinsons grew up on the upper floor of a house built in the Twenties. Number 7436 South Euclid Avenue - a classical reference to the Greek mathematician which found an appropriate echo in Michelle's subsequent respect for traditional learning - even has a small garden, shaded by a large elm tree, and an ornate stone bench......
No one could pretend they were rich and it is true that her father, Frasier Robinson, spent some time as a maintenance worker for Chicago's Department of Water Management.
However, he was a good deal more than the labourer that many seem to imagine.
Indeed, according to family friends, Michelle's father was a volunteer organiser for the city's Democratic Party, a by-word for machine politics in America, and his loyalty was rewarded with a well-paid engineering job at Chicago's water plant. Even before overtime, he earned $42,686 - 25 per cent more than High School teachers at the time. (emphasis added)
(To understand what it meant to be a precinct captain in Chicago, see this 40 year old Time article on a Robert Novak story.)
The Obamas have no significant achievements to point to. All they offer up is their stories, secure in the knowledge that the press will repeat uncritically.
But if the Daily Mail article is correct, Michelle Obama's "life story" is all story-telling.
Jun 18, 08 12:20 AM