Meghan, I agree that the issue isn't really one of reverse-discrimination, even if think Hanna is right that Sotomayor's views on affirmative action may sound dated to some contemporary ears. Rather, the issue, I think, is similar to one that arose during last year's Democratic presidential primary. Then the election was often portrayed in terms of identity politics, much as Sotomayor's nomination is now. It was black (Obama) v. woman (Hillary), with criticisms of either dismissed as so much racism or sexism. But to me, the far more distinguishing characteristic of both candidates, and of Sotomayor, has less to do with their sex or skin color than with their respective ages. Indeed, it's nearly impossible to understand how race or gender played out in their lives until you know when they were born.

Obama, crucially, is 14 years younger than Hillary. As a result, he wasn't part of the civil rights movement. He was a beneficiary of the civil rights movement—and there's a big difference. For all the genuine obstacles he overcame, he enjoyed a kind of ease and place in the world that for many black men (or women of any color) would have been unfathomable even 15 years earlier. By the time he reached adulthood, for example, it wasn't unusual for an accomplished man to marry a graduate of Princeton (which didn’t admit women until 1969). This, in turn, surely informed his and Michelle's relationship and marriage going forward.

By contrast, Hillary wasn’t the beneficiary of the women's rights movement. Being so much older, she was the women’s rights movement—and as a result, her life and career are necessarily messier and full of more contradictions than for younger women, for whom she helped blaze a trail. Much of what people criticized her for during the election—her stridency, her career and romantic choices, her voice and ever-changing hairstyles, even her privilege—always struck me as largely a function simply of her having come first.

Sotomayor is almost exactly seven years older than Obama and seven years younger than Hillary—a lifetime, in many ways, in both directions. She could attend Princeton (as Hillary could not), but was in only the fourth class to admit women—a far cry, presumably, from Michelle’s experience nearly a decade later, when women and minorities were no longer such a novelty. In sum, part of the diversity Sotomayor will bring to the court, if confirmed, is not merely her sex or ethnicity, but how both have interacted with the particular age in which she grew up—which is as different from mine as it is from Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s and Sandra Day O’Connor’s. To that older generation of women, Sotomayor's outspokenness that Dahlia and Emily have alluded to is probably as unfamiliar as it is to women in their 20s. In the confirmation process, it will be interesting to learn how Sotomayor's perspective has adjusted, over the years, as the world has changed around her. But in asking that her present temper her past (rather than the other way around), I hope we won't deny, as I sometimes felt we did with Hillary, the age-related uniqueness of her story.

Tags: ageism, Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, Obama, Princeton, racism, sexism, Sonia Sotomayor

I dunno, Dahlia, why wouldn't American women want Michelle Obama's life? Sure, it's more superego than ego at the moment, and yes she has subordinated her professional ambitions to her husband's. But she has plenty of power, she gets to talk policy as well as fluff, and she can dine out on these White House moments for all the rest of her life. I mean, how much do you really chafe at being in the helpmeet role when your husband is the president, and you helped make him (see soaring Michelle approval ratings)? It's like complaining about being co-pilot on the spaceship to Mars. This is a once-in-a-lifetime team journey if ever there was one.

And when the Obamas are sprung from the cage of the White House—because over the next four years or eight, it will surely come to feel like the bars are tightening around both of them—Michelle Obama seems bound to chart her own professional course again. She'll have another chance to model for the rest of us, by showing us how to move purposefully from one phase of life to the next and make different choices, with different emphases on self v. family, at different times. (In contrast to my own motto: Try to do too much. None of it well.) What I admire about Michelle's marriage, Jess, is that I really think her husband will want her to take the lead next, and will be ready to move to a new city for her as she has moved to D.C. for him. The Clintons come to mind here, but they're like the too-large-for-life version of what I'm thinking of: The wife runs for president to satisfy her own ambition; the former president husband joins her campaign—and sabotages her. The post White House Obamas promise to be more low-key. More chill. No movie stars, but I'll take that fantasy.

Photograph of Michelle and Barack Obama by Stephane De Sakutin/AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: Amanda Fortini; Barack Obama; Michelle Obama; Obama marriage, Michelle Obama

Has J. Crew pushed the boundaries of their symbiotic Obama relationship a little too far? Politico posted an item disclosing a press release the retailer sent to reporters yesterday, advertising the fact that Sasha and Malia Obama have been spotted out and about in J. Crew wares. Specifically, if you must know—and they really, really want you to know!—the Silk Taffeta Trench ($298), black satin ballet flats with contrast trim ($98), girls’ crushed twill trench ($169.99), and girls’ minna printed ballet flats in classic navy ($108). Michelle’s gotten much traction from her public predilection for affordable clothes, but $298 for a growing child’s coat ain’t cheap. This might be great P.R. for J. Crew, but not so much for the Obamas. The larger issue, though, is the Obama girls’ privacy. Earlier this year, Michelle’s office delivered a strong statement against planned Beanie Babies dolls modeled after her daughters, forcing the manufacturers to pull the line ("We believe it is inappropriate to use young, private citizens for marketing purposes” was the exact spokesperson-ese). And a J. Crew rep confirmed to Politico that they hadn’t run this release by the White House. Is this a lesser offense than Beanie Baby-gate, to which Michelle can turn a love-blind eye? Or does this gauche crowing mean that she should start seeing what Banana Republic has to offer?

Photograph of Sasha and Malia Obama in J. Crew coats at their father's inauguration by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

Tags: Beanie Babies, fashion, J.Crew, Michelle Obama, Politico, retail, Sasha and Malia

It’s been interesting of late to read so many reminiscences of Princeton, a topic we may hear more about today as the Sonia Sotomayor confirmation hearings go forward. I graduated from there in 1982, into what still holds the record for being the worst job market since the Great Depression. A year ahead of Walter Kirn, I read with fascination the 2005 piece in the Atlantic that led to his current book about the place, Lost in the Meritocracy. Having grown up on the outskirts of Appalachia, I empathized with Walter's alienation but was struck by how much more dramatic his recollections are than mine, which tend to be garden-variety memories of, say, having my accent made fun of. I also remember the mystery of seeing a racing shell stationed outside the gym during our first week, for recruiting purposes; I had never heard of crew. Or any of the northeastern prep schools. Once we all started job-hunting, I had a great deal of trouble understanding what a "consultant" was, and still do, sort of.

Sometimes it seems as though everybody who was there in the 1980s felt out of place. Michelle Obama entered in 1981 and wrote, famously, that Princeton was where realized she was black. Her memories have been echoed by Sotomayor, who recalls that matriculating on that suburban campus in the 1970s was like landing in a foreign country. Margaret's more recent trials were I think of a different order: Gen Y has, as Ann points out, been required to amass so many achievements—real achievements, not just trophies, I might add—and has faced such stark admissions odds that I think the place must be a lot more of a pressure cooker than it was back when a lot of us were feeling put upon by the ruling classes, but also, in some of our cases, not always working.

But a couple points need to be made. I am a fan of Walter’s writing but I think he leaves the impression that Princeton was more of an aptocracy in the 1980s than it was. He may well have been admitted thanks to high grades and test scores, but it may also have mattered that he was a legacy—his dad went to Princeton—which could sometimes give you a leg up when it came to admissions. So he may not have been so different from Obama or Sotomayor, both of whom were admitted during a push for diversity. Back in the 1980s, Princeton’s president William Bowen, along with Harvard’s Derek Bok, was working to fashion an approach to affirmative action that did not involve quotas; they pioneered the idea of “race-sensitive admissions," a holistic policy whereby race could be one admissions criterion, along with a host of others including legacy status or athletic achievement or academics or even, I think, where you came from. I think it was a valid and beneficial way to increase diversity on campus, but it did create a backlash that Obama and Sotomayor clearly felt. The upshot of a holistic policy is that nobody quite knew why he or she had been admitted, and that created anxiety.

But I think it's also important to remember that most graduates have profited from their degrees. Michelle Obama tends to dwell on times when she felt underestimated and discouraged by, for example, some school advisers, and no doubt this happened, maybe appallingly often. But she also found help and encouragement, sometimes in unexpected places. When I was reporting a biography of her last year, I encountered Steve Carlson, a white conservative Princetonian who believes in the old-boy network and delights in using it to help people who aren't old boys. When Michelle was an undergrad, she found his name in a notebook in the career center and wrote him at his Chicago law firm, Sidley Austin, asking if they had any openings over the summer. He wrote her back saying that they didn't hire college students for the summer, but compiled a list of interesting workplaces that might. He saved her contact information and a few years later wrote her at her home address, asking if she'd decided to go to law school and offering to take her to lunch. She later cited his kindness as one reason she took a job at Sidley, where in 1989 she was assigned to mentor a summer associate named Barack Obama.

So when all is said and done, Princeton benefited our first lady in ways she could never have predicted, and the same doubtless is true of Sotomayor, maybe even Walter Kirn. For my part, I know that when I graduated into that horrible job market of 1982, the person who helped me get a job was a Princeton grad—actually, two, strangers both, whom I contacted out of the same notebook Michelle used. As Hanna once pointed out to me, just because an experience was unpleasant or difficult doesn't mean it was a mistake to have undertaken it.

Photograph of a rower in Princeton by Al Bello/Allsport/Getty Images.

Tags: aptocracy, Michelle Obama, Princeton, Sonia Sotomayor, Walter Kirn

A week and some change after President Barack Obama's widely praised speech to Congress on health care reform, Michelle Obama is making it a double feature. By overtly bringing the first lady into the contentious policy debate, the White House is upping the ante—but with a smart bet. The FLOTUS, as a former administrator at the University of Chicago hospitals, knows her way around the U.S. health care delivery system just as well her Democratic predecessor, Hillary Clinton. The strategy, as told to Politico's Nia Hederson, is to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee:

She will do things that fit in with what she cares about, like health care reform and the implications it has for family and kids,” said Camille Johnston, Obama’s director of communications. “She will spend her time focusing on where policy and people intersect.”

That's a smart play. After a hard-fought battle to reclaim her image as "Mom-in-Chief," Michelle's everywoman caché may well be her strongest asset in winning over the mildly engaged, gently Republican "soccer moms," whose tacit support could speed the health care debate to its conclusion.

And so Michelle kicked off this autumn drive of advocacy (she'll also showcase her negotiating skills at the G20 conference next week and the International Olympic Committee meeting in October) with an address to some 140 women of all ages at the Executive Office Building this morning. Her remarks, while focused on the intricacies of reform—"a marketplace with a variety of options that will let you compare prices and benefits"—still went heavy on the Lifetime theatrics:

Eight in 10 women, mothers, report that they're the ones responsible for choosing their children's doctor, for getting them to their checkups, for managing that follow-up care. Women are the ones to do it. Mothers are the ones that do it. And many women find themselves doing the same thing for their spouses. (Laughter.) And more than 10 percent of women in this country are currently caring for a sick or elderly relative. It's often a parent, but it could a grandparent, or a mother -- or a relative of some sort -- but it's often a parent. So they're making critical health care decisions for those family members as well. In other words, being part of the sandwich generation, is what we are now finding, raising kids while caring for a sick or elderly parent, that's not just a work/family balance issue anymore. It's not just an economic issue anymore. More and more it is a health care issue. It's something that I have thought a great deal about as a mother.

In the rest of her speech, Obama dropped "mother" seven times, "family" 15 times, and "women" 35 times.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. Women are getting slammed with not just decisionmaking but disparities in the provision of health care in America. Obama even referenced the subject of my post earlier this week on female victims of domestic violence being denied coverage for the "preexisting condition" of having been beaten up. And she had plenty of other smart examples which, though targeted at women, offered a case for health insurance reform based more on economic and social equity than on touchy-feeliness (though, my goodness, there was a lot of that):

[A] recent study showed that 25-year-old women are charged up to 45 percent more for insurance than 25-year-old men for the exact same coverage. And as the age goes up, you get to 40, that disparity increases to 48 percent -- 48 percent difference for women for the exact same coverage in this country. ...

Just think about it. Many women are being charged more in health care coverage, but as we all know, women are earning less. We all know that women earn 78 cents on the dollar to every men -- to a man. So it's not exactly surprising when we hear statistics that more than half of women report putting off needed medical care simply because they can't afford it. ...

I think it's clear that health insurance reform and what it means for our families is very much a women's issue. It is very much a women's issue.

And if we want to achieve true equality for women, if that is our goal; if we want to ensure that women have opportunities that they deserve, if that is our goal; if we want women to be able to care for their families and pursue things that they could never imagine, then we have to reform the system. We have to reform the system. The status quo is unacceptable. It is holding women and families back, and we know it.

This hybrid argumentation is really novel, and was quite effective for the crowd in attendance. According to the East Wing, the first lady plans to do much more of this gentle, reasoned nudging as the days creep closer to Oct. 15—the be-all, end-all deadline for passing a health care bill out of Congress.

Tags: health reform, Michelle Obama, Michelle Obama and policy, politics, women's health, women's health reform

Just one small response to Hanna's excellent observations in today’s DoubleX discussion of an alternate universe in which Hillary had become President: I can't resist disagreeing with her that the Obama marriage is post-feminist. I don't think any marriage where one spouse is gone out of the house to the extent that he was, and one spouse is left to raise the small children and hold down the fort, and, oh yes, make the money necessary for the mortgage payment, can be described as post-feminist. At least not in the ideal sense. It may be a post-feminist marriage in the sense that it's what a lot of women in her generation have struggled with—albeit an extreme version—but it's not post-feminist in the sense that it's the kind of set-up one would aspire to. Michelle Obama talked about that all the time on the campaign trail—how she was always the one who had to stay at home and wait for the plumber when the toilet overflowed. She would joke about it, but there was a knowing bite to her words. There were several interviews in which she would say something like, "Barack has been home with free time for 10 days out out of the past year." I think their marriage is less post-feminist than a lot of marriages I've witnessed in which the man really is able (or compelled) to help more at home and cover child care and home chores during his wife's business trips, which is something that Barack Obama to my knowledge never had to do. What if Michelle Obama had, herself, had a professional calling as strong as her husband's—would he have dialed back his career to enable hers? Foregone some fundraisers?

There are actually some interesting parallels—like Hillary Clinton, she for a number of years was obliged to work in part to bankroll her husband's political career.

And just because she, like Hillary, will get to have her own high-profile career after he has had his, doesn't make it, to my mind, post-feminist.

Judging from the New York Times Magazine piece and other sources, they have a strong, affectionate, joking, highly functional marriage that has survived very well the tensions inherent in marriages of high achievers in this generation. Barack Obama is described by his friends as being very open in his praise of her, and he is obviously good about bringing flowers and making restaurant reservations, but part of that, it always seemed to me, is to make up for what he has asked of her. He has asked a lot of her, as many male politicians do ask of their spouses, and to his credit, he knows it. But I still wouldn't describe an arrangement like theirs as post-feminist. I wonder if any political marriage can be, because the demands are just so great and the need to be away from home is relentless. But maybe I have a different definition of post-feminist? Maybe Hanna is thinking kind of a post-feminist reality, and I am thinking post-feminist ideal?

You could even argue, at least by the terms that I seem to have set, that among high-profile political couples it is the Palins who have one of the more post-feminist marriages, at least if you measure this by shared duties, dual careers, and the image of the husband jiggling the baby while the wife is at the podium.

Tags: marriage, Michelle Obama, post feminism, Sarah Palin

Just in time to commemorate the first anniversary of the Obama victory comes Mrs. O: The Face of Fashion Democracy, a commemorative scrapbook by Mary Tomer, founder of the popular blog mrs-o.org.

Before I cracked open the book—a heavy white rectangle emblazoned with an illustration of a smiling Mrs. Obama dressed in one of her best colors, Tyrian purple—I hesitated. I get worked up about the Mrs. O. fashion discourse. I don’t mean to pull up a college seminar table here, but you have to confess that the general refusal to criticize her outfits, or anything about her style or physique or bearing, is mystifying. Some of her outfits are terrible.

I held the book up and decided as an ideological preview to flip to the election night Hell Dress. This is a neat diagnostic trick. Does Tomer grapple with the ungainly sheath? On the contrary. She writes:

The world didn’t realize it then, but Mrs. Obama had made a major statement about her future fashion choices: she was ready to take chances with fashion-forward designers; she was ready to mix up her style; and she was dressing, ultimately, to please herself. In that regard, the evening was not just a victory celebration, but a declaration of fashion independence.

Mrs. O: The Face of Fashion Democracy is 130-page fashion hagiography.

But there is something in Tomer’s editorial approach that reveals why this must be the case. As she traces the ascent of Michelle Robinson from Chicago’s South Side to FLOTUS, the political milestones and accompanying dresses are peppered with Q&As with designers and jewelers. These interviews are miniature success stories on their own. Many of them are immigrants or non-WASPs, self-starters who made it in highly competitive fashion worlds. The stories of hardship, dedication, success sing in a potent chorus as we progress from the first event of the primary campaign (orange Maria Pinto dress) to the book’s closing on the April 5, 2009 visit to Prague, the final day of the Obama’s European visit (black Michael Kors pencil skirt paired with a Moschino big bow blouse and an Alaïa belt). Our fierce admiration of Mrs. O.—and our reluctance to openly criticize her frocks, even when they merit it—matches the extent of our desire to believe in the American Dream at a time when it is harder and harder to do so.

Tags: mary tomer, Michelle Obama, mrs-o.org

I've rolled it over and over in my head, and I cannot avoid the conclusion that this New York Times article on White House social secretary Desirée Rogers is irresponsible at best and inexcusable pandering at worst. While I think that the whole party-crashers story is being blown way out of proportion, I'll accept that there's an argument for the obsessive coverage of it and for looking into Rogers' potential liability for what happened. But I fail to see what her larger-than-life personality, strong self-esteem, and love of fashion has to do with this story. When taken in along with the shaming of Rogers for falling down on the job, this kind of coverage stinks of smacking down a black woman for the crime of being "uppity."

Conservative pundits have a long tradition of looking for scalps to collect in Democratic administrations, and they far prefer to take the scalps of nonwhite, nonmale, or nonstraight folks above all others. Taking out a black female administration employee would be exactly the sort of thing that the pundits could use to drum up white male crowing in their base, even if she's just a social secretary. In fact, one could argue that the scalp of a social secretary who works so closely with the First Lady might even be a bigger prize, as it would function as a symbolic strike at Michelle Obama, an object of fear and loathing for many on the right.

The media should not pander to racist, sexist right-wingers like this. If they must hammer this party-crashers story endlessly, they could at least do it without indulging narratives about how black women who live the high life are stepping out of their station. But of course, responsible coverage of this story would be missing the point for those beating this story to death. Even Howard Kurtz had to admit that the story reigns in the news because of the "gossipy aspects." Unfortunately, if you start to cover news stories as if they were tabloid stories, then you will slip into indulging in all the racist, sexist pandering that we're so used to seeing in the supermarket stands. Burying this story in the fashion pages of the Times doesn't excuse the general slant of the story; it's still a swipe at a black woman for behaving in a way we indulge when it's wealthy white women.

Tags: Desiree Rogers, White House party crashers

Hanna, though you mentioned that Rassmussen poll last week that said Michelle Obama's favorability rating was down, according to Robin Givhan in the Washington Post, Obama's "approval" rating is up. It's also not entirely clear that Obama's favorability is down, either: This Marist poll says Michelle is as well-liked as ever. Favorability is about how much Americans like her, while the approval rating measures whether people think Obama is doing a good job as first lady. I don't know how Americans have really formed opinions on Michelle either way, because there hasn't been much coverage of her in recent months.

Givhan says Obama hasn't received much press because she isn't advocating for a single cause, the way Laura Bush advocated for literacy or Lady Bird Johnson supported environmentalism. Even so, Givhan observes that Michelle's approval rating is up because she's been behaving the way Americans think a first lady should behave: sticking to her scripts, speaking formally behind podiums and observing the customary rituals. Hanna, you said in your last post that if people approve of a first lady, it means they don't take her seriously. I disagree. Americans seem to take the office of First Lady very seriously, and they don't like it when a first lady shows too much spunk or deviates from their fixed notions of appropriateness—at Jezebel, Latoya Peterson brings up this summer's "shorts-gate" as an example of the upset that Michelle Obama caused when people believe she is not observing the proper decorum.

All of this brings me to Michelle Obama's appearance on the Food Network show Iron Chef America on Sunday night. She was advocating for one of her several causes by showing off the White House garden. The chefs participating in the competition all had to use food from the garden in the meals they cooked, and one of the challengers was the head White House executive chef Cristeta Comerford. Obama was somewhat wooden and heavily scripted. Her considerable charm was not on display. She was wearing a brightly-colored version of the '50s "New Look": a dress with a very full skirt and a prim cardigan. She looked polished, formal, and thoroughly unobjectionable. Appearances like these will help her approval rating continue to rise. After all, food is nonpartisan.

Tags: approval ratings, cristeta comerford, iron chef america, Michelle Obama, Robin Givhan

As I noted a week ago, the Washington Post's Robin Givhan has criticized Michelle Obama for not focusing on a single cause. On the one-year anniversary of Michelle's move to the White House, she has finally chosen her pet issue: childhood obesity. This news comes at the same time as a CDC report that says childhood obesity has plateaued. 17 percent of children are obese—that's about the same as it has been for the past five years. However, the number of extremely obese children is on the rise, and Michelle seeks to reduce these rates through changes to the school lunch program and continuing to maintain the White House vegetable garden. Considering all of our discussion about schools and gardening this week, I wonder what Caitlin Flanagan thinks about Michelle's decision. I'm also wondering what everyone else thinks: Can Michelle actually help reduce childhood obesity through these sorts of initiatives?

Photograph of Michelle Obama by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

Tags: childhood obesity, gardens, Michelle Obama, Robin Givhan