Now that there’s still a chance that Hillary Clinton could wind up in the White House, I want to ask: Does anybody have a clue how the White House would function with a First Gentleman who is also an ex-President? Doesn’t this seem like the premise for a farce? It writes itself!

I presume F.G. Bill wouldn’t attend the President’s first-thing-in-the-morning National Security briefings — but only because he didn’t get up in time for them the whole first year he was President

Exactly what would Bill’s role be? Pillow talk advisor? But do they sleep together? I don’t know. This is something that I haven’t wanted to know, but it seems like the kind of thing the voters should know in order to make an informed choice. (Similarly, what is the financial relationship between Hillary and Bill, who is always jetting off to Boratstan to introduce Rich Mining Honcho X to President-for-Life Y. Do they file their taxes jointly? Oh, wait, Hillary has been too busy to release her taxes…)

Granted, it’s unseemly for the voters to have to know that kind of thing, but, in the big picture, it’s unseemly, even banana republicy, for the country to elect the term-limited ex-leader’s wife to be the new Glorious Leader.

“Spengler,” the Asia Times columnist who was a close associate of Lyndon Larouche back in the 1980s, takes a whack at Michelle Obama’s “rage of a privileged class“ as exemplified by her Princeton thesis. Typos ahoy!

That reminds me of something I didn’t squeeze into my long VDARE article on Michelle and racial quotas: how the downsides of affirmative action just spawn more angry demands for more affirmative action. It’s a perpetual motion machine that never goes anywhere.

Michelle got into Whitney Young H.S., Princeton, Harvard Law School, and Sidley Austin LLC due to racial preferences. The entire time she felt aggrieved because people around her at these intellectually elite institutions kept noticing she wasn’t as smart as the average person there, and were guessing that she got in because of her race. That both presumptions were accurate only made them more enraging. Those 14 years she endured in over her head due to affirmative action still gnaw away at her psyche, as the recent Newsweek cover story on her makes clear.

With her aggressive personality and need for attention and dominance, she would have been perfectly happy being a big fish in a little pond, but because elite America institutions are so desperate for hard-working blacks with 115 IQs, she kept getting lured into situations where should couldn’t be satisfied.

So, did all this bitter experience turn her into a campaigner against affirmative action?

Are you kidding? As usual, the exact opposite happened.

Here’s the beginning of the press release put out by her employer after her husband became a U.S. Senator and she got a $195,000 raise:

May 9, 2005

Michelle Obama has been appointed vice president for community and external affairs at the University of Chicago Hospitals. Obama, who was previously the executive director for community affairs at the Hospitals, will be responsible for all programs and initiatives that involve the relationship between the Hospitals and the community. She will also take over management of the Hospitals’ business diversity program.

Prior to joining the Hospitals, Obama worked as an associate dean of student services for the University of Chicago where she developed the University’s first office of community service. She came to the Hospitals in 2002 and quickly built up programs for community relations, neighborhood outreach, volunteer recruitment, staff diversity and minority contracting. [Emphasis mine, although you could argue that her entire job was just diversity.]

She apparently couldn’t cut it in big time corporate law, so she became a … professional diversicrat, in charge of luring other blacks in over their heads, just like she had been, so they can also become underqualified and resentful too, suitable for becoming, in turn, professional diversicrats. Lather, rinse, and repeat, until the end of time.

Via Rod Dreher, I see that Byron York in National Review spent the day on the campaign trail with Michelle Obama:

And not everyone can afford to keep it all together, especially here in Muskingum County, where, according to the census, the median household income in 2004 was $37,192, below both the Ohio and national average. Out of that, there’s the mortgage. And child care. Health care. Education. Lessons. “I know we’re spending — I added it up for the first time — we spend between the two kids, on extracurriculars outside the classroom, we’re spending about $10,000 a year on piano and dance and sports supplements and so on and so forth,” Mrs. Obama tells the women. “And summer programs. That’s the other huge cost. Barack is saying, ‘Whyyyyyy are we spending that?’ And I’m saying, ‘Do you know what summer camp costs?’”

With all those concerns, one might wonder whether the women should be comforting Mrs. Obama, but she assures them that she’s really O.K. “We don’t complain because we’ve got resources because of our education. We’ve got family structure,” she says. “So I tell people don’t cry for me.”

But there are still problems. As she has many times in the past, Mrs. Obama complains about the lasting burden of student loans dating from her days at Princeton and Harvard Law School. She talks about people who end up taking years and years, until middle age, to pay off their debts. “The salaries don’t keep up with the cost of paying off the debt, so you’re in your 40s, still paying off your debt at a time when you have to save for your kids,” she says.

“Barack and I were in that position,” she continues. “The only reason we’re not in that position is that Barack wrote two best-selling books… It was like Jack and his magic beans. But up until a few years ago, we were struggling to figure out how we would save for our kids.”

Indeed, when Obama flew out to the 2000 Democratic convention in LA, he couldn’t rent a car at the airport because his credit card was maxed out.

York sums up:

None of the women at the table has had it particularly easy, but as each tells her story, one, Heather Snoddy, a hairdresser in Zanesville, remains silent. At the end, after hearing from everyone else, Mrs. Obama looks toward Snoddy and asks if there is anything she wants to say. “The only thing that we’re concerned about in our family is bringing more jobs to this area,” Snoddy says. Her husband works in Columbus, nearly 60 miles away. “We are so fortunate and grateful that he has a job there,” Snoddy adds, but the price of gas adds to the problem of an already-difficult schedule. “He leaves at 4 A.M. to be at work by 5:30, and doesn’t get home until 5 at night. With my job, I’m not home sometimes ‘til 8 or 9, because my job works better because I serve people who have been working all day. So when it comes down to it, we only have one family day a week, on Sunday, that all of us are together.”

Mrs. Obama nods in agreement and says she and her husband do much the same thing. “We do that split day,” she says. “‘O.K. — you’ve got them, I’ve got them.’ When we’re together, we’re like, ‘Oh, everybody’s here — isn’t that strange?’”

I talk to Snoddy afterward, and she is genuinely touched by her time with Mrs. Obama. “I just thought it was an amazing experience, that she actually took the time out of her schedule to come and speak with us,” Snoddy tells me.

Something I’ve noticed over and over again is that normal people feel sorrier over minor indignities suffered by celebrities like Michelle Obama than they feel bad over major problems suffered by other normal people.

The New Yorker has a long, upbeat article about Michelle, but eventually the writer, Lauren Collins winds up flailing around in her inability to find much else to say about the potential First Lady that’s both positive and interesting.

One thing that’s interesting:

“In 2005, their income was $1.67 million, which was more than they had earned in the previous seven years combined.”

That means they averaged less that $238,000, for 1998-2004, but probably more than $208,000; otherwise, the reporter would have said “which was more than they had earned in the previous eight years combined.” Obama was elected to the state legislature in 1996, so I presume that if he had had to publish his tax returns for the seven years 1998-2004, he must have had to publish his tax return for 1997 as well.

A quick Google finds a Chicago Tribune article that reports their 2002 income, before the book deals and Michelle’s amazing $195k raise after he got elected to the Senate, to be $259,394. In 1998, they made $191,146. So, the average was likely in the $208k-$238k range.

The 5′-11″ Michelle, who definitely looks like she could win a fistfight with any First Lady in history, works out with a personal trainer four days per week, according to The New Yorker. At, say, $75 per hour, that would come to about $15k per year, more than they spend on their daughters’ enrichment.

They also send their two daughters to the private and exclusive University of Chicago Lab Schools, where tuition runs from $15k-$20k per year apiece, but they may get some kind of faculty discount.

Listening to Mrs. Obama, you can imagine why Mr. Obama made the potentially disastrous decision in 2005 to involve the notorious criminal Tony Rezko in his purchase of an expensive South Side mansion with four fireplaces for the family. Because Rezko went on trial last Monday, the day before the latest elections, Obama’s decision might have cost him the Texas primary, in which a victory would have knocked Mrs. Clinton out of contention.

The New Yorker makes one important point:

“Perhaps Obama’s high-handedness is preëmptive, her way of “claiming a seat at the table”—as she is fond of calling enfranchisement in the power-brokering structure—rather than waiting to be offered one. It’s as though she figures she might as well say that she and her husband are all that before someone can say that they aren’t. And there’s a sort of strategic genius to her presentation of campaigning as grinding work that takes her away from her family, rather than a glorious tour of the world’s greatest country that she would be thrilled to be undertaking even if she didn’t have to. She frequently tells her audiences, “I don’t care where I am, the first question is ‘How are you managing it all? How are you holding up?’ ” The effect, of course, is to set up an expectation of tribute, like those hairdressers who display all their gifts in the days leading up to Christmas. By loudly voicing her distaste for retail politicking, Obama makes people feel as though, by showing up, she were doing them a favor.”

So, the secret of Michelle Obama’s appeal is that she’s self-absorbed, self-pitying, and not all that bright — just like most people. The only difference is that she’s self-assertive and famous. So people love her.

Barack Obama has such an unusual background that it’s interesting to find individuals very similar to him by heritage, such as his estranged half-brother Mark, and see how much they differ in world-view. Another doppelganger is the American-born daughter, Juliette Akinyi Ochieng, of Barack Obama Sr.’s old drinking buddy, the Kenyan newspaper editor Philip Ochieng. The elder Ochieng came to America to study under the same program as the elder Obama and their children were born 14 days apart. The Kenyan students eventually returned home where they spent a lot of time together, leaving their children to be raised by their American mothers.

Juliette is a retired U.S. Air Force sergeant and staunch Republican. Her LuoAmerican.com blog keeps up with the latest on the situation in Kenya (which appears to be better today than a couple of weeks ago) and

How does Washington willfully endanger the American people? Let me count the ways! Admitting potential enemies remains popular at the State Department.

One impaired idea that has existed largely below the MSM radar is the post-9/11 welcome of many thousands of college students from Islamic nations, particularly Saudi Arabia. GW Bush acquiesced to his Saudi pals to open America up to 20,000 students over four years. (See my 2005 blog Saudi Students Coming to a College near You.)

Interestingly, the slant of this NBC-produced article (More students from Islamic nations allowed in U.S., Deep Background, Feb 15, 2008) is upbeat about the effect of young Muslims being educated in the west. However, the 9/11 hijackers who had such educations (several of them) were not turned from the dark side by learning about the Enlightenment and Constitution. Ringleader Mohammed Atta had a degree in architecture and worked professionally in Germany. Pilot Ziad Jarrah attended a private Catholic school in Beirut as a boy.

The State Department has been steadily increasing the number of visas granted to students and visitors from three Islamic nations -nations with connections to the Sept. 11 attacks and to al-Qaida, according to an NBC News survey of U.S. visa data.

Many counterterrorism experts welcome the increase in visas to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan, arguing that exposure to American culture outweighs any possible risk from prospective terrorists.

Beside the obvious terror threat, another problem has been the bad behavior of Saudi students, particularly crummy driving and sexual harassment against women.

However, The Kingdom is dealing forthrightly with these difficulties: the ever fascinating Arab News reported, Saudi Students Taught How to Behave in Host Countries.

JEDDAH, 27 January 2008 — Over 3,000 students from Jeddah, who are going abroad as part of the King Abdullah Scholarship Program, which is in its third year, attended a four-day orientation course offering them educational tips and how to behave in their host countries. [...]

It also transpired that the bad attitude of students last year caused many to cut short their studies and that 71 students were forced to return from the US, 13 from New Zealand and five from Malaysia.

Phew! Diversity sure is a lot of work!