Michelle O's "working class" narrative wears thin

  Jodi Kantor, author of the highly discussed new book The Obamas, was interviewed on WJR's Frank Beckmann show this morning.

  Kantor has covered the Obamas for 5 years. While Frank (being Frank) tried to ask her about the nitty gritty of working with the Obamas, Kantor was eager to soft pitch the Obamas and their difficulty adjusting to the lack of privacy in the White House. 
  All in all, it sounded like Kantor was trying to get back into the good graces of the White House.
  Some highlights from the interview:

• Michelle O is a worrier; she genuinely can't understand why people would stereotype her as an angry Black woman (regardless her embargoed college thesis). 
• The first year they moved into the White House, Sasha and Malia were allowed to go trick or treating, escorted by friends to a safe neighborhood (presumably not DC itself). This turned out to be a tragic situation for the girls because, despite their wearing masks, people started figuring out who they were, calling, texting friends, gathering around them. Tragic. 
• Kantor said Michelle O was really, really worried about what her children had to give up, how they have to live, being trapped like rats in the White House. Well, she didn't say rats. Frank bawhawed this, saying you don't think that's offset by being able to meet the Pope (which was another incident Kantor breathlessly related, presumably because it revealed Michelle's commitment to religion) and fly around on Air Force One? According to Kantor, apparently not. Michelle suffers.
• Kantor gushed that Michelle O had given up so much by becoming FLOTUS that people should be sympathetic to how much she has lost because they just can't imagine how public it is being president & FLOTUS. Again Frank bawhawed this, saying, you don't think flying on a private jet, taking 4 million dollar vacations, meeting famous people helps offset the loss? Kantor quickly said, oh, well, that HELPS but NO ONE can imagine how tough it is for Michelle, trapped like a rat in the White House. Well, she didn't say rat.
• Kantor spoke about Michelle's upbringing and how humble it was; this, she explained, is why we should be sympathetic to FLOTUS. She is in wonderment and amazement that she is where she is. It's just tragic. The whole "Marie Antoinette" accusation hurts her deeply because people just don't know what she's come through in her life. She's just a "working class" girl, after all, who's risen to this incredible fairy tale in life, even though she has to suffer with people taking cell phone pictures of her everywhere she goes.

  In fact, the whole "working class girl" is part of the traditional MIchelle Obama "story," as she tells it, including a one room tenement childhood home.
 From a pre-presidential article in 2008 in the Daily Mail, we learn some interesting details about Michelle Obama's life, beginning with her childhood and including a picture of her early home, described here in the Chicago professorial neighborhood:

Instead of the one-room tenement that now appears in most accounts of her upbringing, we found a well-kept neighbourhood of red-brick Arts and Craft-style houses which have long been home to respectable black families.

  The folklore includes the fact that her father worked for a "waste management" company for a while, which is true. But there's more:

Indeed, according to family friends, Michelle's father was a volunteer organiser for the city's Democratic Party, a by-word for machine politics in America, and his loyalty was rewarded with a well-paid engineering job at Chicago's water plant. Even before overtime, he earned $42,686 - 25 per cent more than High School teachers at the time.

  In fact, Michelle had a stay-at-home mom, was sent to a magnet school for the gifted, and enjoyed a privileged education. Because of her competitiveness, her brother has said of her, "My sister is a poor sport. She didn't like to lose."

  And the class warfare rhetoric from the Obamas is no new message.

  Michelle didn't appreciate having to take out loans to attend Princeton; thus began the narrative that she felt different from other Princeton students, none of whom surely had to take out loans to finance their educations, and thus began the narrative of the angry Black woman stereotype which surfaced in her thesis and which she recently protested as untrue of herself. Seeing the thesis might reveal something but:

The document, now locked away by the university until after the election in November, betrays an angry, campaigning brand of politics which in no way fits with the mild-mannered advocate of common sense now winning hearts and minds from coast to coast

  In light of the current SOPA, DHS internet ID tracking, Protect IP threat to the internet, all in the name of copyright protection, another interesting item is revealed in the 2008 pre-POTUS Daily Mail article. Michelle Obama did not decide to do volunteer work when she graduated, unlike what she urges students now:

It was little surprise to those who knew her at the time that it was commerce not campaigning that claimed her when she graduated with a law degree from Harvard, taking a post with Sidley Austin, an eminent Chicago law firm. Her specialist area was not human rights or family law, but the lucrative detail of copyright and trademark cases.

  So not only did FLOTUS work to move indigent inner city patients from a prominent Chicago hospital to "inner city" hospitals, she worked to support copyright claims like that of Hollywood which is currently trying to shut down free speech, jail piraters, and enact more legislation to punish those who may even have some remote connection to pirating websites or however the DOJ decides to define SOPA.
  Isn't it a bit odd that this legislation is being pushed now, supported by both Republican and Democrat legislators? Michelle claims to have nothing to do with current policy, yet there it is.
  The Beckmann/Kantorinterview was hard work on the part of Kantor to defend the Obamas. The whole time it was difficult to defeat this thought. 
  Gee. 
  No other common people have ever been elected to the White House.
  Boyhood homes of previous PRESIDENTS:

George W. Bush

William Jefferson Clinton

Ronald Reagan