No, because 51% of the country believed him. Were you here in 2004?
On a more superficial note, and as a man who seldom notices these things, that’s a gorgeous skirt.
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I understand you want to limit dynamics when it comes to complex situations. So do I. Decisions should be rational.
Also, I apologize for using ‘sexist’ earlier. It was reactionary.
However I do believe your position is narrow and ignores what a reasonable person would agree with.
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Getting 50.7% of the vote (and 30.8% of total eligible voters) doesn’t mean 50.7% of the country believed him about his MBA being important to the presidency.
OK. If your argument is that Michelle Obama’s feminine dress is important because it communicates that they can aspire to being the well-educated woman behind a powerful man, then I’ll let it stand even though I disagree that this is a good thing.
Don’t shift the narrative. There are two conversations happening–her stylish appearance and me taking issue with your casual dismissal.
The interwebs make nuance a bit tenuous, and I bet if we talked face to face we wouldn’t be that far in opinion.
No no no!
My argument is you should not dismiss a persons education. Full stop. Done. Disregard anything else you believe I said. If you think I said something else it is a gross miscommunication.
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The casual dismissal is because there is no causal relationship between her education and her position or what she is known for. And this is linked to why her attire does not signify what the author thinks it might.
I don’t think that a higher degree—especially a professional degree—is an end, but a means to an end or a credential that admits one to that profession. A law degree is little more than a shiny bauble except when being put into practice, and it’s hardly worth aspiring to obtain one when one’s status is derived from one’s spouse.
I’d like to cut in to point out that Michelle didn’t leave her job at Sidley Austin to become First Lady. She hasn’t worked there in nearly 25 years. Her law license has been inactive for over 20 years. She’s worked in various high level non-profit administrative jobs since then, first for the City of Chicago and then the University of Chicago. It’s like her actual career history isn’t important in this conversation…which is rather ironic.
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Wait, what?
She shouldn’t have worked to obtain a law degree in the 1980s because she was going to be the First Lady decades later?
What about people who get a law degree for the training but know that the career path they want is in a different field (politics, say, or other public service)? What about recent graduates who can’t find a job as a lawyer? What about people who marry someone whose job makes them move repeatedly so keeping up with each state or country’s Bar requirements is a lesson in futility?
If you meant something different, please explain.
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I think what they mean is that she may not be doing it intentionally but that it doesn’t really matter. And that’s what my comment that I left earlier about my really liking her style was supposed to allude to. It’s also pretty great that she is a strong, smart, powerful woman who clearly feels very comfortable in her skin – even when dressed “girly”. She still exudes power and importance, even when she’s wearing pretty dresses and heels. The article goes on to great length to explain why this is, but your snark takes great pains to ignore that. It doesn’t really matter if she’s doing it on purpose; it still has the same results. In fact, it would be even better if it wasn’t intentional. That would be progress.
Did you read the article, , or did you just immediately take that one sentence away from the larger context so you could make a snark about fashion having no substance?
Instead of making a really out-there blanket snarky comment, as if you were referring to the larger article as a whole, you could have started with this comment I am not replying t – by quoting the actual sentence you had a problem with, and explained why. Would have saved us a whole lot of trouble.
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But there is!! Their marriage isn’t the result of drawing cards, it is because they are equals that had similar experiences.
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How do you think Hilary Clinton dressed when she was “just” the first lady back in the mid-90s?
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No, I’m saying that Michelle Obama, while traveling as the First Lady and representing the US as the First Lady, is not a great aspirational figure by virtue of her law degree.
Yeah, I don’t think these folks are great role models or whatever. Lots of people go to law school because they have no other plans, and there’s no shortage of law schools who will basically take anyone who can get a student loan. Those who can’t get a job aren’t great aspirational figures, either.
They happened to meet because they were working at the same firm. But do you think that if Michelle had gone to med school or Barack got an MPP that they would not be attracted and marry? I suppose you use different metrics depending on when people met, and how much dating (and other) experience they had when they met?
Marriage may not be the result of drawing cards, but they say “there’s no accounting for taste” and I don’t think that one’s spouse has a hell of a lot to do with one’s qualifications for the job.
More or less like she does today—business-like—which reflect her larger political aspirations and political involvement during Bill’s Presidency.
No. But I still believe your straw man is naive.
Wait, tipper gore and music censoring? Nancy Reagan and drug policy? Dare I say nutrition and Michelle Obama?
How many do you want? Your argument is not based on history or science.
And what I am saying is it shouldn’t be casually dismissed. You have a wide range of arguments, but you never address why this isn’t causal except to say, 'it isn’t.
If you believe that it is shared experiences that make marriage less than a lottery, surely high-school sweethearts who get together when neither party has much experience are more suspect than later marriages formed when both parties have more experience.
Well, you can argue that everything is causal, in a butterfly-effect sort of way. The law deals with this problem through the concept of proximate causation, which requires a fairly short and reasonably foreseeable chain of causality.
There’s a pretty clear and foreseeable chain of causality between going to law school and becoming a lawyer. That chain of foreseeable causality doesn’t exist between going to law school and marrying someone who will be president, let alone that law degree causing your spouse to become president. Does anyone say “Boy, that Barack is lucky Michelle got her JD, otherwise he wouldn’t be President!” I think not.
Look, I see what you are doing here. I have respect you, and your arguments have merit. But my supposition was that your position was jerkish, not illegal. It is perfectly legal to be an ass, and I hold no grudges.
I don’t think you see what I’m doing. I was simply using the legal idea of causation to illuminate causation more generally, because I think it’s a sensible approach and explains why there is a causal link between law school and being a lawyer, and not between law school and being First Spouse. Using butterfly-effect causality, there are causal links between almost everything. I think that reasonable foreseeability is a sensible way to limit causality, and I think it’s essentially what most of us do in everyday life.
Most people don’t actually say butterflies in Turkey cause typhoons in Japan, nor do they say that Michelle going to law school cause Barack to become President. Why? Because that outcome isn’t reasonably foreseeable.
Princeton and Harvard law school.
So while there is a 1/300,000,000 chance for me to be related to the potus, the chance for that education is more like what, one in fifteen thousand? Maybe forty thousand? The group size has shrunk by what, two orders of magnitude?
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