Michelle Obama, adding jobs one bauble at a time

posted at 11:02 am on September 23, 2011 by Howard Portnoy
[ Double Standards ]   

[Programming note: I will be a guest tonight on The Alana Burke Show (99.3 FM and 1400 AM KQMS News Talk radio, ) in the segment beginning at 6:10 P.S.T (9:10 E.T.). I will be sharing my reactions to last night's debate and discussing the recent opening of the Ground Zero mosque.] 

If the president is earnest about creating jobs (and Charles Krauthammer makes a powerfully persuasive argument in today’s Washington Post that he is not), he could learn a thing or two from his missus.

In 2009, a starving 26-year-old fashion designer by the name of Jason Wu was catapulted to instant fame and wealth when the First Lady auditioned an off-the-shoulder affair at her husband’s inauguration that Wu had dreamed up. She engineered another rags-to-riches story in May for costumier-turned-fashion designer Barbara Tfank by wearing one of Tfank’s creations during a visit at Buckingham Palace with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.

Just this week Mrs. Obama waved her magic wand again. The Mail UK reports that the First Lady made a grand entrance at the Democratic Party dinner in New York decked out in $42,150 worth of diamond-encrusted bracelets designed by soon-to-be-formerly-obscure Texas jeweler Katie Decker.

This is how jobs are created, a fashion at a time. The details—the type and amount of fabric or the number and nature of precious stones used—are inconsequential. The important thing is that the president’s wife is advancing the careers of hard-working Americans and simultaneously developing a market for their wares, at least for that select subset of consumers who can afford them. That would be the idle rich, much-maligned by her husband.

In fact, the Obamas are themselves members of that fraternity, albeit just barely. Their estimated net worth, at $5.5 million, most of it from book royalties, makes them one of the least rich couples to take up residence in the White House.

That hasn’t prevented the First Lady from dressing up like a member of the super-rich and jetting off (in Air Force One) to sport her fancy duds at vacation destinations that most Americans will experience, if ever, only in pictures. And the fact that she is doing this at a time when most families are struggling mightily to put bread on the table—a condition that 53% of Americans now blame her husband for—bothers her not in the slightest.

Then again, perhaps Michelle Obama is wise enough to understand that the people whose careers she builds, her husband will break down soon enough, given his bleed-the-rich, redistributionist druthers.

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