Michelle obama

How the Obamas marginalized Jesse Jackson

During a visit to Zimbabwe in 1989, Jesse Jackson was walking down the dirt trail leading to Victoria Falls when a group of three African men hunkered in the shade of a scrubby tree stood up to point at him. One asked, “Is this… is this the great Reverend Jesse Jackson?” His fame was global. He popped up in the most unlikely places: negotiating the release of hostages in Lebanon, lobbying for earthquake relief in Armenia, criticizing factory conditions in Japan. A photo spread of his career would show him face-to-face with Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milošević. He hosted Saturday Night Live and appeared on Sesame Street, and he had a

Call her Obama

Michelle Obama is the latest guest on the Call Her Daddy podcast – the raunchy girlfest “Howard Stern for women” – and the conversation is about as relatable as you might imagine. Obama and host Alex Cooper spend a couple of minutes up top talking about skiing. The former first lady is particularly fond of Aspen. “There are a bunch of mothers and daughters. We’ve all raised our kids together, and we take the long weekend, go to Aspen and ski,” joined, she says, by a man named Vance, her personal instructor and “ski husband”. Michelle Obama, “one of the most influential and powerful women in the world” according to

Obama

Michelle Obama’s new book about style lacks substance

First lady is a strange role. Even when your husband is the first black president, and you’re a Princeton and Harvard-educated former corporate lawyer, America still projects its most regressive ideas about gender onto you. So I understand that Michelle Obama, like Hillary Clinton before her (skipping Laura Bush, a more classical first lady, along with, more recently, Jill Biden and Melania Trump), might have felt constrained, faced with expectations she could never satisfy. I don’t doubt that being black added enormously to that burden. Yet there is nothing more irritating than the person of Michelle Obama complaining. And she is always complaining. There is always sexism or racism or

michelle obama