Mark Steyn writes about Michelle Obama, who appears to be quite a piece of work.

I’m willing to cut presidential spouses a lot of slack. When Senator Obama said Jeremiah Wright was like a goofy uncle, it was pointed out that your relatives are a given but you get to choose your pastor. It’s true that you also get to choose your wife, but, unless you’re particularly far-sighted, you don’t always choose them with a presidential run in mind. I found Teresa Heinz’s tone-deafness to the rhythms of democratic politics one of the more charmingly genuine features of John Kerry’s phony-baloney populist campaign.

Who wouldn’t love a woman who, shanghaied into lunching at Wendy’s with Mr and Mrs John Edwards, demands to know what “chili” is and has to have it explained to her by the clerk that it’s a meat-based food dish widely consumed around the United States.

Oddly enough, despite being a couple of decades younger and several gazillion dollars poorer, Mrs Obama has a tin ear even Mrs Kerry must marvel at. Addressing a group of struggling women in economically torpid central Ohio, Michelle Obama eschewed the usual I-feel-your-pain shtick and invited her audience to fee hers, lurching into a long riff on the expense of extracurricular activities for her daughters, piano and ballet and summer camp, and somehow she and Barack are expected to figure out how to pay for it on a combined salary of 500 grand a year, not including his book royalties and her corporate directorship. (Nor the home they bought for $1.6 million  – which is the only house they’ve ever owned.)

Mrs Obama’s plaint was worryingly reminiscent of the time the Prince of Wales, attempting to bond with some of the British Army’s black recruits, said that he too knew what it was to suffer prejudice: At his boarding school some of the boys had been prejudiced against him because he was a prince. (“The people in my dormitory are foul,” he wrote to the Queen in 1964. “They throw slippers all night long or hit me with pillows.”)

Two and a third centuries after throwing off the monarchy, many Americans remain polite and deferential to the political class. So an audience of women living in a depressed county where median household income is about a tenth of Mrs Obama’s salary alone nodded politely and tutted sympathetically as the Senator’s wife outlined the difficulties of making ends meet on a lousy half-million per.

You can understand why a visit to Wendy’s by Teresa Heinz, a Portuguese Mozambican ketchup heiress, should come off like an ill-advised anthropological expedition, but it’s less clear why so much of American life should seem so foreign to Michelle Obama. Come presidential season, the Democrats prefer blind dates while the Republicans make do with the old coot who’s been pestering them for a night out since Gold Diggers Of 1934.

…

She was born in 1964, so, unlike, say, Condi Rice, she has no vivid childhood memories of racial segregation. She grew up in a conventional two-parent household which, though poor and living in a small apartment, gathered each evening for dinner, so she’s not a victim of the Great Society’s atomization of the black family. She was among the first generation to benefit from “affirmative action”, which was supposed to ameliorate the lingering grievances of racism but seems, in Mrs Obama’s case, merely to have transformed them into post-modern pseudo-grievance. “All my life I have confronted people who had a certain expectation of me,” she told an audience in Madison. “Every step of the way, there was somebody there telling me what I couldn’t do. Applied to Princeton. ‘You can’t go there, your test scores aren’t high enough.’ I went. I graduated with departmental honors. And then I wanted to go to Harvard. And that was probably a little too tough for me. I didn’t even know why they said that.”But hang on. By her own admission, her test scores weren’t high enough for Princeton. Yet, rather than telling her, “You can’t go there”, they took her anyway. And all the thanks they get is that her test scores are now a recurring point of resentment: “The stuff that we’re seeing in these polls,” she told an interviewer, “has played out my whole life. You know, always been told by somebody that I’m not ready, that I can’t do something, my scores weren’t high enough.”

If you were, say, Elizabeth Edwards and your scores weren’t high enough, that’d be that (Teresa Heinz could probably leverage the whole Mozambican thing). Yet Mrs Obama regards state-mandated compensation for previous racism as a new form of burthen to bear. In an early indication of the post-modern narcissism on display at Zanesville, she arrived as a black woman at Princeton and wrote her undergraduate thesis on the problems of being a black woman at Princeton. Princeton-Educated Blacks And The Black Community is a self-meditation by the then Miss Robinson on the question of whether an Ivy League black student drawn remorselessly into the white world is betraying lower-class blacks. As she puts it: