The Manhattan Institute’s City Journal has an informative and useful morning newsletter. Readers can sign up for it here. On a personal note, City Journal has proved a welcome home for my own work. I am grateful to managing editor Paul Beston for making it so.
In this morning’s newsletter City Journal rolls out a new feature: Friday Face Palm (query whether “face palm” should be spelled as one word). Michelle Obama is the debut winner, so to speak. Kirsten Fleming also takes up the latest on Mrs. Obama in her New York Post column this morning. To borrow a line from John Lennon, Mrs. Obama “has a chip on her shoulder that’s bigger than [her] feet.” The City Journal editors write (links omitted):
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Former First Lady Michelle Obama has been notably absent from some high-profile events this year, including Jimmy Carter’s funeral and President Trump’s second inauguration. Her decision to skip the ceremonies sparked rumors that she was planning to divorce her husband, former president Barack Obama, who attended both events.
This week, during an episode of her podcast, “IMO With Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson,” she (sort of) explained why she wasn’t at Trump’s inauguration.
She acknowledged the speculation about trouble in her marriage but didn’t point to that as the reason. Nor did she cite a scheduling conflict.
“It started with not having anything to wear,” she said.
Well, we’ve all been there, but surely she could have thrown something together and shown up to support the next administration?
She continued, “So I was like, if I’m not going to do this thing, I got to tell my team, I don’t even want to have a dress ready, right? Because it’s so easy to just say, ‘let me do the right thing.’”
Turns out she just didn’t want to go. “It took everything in my power to not do the thing that was perceived as right, but do the thing that was right for me. That was a hard thing for me to do.”
We’re not sure what’s worse: the self-involvement or the pride taken in skipping ceremonies generally seen as customary for former First Ladies.
Had she gone ahead and attended these events, she explained, she would have been “keeping that crazy bar that our mothers and grandmothers set for us.”
You know, that one about doing the right thing.
