Apparently Michelle Obama needs a makeover. No less than the New York Times says so. So let it be written. So let it be done. The most recent piece of fiction crafted by the mainstream media is that there is something wrong with Michelle Obama. In the words of the Times, Michelle has a “strong personality”. I don’t think they meant “strong” in a good way — like strong bones, strong bridges, strong families or a strong national defense. In Michelle’s case, being “strong” is a liability, not an asset. There is something about Michelle that the American media thinks is too much. Is it that she is too confident? Too eloquent? Too intelligent or too compassionate?
After declaring that she was just too much, on Wednesday, the New York Times followed up by inferring that Michelle needs to be made over into a softer version of herself, but I didn’t see anything wrong with the original version we’ve grown to know.
As critics have increasingly frothed at the mouth with charges that she is some angry, unpatriotic black radical, I can’t help think of those iconic images of black women and girls during the civil rights movement.
The truth is that any woman who would submit her children to the circus-like gauntlet that has become the presidential nomination process in this country, has a deep unwavering love for her country. Only a woman who loved her country would be willing to sacrifice so much and endure the negative stereotyping, spurious rumors and the incessant chatter from prognostitutes psychoanalyzing her decision to go sleeveless and wear the colour purple.
Michelle Obama doesn’t need a makeover. She was a classy, eloquent spokesperson for her husband’s candidacy. What needs making over are the puny little minds of the editorial decision-makers in this country who once again are forcing an accomplished professional spouse of a man seeking high office to contort herself to fit into their tiny little archaic boxes.
Political campaigns, being the risk adverse sheep that they are, follow the media’s lead. Thus every four years they force the country to watch a very public lobotomy via daytime talkshows, fluff pieces in supermarket tabloids and magazine bake offs — minimizing a woman’s professional accomplishments in favor of reminding us that she can bake a mean cookie. They did it to Hillary Clinton. They did it to Teresa Heinz Kerry. They would have done the same thing to Elizabeth Edwards. And they are doing it to Michelle Obama. All of these women are accomplished in their own rights and have been vocal surrogates for their husbands’ campaigns. In Michelle’s case the cookies are shortbread with lemon zest topped with dried fruit and nuts.
Nuts is exactly what we are for allowing the mainstream media to drag us on yet another cycle of their election year lunacy where they force professional women to jettison their careers, their education and their professions to become cookie-baking candidate robo-wives.
