nobody’s opinions

This is puzzling. I mean, really puzzling.

Michelle Obama, Harvard lawyer, wife of Barack Obama, Harvard lawyer, tells us:

I have to say that my life now is not really that much different from many of yours. I wake up every morning wondering how on earth I am going to pull off that next minor miracle to get through the day. I know that everybody in this room is going through this. That is the dilemma women face today. Every woman that I know, regardless of race, education, income, background, political affiliation, is struggling to keep her head above water.

Does she see her job in this campaign as being the messenger of neurotic despair, in order to provide a much-needed counterpoint to her husband’s helium-filled message of hope and change?

And what are these trials to which this millionaire lawyer is daily subjected?

scheduling babysitters, planning play dates, keeping up with regular doctor’s appointments; this was my week last week, supervising homework, handing out discipline.

Poor baby! But can this be right? The L.A. Times says:

The couple’s combined salaries were more than $430,000 in 2006, according to their tax return. In addition, Barack Obama earned $551,000 in book royalties. The family lives in a $1.6-million home in Chicago.

Despite their Ivy League pedigrees and good salaries, Michelle Obama often says the fact that she and her husband are out of debt is due to sheer luck, because they could not have predicted that his two books would become bestsellers. “It was like, ‘Let’s put all our money on red!’ ” she told a crowd at Ohio State University on Friday. “It wasn’t a financial plan! We were lucky! And it shouldn’t have been based on luck, because we worked hard.”

Now this is hard to fathom. That’s $8,000 a week without the book royalties. And the debt of which she famously and constantly speaks comprises student loans that paid for Barry’s Columbia and her Princeton undergrad degrees, and his-and-hers JDs from Harvard Law! I don’t think Michelle understands what “lucky” means.

This…

“See, Mr. Smith, as near as we can tell, the fifth or sixth time your car went over, it landed on a corner and warped the whole thing enough to make the windshield pop right out. And since you weren’t wearing a seat belt, it looks like you were thrown out through the empty windshield frame, just before the car landed on its roof and smashed the seats down—or up, I guess—flat against the floor. The fact that you fetched up against that pine tree with your back is probably the reason you got those three cracked vertebrae, but if you had hit it face-first… well, let’s just say that I wouldn’t be here at the hospital taking this statement. And by the way, I know you were drunk—I can still smell it on you. But you’ve probably been through enough today, and nobody else got hurt, so I’m not gonna write you for it.”

 …is lucky.

Having books become bestsellers so they bump your income from $400,000 to nearly $1,000,000 is not lucky, unless you agree with Branch Rickey that “Luck is the residue of design.”