T
he one great question of the presidential campaign is this: Whatever got into the head of a grossly inexperienced junior Senator with no foreign policy or legislative leadership credibility that allowed him to think for a moment that he could run for president, and that America should plead temporary insanity and elect him? In a word:
If there’s a great woman behind every great man, there’s a self-centered, over-ambitious woman behind every self-centered, over-ambitious man. And that would be particularly apt here, we learn from a preview of a new Michelle Obama bio by Liza Mundy reviewed by WaPo, excerpted by Byron York at NRO:
At Sidley [& Austin, a top Chicago law firm], Michelle didn’t follow the traditional route for newly minted associates by doing general litigation or antitrust work. Instead, she was recruited by the looser, more fun-loving lawyers in the marketing law group, also known as intellectual property or entertainment law. These attorneys represented companies that sold goods to the public: advertising agencies, automakers, beer manufacturers…
The group went out of its way to give Michelle work suited to her interests. When an opportunity came in to handle the budding public television career of Barney, the purple dinosaur poised to become a phenomenon among American children, Goldstein says he and others felt it had Michelle’s name written all over it.
But was this exceptional assignment sufficient to salve her raging ego ambition? Any guesses?
But Michelle could also frustrate her supervisors. Quincy White, the partner who helped recruit Michelle and who headed the marketing group, remembers finding her a challenge to manage. White, who is now retired from the firm, says he gave her the most interesting work he could find, in part because he wanted to see her advance, but also because she seemed perennially dissatisfied.
She was, White recalls, “quite possibly the most ambitious associate that I’ve ever seen.” She wanted significant responsibility right away and was not afraid to object if she wasn’t getting what she felt she deserved, he says.
Do you get the sense that the honorable Mr. White is parsing his words a bit when he uses “ambitious” to describe Michelle? He went on to explain that ever effort to give Michelle the most interesting work they had for associates came to naught:
Too monotonous for Michelle, who, White says, complained that the work he gave her was unsatisfactory. He says he gave her the Coors beer ads, which he considered one of the more glamorous assignments they had. Even then, he says, “she at one point went over my head and complained [to human resources] that I wasn’t giving her enough interesting stuff, and the person came down to my office and said, ‘Basically she’s complaining that she’s being treated like she’s a second-year associate,’ and we agreed that she was a second-year associate. I had eight or nine other associates, and I couldn’t start treating one of them a lot better.”
Somewhere along the line, Michelle Obama got the idea into her head that the world owed her more than it owed her peers. No matter how much the folks at Sibley tried to appease the princess, she wanted more, at the expense of others who, she must have realized, would be stuck with more monotonous work if she got all the best associate assignments.
And then she met Barack Obama, and as the Bible says, they became one flesh.
hat-tip: Jim
