Right leaning Matt Drudge and "The Drudge Report" are at it again. The Washington Post has an article about the First Lady Michelle Obama calling her "current life" in the White House "a very blessed situation, because I have what most families don't have -- tons of support all around, not just my mother, but staff and administration. I have a chief of staff and a personal assistant, and everyone needs that." Isn't that a fact and pretty much what every other first lady has experienced? Deliberately missing from his jab is the true context of her statements. Once again, Matt Drudge and the Drudge Report have shown how biased they are towards the president and his wife. So, I am baffled as to why the Drudge Report sought to feature the fact that Mrs. Obama has a chief of staff, a set of personal assistants, among other things. Isn't there some hypocrisy on the right wing afoot here? The issue I have with this, isn't directed at Michelle Obama, but the entire list of First Ladies who have had all these niceties at their disposal. Exactly why does any First Lady need a chief of staff and a set of personal assistants? I can see one, maybe two people at the most. But I think the bigger question is why the Drudge Report focused on a snippet of her comments as their caption? They are up to the usual right wing
shenanigans.
Michelle Obama made these comments during a "Corporate Voices for Working Families" conference at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. You see, woefully lost in Matt Drudge's caption is the fact that Mrs. Obama focused on the issues of community service and military families, which she has said as first lady she wants to focus on the struggles of working families.
True to form, during her 10-minute speech, Mrs. Obama advocated for sick leave for parents, flexible work hours for employees and on-site child care, which she said "is something that keeps many of us up at night....You're just wondering where are we going to put our children where we feel like that they're being safe, that they're safe and being loved. That will relieve many of the stresses that parents feel on the job throughout the day." She knows exactly what it is like trying to juggle a career with raising a family and being a wife. She is painfully aware of the tightrope many women, including myself, walk on a daily basis.
She also told the story of her own childhood, growing up in Chicago with a father who worked as a city employee at a time when he could make enough money to allow her mother to stay home with the children.
"When I look back on my childhood and the life that my parents provided, working-class folks with not a lot of money, my father was a blue-collar city worker who worked a shift job," she said. "But because he earned enough as a shift worker without a college degree, he could still support a family of four on that salary. And because he could, with that salary, support us -- we rented a home, we didn't live lavishly -- my mother was able to stay at home. She could afford to make the choice not to go to work while we were growing up. That was how families balanced back then." Source: Washington Post
So, it seems pretty shallow that all Matt Drudge could find to focus on is the issue that she has a chief of staff and a set of personal assistants. The bigger picture is that she is the closest thing we will get to a middle class upbringing in the White House. If memory serves me correctly, didn't former First Lady Laura Bush have the same things, but wait, exactly what was her platform and how similar is her story to that of normal working-class people? I suspect you can't come up with one example. With that said, I rest my case.
