Michelle Obama gave a speech this morning to a U.S.-sponsored Young African Women Leaders Forum in Soweto. It was mostly the usual Hope’n’Change boilerplate, part Sermon on the Mount, part Oprah-esque commencement address. But this bit caught my ear:
Like my husband, I came from a modest background. My parents saved and sacrificed everything they had so that I could get an education. And when I graduated, got a job at a big, fancy law firm — nice salary, big office. My friends were impressed. My family was proud. By all accounts, I was living the dream.
But I knew something was missing. I knew I didn’t want to be way up in some tall building all alone in an office writing memos. I wanted to be down on the ground working with kids, helping families put food on the table and a roof over their heads.
So I left that job for a new job training young people like yourselves for careers in public service. I was making a lot less money. My office wasn’t so nice. (Laughter.) But every day, I got to watch those young people gain skills and build confidence. And then I saw them go on to mentor and inspire other young people. And that made me feel inspired. It still does.
Those listening could have been forgiven for thinking Mrs. Obama went straight from “down on the ground working with kids” and “making a lot less money” to the White House, because – perhaps out of modesty – she left out a significant chunk of her resume: the part where, after she and her husband had established their activist credentials, she took a $120,000-a-year admin job at the University of Chicago Hospital.
I don’t know how tall the building was, but I’m sure she would have spent a fair bit of time alone in her office, and must have written the occasional memo. This was the job in which Mrs. Obama famously received a $200,000 pay rise shortly before her state Senator husband requested a $1 million earmark for… UCH, the hospital she worked for; her job which was so important that when Mrs Obama left, UCH didn’t bother to replace her.
The disingenuousness on display here is bad enough, but what’s really irritating is the implication that white-collar jobs are somehow beneath the Obamas and their ilk. Millions of Americans do what Mrs. Obama presumably thinks are ‘unfulfilling’ office jobs – they’re jobs that generate the money that makes the privately- and publicly-funded community programs in which the Obamas dabbled possible. Never mind that when it suited Mrs. Obama she took one of those jobs.
Mrs Obama’s remarks are of a piece with her husband’s suggestion that young people should aspire to be doctors and engineers rather than investment bankers. And note the inverted snobbery implicit in her description of law firms as “fancy” (those fancy lawyers are, along with the wicked investment bankers, among the most generous donors to the campaign coffers of her husband, and Democrats in general).
The Obamas just don’t seem to understand that while they’re busy transforming America, other – and apparently, in their view, lesser – people are working hard just to keep it running.
Nice job. No more need be said.
And here’s another thing about those people with “fancy jobs.” Even before they make their ginormous campaign contributions to the likes of Barack Hussein Obama II, they have paid the highest taxes of any Americans— tax revenues the Socialist-in-Chief and his designer-clothed consort now wish to “re-distribute” to “real people.”
Are we in Wonderland, yet, or is the first stop the Emerald City in Oz?
Another “Do as I say, not as I do.”
They’re like an amorphous amoeba, changing shape as needed.
So, what’s new from this bunch? Lies. More lies. And even more lies. Smiling all the while lying, and the lies ignored by media.
But, the leftist herd goes on a stampede over every single word Sarah Palin ever wrote or said…what a pile.
Greetings:
The only update I’m waiting for is what our First Lady tells her daughters and our First Mother-in-Law about South African President Zuma’s collection of “wives”.
That would be the same South African President that refused to meet with the FLOTUS and instead sent his director of prisons as well as his third wife.
So, “training young people for careers in public service” — i.e. showing them how to get funded by the taxpayers — is more noble than any job that actually generates revenue? (I don’t usually defend the economic value of lawyers, but here it’s relative.)
Also: what’s the REAL reason why she no longer has a valid law license?
Blame not the opportunistic, morally impaired Obamas, blame the lazy, unmotivated, entitlement seeking acolytes who vote people of their ilk into office and ask no questions.
In the 1950s the politicians in New York City set up an office in Puerto Rico where residents of that third world US territory could sign up for welfare and get a ticket on Eastern Airlines to LaGuardia airport where they would be greeted and directed to their subsidized housing and receive their initial checks…the only requisite…vote Democratic.
Mr. Obama, as with everything he does, has only expanded on an old idea.
Mrs. Obama…well she sets up the welfare offices!
You left out that her law license was taken away and Valerie Jarrett rescued the situation getting her a job in the mayors office then at the hospital.
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