As if these times weren’t crazy enough, an entertaining and enlightening new film, MICHELLE OBAMA 2024: Her Real Life Story and Plan for Power, by the inimitable documentarian, Joel Gilbert, explores Crazytown (i.e., Democrat politics) further than you probably ever wanted, or expected, to go. But go there we must. Michelle Obama may be the Democratic presidential candidate in 2024.
Joel and I first discussed his theory a couple years ago, around the beginning of Covid, that Michelle Obama and her handlers were positioning her to make a run for the presidency in 2024. I think I nearly spat my coffee across my back deck. There was no way, I replied, that this angry, America-loathing, entitled elitist would be proffered by the Democratic Party as their standard-bearer in 2024. But when he laid out the basis of his prediction, I was unnerved. He was making sense.
Now having seen an advance copy of the film, I am surer than ever that he is on to something. And also having seen the movie, I’ve come to realize that I simply do not think like a Democrat. For which I am eternally grateful.
While you and I and much of what I like to call “normal America” have a visceral dislike for this woman who once said she was proud of her country for the first time in her adult life only after her husband, Barack, was running to be the Democrats’ nominee for president, many other Americans don’t see her that way.
Gilbert provides a fascinating look at this political chameleon. I was amazed at how little I really knew of Michelle Obama’s background as he explores her intensely political life, starting as a child accompanying her father, a Democratic Chicago city precinct captain holding a patronage job, making his political rounds. Young Michelle was groomed from the outset for a future in politics, particularly grievance politics, which the Democratic Party thrives on. And contrary to much popular perception, Michelle was hardly one who avoided the political limelight. She was a driving force and essential player in the rise of her husband’s political career.
Moreover, young Michelle herself has been navigating murky municipal politics and gritty government bureaucracy since she was plucked in 1991 for a job by Valerie Jarrett during the latter’s tenure in the administration of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, in which Jarrett served as Daley’s deputy chief of staff. She chose Michelle (then Michelle Robinson) to work in the city’s Department of Planning and Development. It was in that role that Michelle oversaw the eviction of blacks from a low-income housing project known as Cabrini Green, so that those residences could be demolished to make way for construction of upscale yuppy townhouses.
In fact, this episode at the start of Michelle’s career illustrates an overarching theme in Gilbert’s film: Michelle Obama has spent her life running away from blacks. This black-avoidance penchant began at an early age, when Michelle’s parents illegally enrolled her in a predominantly white, affluent grammar school, known as Bryn Mawr Elementary School, in order to avoid sending her to the predominantly black, less prestigious and less affluent public elementary school in which she was supposed to be enrolled, based on her parents’ address.
Gilbert uses this same vignette to illustrate another penchant of Michelle Obama’s: to lie about things great and small in furtherance of her political agenda. She had claimed that she had skipped second grade because she and some of her friends had complained about their math teacher. However, the truth is that Michelle and her friends had been skipped a grade because they tested very high in their reading skills at the end of first grade. Somehow, this tendency to prevaricate over silly matters brings to mind one Hillary Clinton, who once told Sir Edmund Hillary that she had been named for him, even though Sir Edmund Hillary had not achieved fame for climbing Mount Everest until six years after Hillary was born. But such is life in Democratic politics (see Senator Richard Blumenthal fraudulently claiming he had seen military service in Vietnam, Bill Clinton saying “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” and John Kerry lying about the circumstances of some of the injuries he sustained in Vietnam in order to receive a Purple Heart after blasting shrapnel into his own buttocks with a grenade he detonated.)
I’ll confess I now know more about Michelle Obama’s life story than I ever wanted to know, thanks to Gilbert’s well-researched and meticulously documented film. As an old-school investigator myself, I enjoy his style of pounding-the-pavement investigative journalism, as I’ve noted in the past, following release of his terrific examination of the Trayvon Martin hoax. Frumpily dressed in leather jacket over partially tucked dress shirt in old blue jeans, he visits Michelle’s mother’s home to chat with her. He walks the grounds of Michelle’s alma mater, Princeton University, to visit The Third World Center, where Michelle studied sociology, babysat the director’s kid, and wrote a woe-is-me, oppressed black student at oppressive Princeton University undergraduate thesis. He talks to poor blacks whom Michelle got kicked out of the University of Chicago Health System in a patient-dumping scheme.
Gilbert’s movie can be accessed on-demand at SalemNOW and be sure to check out its website and the trailer.
I plan to attend its release at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., at 1pm on July 11.
As conservatives, many of us may relish the prospect of the Republican nominee in 2024 going up against, to our minds, the very unlikeable Michelle Obama. After seeing Gilbert’s movie, I am not so sanguine. Michelle Obama is a slick political operator, notwithstanding missteps she has made in the past. Moreover, she is backed by very intelligent, very cunning political operatives, like Valerie Jarrett. The Democrats will be desperate for a viable contender in 2024, and that certainly will not be the clearly senile Joe Biden, and probably not the imbecilic-from-birth Kamala Harris. Hillary is vinegar. So who’s left? Michelle Obama is surprisingly popular among many Democrats, as Joel Gilbert notes, and she certainly seems to be positioning herself to carry the torch.
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