Hillary pulled off a surprise win the other night, but I still think the Obamas have a lot of game. Plus, they’re much more interesting than the Clintons. A couple of good profiles: one (of Michelle) in the New Yorker, the other by Victor David Hansen.
I notice with Michelle Obama a trait that I often see in apolitical people: a vague, not particularly analytical, sense that something is wrong with our way of life and our busy world. I’ve seen it most in people from blue collar backgrounds that somehow make their way into money: they are surprised to learn that it doesn’t solve all of their problems. The whole “super mom” career thing undoubtedly has not lived up to Michelle’s expectations. She’s running here, there, everywhere, keeping up with the Jonses, not knowing her neighbors, still feeling insecure, and constantly having to work.
She often talks of a profound malaise in American life, but one can’t ignore the dissonance between means and ends: her complaints are all spiritual in nature, but the solutions she and her husband reach for are prosaic and practical, such as government health care, free trade protectionism, and a soak-the-rich tax policy.
When she’s not mouthing Marxist platitudes about race, Michelle Obama’s instincts are actually fairly conservative–this undobutedly the product of her stable, blue collar upbringing. But the solutions she is promoting to solve our crisis of meaning are not the right tools for the job, and her husband’s soaring rhetoric conceals a very ordinary agenda.
The real roots of her pain are deeper, stemming from the unbalanced and typically American obsession with money, status, getting ahead, “career,” and the like. Nothing in capitalism makes people get on that track. People choose to. Her lack of sensitivity to the serious financial problems of her blue-collar audiences (and her blindness to the well hidden struggles of her parents) demonstrate what I believe is another important factor in her and other Americans’ unhappiness: a lack of gratitude and perspective.
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You’ve missed the kicker in her attitude: she has re-directed her animus against things as they are against white people (it’s the Do-George-a-Favor syndrome).
What I find more troubling is the thought – promoted by the political class, but lapped up by political junkies as well – that it is up to our elected officials to salve our spiritual wounds, real, imagined, or exaggerated.
We are, or should be, electing people to administer state bureaucracies, make budgeting decisions, and legislate. Nothing in the job description above, which most of elected officals can’t do competently anyway, requires them to grapple with the demons of the American soul.
To the extent that people ever come to terms with the circumstances of their own lives and find some satisfaction there, they do so in ways mysterious, manifold, intensely personal, and utterly unknowable to government bureaucrats and political operatives. Whatever it is that we’re supposed to be lacking, spiritual contentment, for example, will never be systematizable under any federal program, though I sense the approach of the day when happiness will be mandated by legislative fiat.
The most we can hope for in this area from our politicans is that they get off our backs, stay out of our way, and let us try to figure what to do with our own lives. But I’m not holding my breath.