America in the Balance

BILL CLINTON AND MICHELLE OBAMA: A CASE OF POLITICAL SPOUSAL ABUSE

By

Ken Eliasberg

Elections are always fascinating, if only for the phenomena and anomalies they produce. One of the more curious anomalies to me with respect to our current effort is the deleterious effect that the Democratic candidate’s spouses have had on their respective campaigns. And, frankly, this came as a complete surprise to me. Why? Because, in the case of Bill Clinton, I was amazed at his ineptitude, and this coming from one of the sharpest politicians I have ever seen. He just could not seem to get out of his own way, with a number of pundits sympathetic to Hillary’s cause attributing many of Hillary’s woes to Bill, thereby derailing her early inevitability train. Nowhere was this more evident than in Hillary’s horrendous showing in South Carolina. The problem? When Bill wasn’t putting his foot in his wife’s mouth, he was unable to get out of his own way, i.e. his narcisisstic predilection for making everything about him and his legacy. It seems that they finally managed to shut him up as he was much less of a presence in Texas and Ohio.

In all fairness to Bill, he had a lot of help from Hillary’s managers, who have come under considerable fire for their inept management of her campaign. That is, so sure were they of the ease with which Hillary would sweep to an early coronation, that they had no game plan for anything after the first super Tuesday; in their somewhat arrogant assessment of their candidate’s inevitability they just dismissed Obama out of hand.

I was even more taken aback by Michelle Obama, who, I somewhat naively thought, might mirror her husband’s easy and likeable manner. I could not have been more wrong. Not only did she (and does she) have a rather hard edge, she displayed an attitude that could prove more than just embarrassing to her husband — it could prove fatal. She proved that not only is racism alive and well in this country, but something more troubling to her husband, that it can operate just as easily from black to white as it has from white to black. That is, racism is a two-way street; blacks can be as anti-white as some whites have been anti-black. This fact may seem obvious, but its lines have been blurred by a combination of political correctness and stupidity.

The political correctness part of the equation has made it almost impossible to take issue with a black on any subject without being accused of being a racist. You have seen plenty of signs of this in the current campaign; if you said boo about Obama, you could face a charge of racism. The stupidity part of the equation is injected into the discussion by the assertion of some blacks that a minority, lacking any real power over the majority, cannot be racist. This was an argument made by Sister Souljah in the early ‘90s as justification for her continuing musical assaults on white folk. You may recall, Bill Clinton, in one of his rare gestures at faux courage, took Sister Souljah to task at a meeting of the Rainbow Coalition, thereby earning Jesse Jackson’s momentary displeasure and disapproval (a situation apparently rectified after Bill’s Monica problem surfaced when good ‘ol Jesse came to the White House, accompanied by his pregnant mistress, to give Bill moral guidance).

Now to Michelle’s role in trying to torpedo her husband’s otherwise sunny effort to become president of these United States. You will recall her angry and idiotic statement that“[F]or the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country — not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction and just not feeling so alone in my frustration and disappointment.” Now let’s take a look at that statement and the context from which it emanates. This is a lady whose husband, a black man, is being put forward as a candidate for the presidency of a country which has failed to inspire pride in her. Does she have any other civilized country in mind where her husband would receive comparable consideration? An uncivilized country, perhaps, like say one in Africa?

Now let’s look at her personal background. She was admitted to Princeton University and Harvard Law School, on her own admission, by virtue of affirmative action (without which she would not otherwise be eligible for admission because her grades would not have measured up). How about that, by virtue of her country’s generosity and essential fairness (not to mention a complete misconstruction of what affirmative action was all about — i.e. the content of her character, not the color of her skin) she was admitted to 2 of America’s most prestigious Universities (in preference to others — e.g. whites, Asians, and/or Hispanics — more qualified for that honor). Isn’t that something that might inspire just a touch of pride in her country — its misguided effort to right an historical wrong (again, misguided in the sense that affirmative action was never intended to be about quotas; it was about fairness — a fairness that its creators thought to be the case when 2 students — one black, one white (or Asian, Hispanic, etc.)- were equally qualified, the black gets the nod (not when the black was clearly less qualified). No, this was not enough to inspire pride in Mrs. Obama.

I am not going to get into the dozens of things that this country has done that might inspire pride in a more humble (and less angry) human being than Michelle Obama; that has been covered in numerous other articles, and I’ll have much to say about that in the future. For present purposes, her comments reveal 2 things: (1) how pathetically imprudent Mrs. Obama was to have made such a comment, revealing her own anger and dissatisfaction with this country, at a time when her husband is campaigning on a bright and happy note; and (2) that either Barack cannot persuade his spouse to keep a lid on it, or, that her comments are a revealing look into the soul of the real Barack Obama. And we’ll have a lot more to say about that down the road.

In all events, I believe that her comments had a lot to do with his losses in Texas and Ohio, and thus his prospect of putting the election out of reach for Hillary Clinton. Now she has put him in the position of having to win Pennsylvania or go to the convention as the underdog. A man is not his wife’s keeper to be sure, but there are cases when it would not be inappropriate for a man (or a woman) to tell his (or her) spouse to put a sock in it. Hillary apparently did, and it helped her; Obama apparently did not, and it cost him. Michelle Obama is a loose canon, and, if not held in check, could do serious harm to her husband’s chances of success.