Hitchens On Michelle Obama'S Thesis

From her earliest appearances on the 2008 campaign trail, it was clear that she possessed rare political gifts.” Without quite seeming to grasp the magnitude of her insult to the country her husband was seeking to lead, Cherlin recalls a particularly famous instance of Mrs. “For the first time in my adult lifetime,” she memorably said, “I’m really proud of my country.

It was a shallow document on “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community,” and not the work of a highly-disciplined person.One of the most gifted, in Cherlin’s telling, is a woman named Kristina Schake, a California political operative who had worked for Maria Shriver and against Proposition 8.The tone of the story leaves me wondering if it was written solely to promote Schake, who was “out the door” two and a half years later, ignominiously replaced by an Estee Lauder executive. “It was Schake who recommended that the first lady appear with celebrities like Jimmy Fallon for what have become familiar bouts of silliness: feeding kale chips to Fallon and Will Ferrell, or dunking a mini basketball on Le Bron James as Dwyane Wade reads healthy-eating tips,” Cherlin writes approvingly.If Obama were as smart as a fifth-grader, he would know, of course, that "merits ...have." Were there such a thing as a literary Darwin Award, Obama could have won it on this on one sentence alone. Although the letter is fewer than a thousand words long, Obama repeats the subject-predicate error at least two more times.What is noticeable is that Cherlin doesn’t hold Mrs. The reason she is Teflon is…she is a lawyer, she has credentials. She is “really disciplined,” says a former staffer.But how really disciplined is she when it comes to intellectual matters?The first lady’s office, according to Cherlin, “can be a confining, frustrating, even miserable place to work.Jealousy and discontentment have festered, as courtiers squabble over the allocation of responsibility and access to Mrs. Fueling these sentiments, according to former East Wing insiders, is the exacting but often ambivalent leadership style of the first lady herself.” Translation: it’s not really that pleasant to work for Mrs. Of course, the atmosphere described is not atypical in a high-powered office.“Those appearances won important attention for the first lady’s signature issues.” Am I the only one who doesn’t think it’s ironic that feeding kale chips to Jimmy Fallon is seen as a good thing? Schake is looking for a job, I wish her all the best.She now has the Cherlin piece as a glowing recommendation, no doubt.