Robin Givhan takes wanking to levels not seen since David Broder predicted in January ’06 February ’07 that Bush would rebound in the polls. It’s hard to know how to start with this wankfest. Maybe with her describing Juan William’s comparison of Michelle Obama to Stokely Carmichael thusly?
The vitriol has flown at those, such as journalist Juan Williams, who have suggested that she can be too aggressive or dour in some of her speeches.
Or, how about this segment of Noonanesque lunacy?
For all the wide-eyed Michelle-Obama-is-just-like-us rapture because she wears Gap, the reality is that those Main Street frocks in her closet make her position only more vertiginous. Audiences feel they have an intimate relationship with this person they’ve put atop a pedestal, and they are more visceral in their defense of her.
The photograph of Obama on the March cover of Vogue adds to that false sense of public intimacy. Unlike the portrait of Clinton that appeared in December 1998, there’s nothing especially regal or grand about Obama’s image. Clinton wore a boat-neck ball gown by Oscar de la Renta when she broke the Vogue cover barrier. Obama wears a sleeveless sheath. Clinton’s formal photo could just as easily have been an oil painting by a modern-day John Singer Sargent. Obama’s picture has the self-consciously relaxed quality of something that might appear on a Facebook page.
Obama’s champions act as if they know her, that they understand her and she them. All that passionate support, however, comes at a price. They have wrapped her in a protective cocoon that could soon border on smothering. It is a place where normal human failures are denied, reasonable criticism is met with a ferocious defense, bad hair days don’t exist and dimwitted attacks can’t simply be ignored.
Anyone want to help me out and tell me what point Ms. Givhan is trying to make?
Is it nothing more than a desire to see Michelle Obama taken down a peg?
Can an icon have a cranky day in public — and have that crummy mood noted without it launching boycotts, blogs and a thousand dissertations on the stereotype of the angry black woman? It may be that she cannot.
Still, one wishes that some close Obama friend would step forward and do for her what she pointedly tried to do for her husband early on in the campaign. Tell the world that she doesn’t put away the milk. That she skips the weekly pedicures. Debunk the mythology. Or at least try.
What mythology?
