[Michelle] Obama begins with a broad assessment of life in America in 2008, and life is not good: we're a divided country, we're a country that is "just downright mean," we are "guided by fear," we're a nation of cynics, sloths, and complacents. "We have become a nation of struggling folks who are barely making it every day," she said, as heads bobbed in the pews. "Folks are just jammed up, and it's gotten worse over my lifetime. And, doggone it, I'm young. Forty-four!"
In Cheraw, Obama belittled the idea that the Clinton years were ones of opportunity and prosperity: "The life that I'm talking about that most people are living has gotten progressively worse since I was a little girl. . . . So if you want to pretend like there was some point over the last couple of decades when your lives were easy, I want to meet you!"
Michelle and Barack met at Sidley & Austin, when she was assigned to advise him during a summer job. Michelle's co-workers warned her that the summer associate was cute. "I figured that they were just impressed with any black man with a suit and a job," she later told Barack.
When she talks about wanting "my girls to travel the world with pride" and the decline of America "over my lifetime," you wonder why her default pronoun is singular if the message is meant to be concern for others and inclusiveness.
And you start reading the labels and you realize there's high-fructose corn syrup in everything we're eating. Every jelly, every juice. Everything that's in a bottle or a package is like poison in a way that most people don't even know. . . . Now we're keeping, like, a bowl of fresh fruit in the house. But you have to go to the fruit stand a couple of times a week to keep that fruit fresh enough that a six-year-old—she's not gonna eat the pruney grape, you know. At that point it's, like, 'Eww!' She's not gonna eat the brown banana or the shrivelledy-up things. It's got to be fresh for them to want it. Who's got time to go to the fruit stand? Who can afford it, first of all?"
The Obamas' financial standing has risen sharply in the past three years, largely as a result of the money Barack earned from writing "The Audacity of Hope." In 2005, their income was $1.67 million, which was more than they had earned in the previous seven years combined.
Just after Barack was elected to the United States Senate, Michelle received a large pay increase—from $121,910 in 2004 to $316,962 in 2005. "Mrs. Obama is extremely overpaid," one citizen wrote in a letter to the editor of the Tribune, after the paper published a story questioning the timing of the award. "Now, what is the real reason behind such an inflated salary?" Her bosses at the University of Chicago Hospitals vigorously defended the raise, pointing out that it put her salary on a par with that of other vice-presidents at the hospital. (As it happens, Obama has spent most of her life working within the two institutions for which she most frequently claims a populist disdain: government and the health-care system.)
As you can see, this woman appears to be driven by some serious negative viewpoints, and she doesn't appear to be terribly in touch with reality. In fact, her entire frame of reference seems to be that of soup lines, racial divisions, and American failure. Now, I realize this is not the person who would be President, but you can't deny the fact that she will have a certain level of influence over Barack if he wins in November. Aside from that, can we really be sure that Barack doesn't agree with her? From his own rhetoric, they appear to be in lock step.
These are some signs of serious problems, and people need to realize just who these people are. The short version: very, very bad news for America.
There's my two cents.
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