Life Without Hope

Vincent J. Curtis

19 Dec 2016

Could anyone be more hopeless than Michelle Obama?  Could anyone be more out of touch than Michelle Obama?  I mean, other than those Hollywood celebrities calling on Trump Electors to be faithless – as an act of conscience and patriotism!

Today, an Oprah Winfrey show is going to have Michelle Obama tell Oprah that the current mood of America is what “not having hope feels like.”  She then amplifies her statement by saying something about hope being necessary and some such, a quality of statement that belies the education she received at Princeton and Harvard.

In 2008, after the Democrat party had nominated husband Barack at its presidential nominee, she famously said that this was the first time in her life she felt proud of her country.  She meant that for the first time in her life, that racist chip on her shoulder slipped off.  Soon enough she replaced it, however, because the racist ambush is about the only method of argument she has confidence in delivering.

Michelle has lived a life of cosseted privilege.  In 2006, her salary was $273,618 from the University of Chicago Hospitals, while her husband had a salary of $157,082 from the United States Senate. The Obamas' total income, however, was $991,296, which included $51,200 she earned as a member of the board of directors of TreeHouse Foods, and investments and royalties from his books.

Advancements through her career are mysterious for a person without connections and of modest attainments.

In 1996, at the age of 32, Michelle served as the Associate Dean of Student Services at the University of Chicago.  In 2002, she began working for the University of Chicago Hospitals, first as executive director for community affairs and, beginning May 2005, as Vice President for Community and External Affairs.  Note the dates and the status of husband Barack’s career at the same time.

In 1991, at the age of 27, she worked in the Chicago city government as an Assistant to the Mayor and as Assistant Commissioner of Planning and Development. In 1993, she became Executive Director for the Chicago office of Public Allies, a non-profit organization encouraging young people to work on social issues in nonprofit groups and government agencies.

In 1981, she entered Princeton University.  Her graduation thesis was entitled Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.  Part of her research consisted in sending a questionnaire to African American graduates, requesting they specify when and how comfortable they were with their race prior to their enrollment at Princeton and how they felt about it when they were a student and since then. Of the 400 alumni sent the survey, “fewer than 90 responded, and the findings did not support her hope that the black alumni would still identity with the African American community, even though they had attended an elite university with all of the advantages that accrues to its graduates."  She majored in sociology and minored in African American studies, graduating cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in 1985.

Obviously, race consciousness and feelings have been central to Michelle’s thinking since college days.  A voluntary survey of 400 to which fewer than 90 responded does not provide scientific results.  The purpose of the survey was to test a thesis, not a hope; and you would not be wrong to rub your eyes at what the thesis was: that blacks still identify as “blacks” despite being Princeton graduates and having the advantages of an Ivy League education.  Nevertheless, Michelle graduated, and was admitted to Harvard Law School.

Michelle earned a J.D. (Juris Doctor – a fancy name for a lawyer with another university degree) from Harvard in 1988.  It was at Harvard that Michelle allegedly concluded that she could be “both brilliant and black,” according to her faculty mentor Charles Ogletree.

She graduated from Harvard Law and landed a job at the law firm Sidley Austin, LLP, where she met Barack.  They were married in 1992.

Michelle Obama got into Princeton with a lot less than non-minority students, and I’m guessing that it was on full, or nearly full, scholarship.  She takes a bird course, does a half-assed thesis, and they give her a degree and send her out the door; and Princeton gets credit for graduating a black female.

On the strength of a mere cum laude sociology degree, Michelle lands a spot at Harvard Law, but don’t think for a moment that being black and being female had anything to do with her admission.  No more so that being female and being 1/32 Cherokee had anything to do with Harvard Law hiring Elizabeth Warren.

Anyhow, after barely three years in practicing law, she is already working for government in the city of Chicago doing those non-technical soft things – Assistant to the Mayor, Assistant to someone else.  Within five years of graduating Harvard Law, she placed her law license into voluntary suspension, and is wife of up and coming Barack Obama, another story of modest attainments being inflated to epic proportions for reasons of race.

If it weren’t for prevalence of race-guilt in America, a person of Michelle Obama’s talents would never have made it to Princeton and Harvard Law.  She has benefitted personally to a degree she cannot imagine on account of the fact that she is a black female who is culturally a step above a ghetto-mama.

She sees the race guilt of America everywhere she looks, and her comment about the America of Donald Trump being a place without hope reflects her view from the bubble of privilege she has lived in her entire adult life.  It chokes people more talented and less lucky than she has been to listen to her disparage the first sign of hope they have seen in a decade or more – Donald Trump.

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