Michelle in Spain

I suppose it was inevitable that the knives eventually would come out for Michelle Obama given the vigorous, nonstop pandering to race-tinged resentment from the usual suspects. But it is still pretty laughable—was Laura Bush ever criticized for extravagance?

Or let us recall Nancy Reagan’s delight in living rich with her BFFs like Betsy Bloomingdale, all constantly celebrated for wearing fine designer clothes and throwing lavish parties. I can personally attest to the Washington press corps’ enthusiastic reception of the Reagan style in the early 1980s, from exotic canapés to tent breakfasts on the Mall, in contrast to the austere Carter period.

That didn’t change, either, when millions were out of work in the first recession Reagan presided over; on the contrary, the Reaganite mystique was all about getting over apologetics and ‘feeling good about America’, which meant consuming whatever you had as conspicuously as possible and not paying taxes that might help those annoyingly whiny lesser people.

But leaders who dare to defend the poor are easily targeted for any signs that they don’t personally embrace poverty. It recalls the notorious Jeremiah O’Leary’s 1973 front-pager in the Washington Star on the coup against Salvador Allende, which started out by chortling over the socialist Chilean president with bourgeois tastes and proceeded to cheer Augusto Pinochet and his worthy assault on Chilean democracy.

The Star and the rest of the American press corps then forgot about official extravagance for the next decade or so—they were too busy applauding Pinochet’s ‘sensible’ neo-liberal economic policies that destroyed Chilean unions and eventually drove the unemployment rate up to 25%. Such is the reigning double standard about who lives in the lap of luxury.