‘And then Michelle — she just took over’

Mom called the other day. Born before the start of the Great Depression, raised in a converted one-room Ohio schoolhouse that didn't even have indoor plumbing when they were kids, Mom is still going strong. She was in the process of packing to visit Scotland, where my niece is set to graduate from St. Andrews later this spring. And complaining about how they expect her to squeeze all her stuff into that small a bag.

"Have you been watching the president's trip on TV?" Mom asked.

"No, Mom. I read the wire service reports."

"I think people of mixed race all over the world must be so proud when they see him standing there, in that line of 20 people or 30 people that used to be just white men with their blue eyes and blonde hair. But then he smiles that dazzling smile, and you forget all about everything else."

I'm not sure how many leaders of Brazil, Turkey and Japan have been blonde, but I think I get it. Mom really does talk that way. I can remember, clear as a bell, her returning home with a lady friend late one evening in 1960. They'd been to Hartford to hear Sen. John Kennedy speak. "I had no idea he had that flaming red hair," one of them enthused. "And that smile!" the other responded. I was only a child; I'm sure I missed some of the conversation; but there didn't seem to be a lot of talk about any of the policy points covered in the Democratic candidate's speech.

I asked her, last week, "But what about the issues, Mom? Obama is over there telling them all they've got to print more money, spend more money.  But Angela Merkel says that's not the solution. She says we got INTO this mess by spending too much, that the answer is more bank regulation. What about that?"

Be careful not to get whiplash, now. I swear I'm not deleting anything. Mom's answer was:

"And then Michelle — she just took over. The crowds love her. She's so elegant." The evening gowns, the queen hugging her, etc. etc. "You know, President Kennedy joked once that 'My wife visited Europe and I accompanied her.' Well that's exactly what's happening, again, now."

I don't mean to say Mom is dumb, because she's not. Some of this may be a male-vs.-female kind of thing, or a people-who-get-their-news-exclusively-from-TV  vs. people-who-don't kind of thing. There's even a good argument to be made that Mom's take on the "G-20 Summit" and ensuing "If it's Monday this must be Prague" presidential whirlwind tour is more reflective of reality than mine.

Mr. Obama may have said, upon arrival, "I'm not here to lecture; I'm here to listen" (a purely spontaneous ad lib, I'm sure) but if you do the math, you can demonstrate it was impossible for all the attendees at that "summit" to so much as stand up and each give a half-hour speech. There just wasn't enough time. So idiots like me are supposed to believe everyone was sitting there with bated breath, waiting for the guy from India or the latest jumped-up Argentine dictator to finish his 80-minute Powerpoint presentation on the Rothbard-von Mises theory of economic corrections, at which point they all jumped to their feet, slapped their foreheads, and cried, "Of course; we have to return to sound money and free-market banking! How could we have been so blind!"?

Oh, please. Whatever bland "joint communique" they signed had been hammered out by faceless bureaucrats weeks ago to guarantee no one would be restricted in the slightest from pursuing whatever economic policies they were planning to pursue in the first place. What this was really all about was Russia being able to demonstrate she can still require America to come with hat in  hand, seeking her agreement on "disarmament" (a myth that Ronald Reagan busted, destroying the Soviet Union in the process, but which the Democrat fellow-travelers will now carefully re-erect), while the guys from Brazil and Indonesia and South Korea and even China and India couldn't wait to get their pictures taken with Barack, demonstrating to the peasants back home "See, I'm an international leader; I stride the world stage like a collossus; Barack asks me which fork to use for the salad; you certainly wouldn't want to replace me with some idiot jailbird challenger who's not a warm personal friend of the President of the United States, like me."

The president and First Lady fulfill for modern Americans the same function as the Queen of England for the more conventionally minded Brits, riding forth to Parliament from time to time, the press gushing about the splendor of her jewel-bedecked carriage and her matched set of dock-tailed gray horses, her loyal subjects standing on tippy-toe hoping to catch a glimpse of the crown and sceptre, whispering scandalously that whoever stood fourth in the reception line last time has now been demoted to 22nd place after that unfortunate incident with the Afghan hound, et blooming cetera.

If the gang of 20 are just hand-picked frontmen for the international bankers, who are going to get everything their way until their printing presses screech to a halt for lack of sufficient taxpayer lubricant, then maybe it makes perfectly good sense for Mom to be worrying about how Michelle Obama's jeweled accessories set off her frock, and it's those of us who parsed the transcripts of the official proceedings late into the evening, hoping for some hint that the economic light is beginning to dawn on these guys, 76 years after FDR seized Americans' gold; 45 years after Lyndon Johnson gave us big copper pennies disguised as "quarter dollars" ... who are just being silly.  

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