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Can we talk about Caitlin Flanagan's underminer-y commentary on Michelle Obama's hostessing? Flanagan contributed a short essay to New York Magazine's cover story package on Mrs. O, and the entire thing is a litany of backhanded compliments:
Michelle Obama cuts a pretty figure in her big-and-tall gal ready-to-wear, and she has Joe Kennedy’s understanding of the power of family photographs to advance a political career. Like Hillary she lacks taste; her consumer preferences seem to have been rendered into being by the Mall at Short Hills. But ours is not the moment for taste. Or, for that matter, for a Nancy Reagan/Candy Spelling hyperattention to “gifting.”
Is Flanagan just a clear-eyed Obama observer, ignoring the swoons over Michelle's style and telling it like it is? Or is she just being contrarian to get our attention?
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Michelle Obama is no Nancy Reagan, either, and I think maybe all of these women are just trying to "pop'' on TV. But—shameless forced transition alert—whatever shade we're in the market for ... doesn't it seem like the phrase "shop until you drop'' is taking on an ominous new meaning? Seriously, we've become so used to this level of violence that it barely registers, but just last Saturday, five women were shot to death in a Lane Bryant store in a Chicago suburb. The very next day, three men were killed in what the AP described as a "dining, shopping and entertainment complex'' in Largo, Md. That follows the December tragedy in which a 19-year-old took down eight others before fatally shooting himself at a mall in Omaha, Neb. Not to be confused with the time earlier in the year when another teenager murdered five people at a mall in Salt Lake City. So my question is, at what point does our patriotic duty to shop run up against our God-given right to pack a semiautomatic? And as long as we're still mulling our presidential options, is any candidate out there ever going to have a single word to say about gun control?
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All this talk about First Ladies wearing red got me thinking about My So Called Life. In one of the first episodes, the dad character says he thinks Hillary Clinton doesn't wear enough red. That was a "thing" during the '90s, wasn't it--I mean people complaining about Hillary's color palatte? As Dana suggests, maybe the red complaint was shorthand for "she's no Nancy Reagan."
So what does it mean that Hillary wears more red now (at the State of the Union, for example) than she ever did as first lady? I buy that Michelle Obama's trying to evoke Nancy, but surely Hillary's going for something else, right? I think it makes her look tough and bold. The color doesn't evoke submission.
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Dahlia, you got that right: Putting prospective first ladies in red suits is a none-too-subtle code meant to evoke the administration that's currently back in nostalgic vogue. Nancy Reagan wore the color so often (usually in that same fire-engine shade we saw last night) that it came to be called "Reagan red." Last year, Mrs. Reagan took Laura Bush on a tour of an exhibit of red dresses at the Reagan Library. To wear it is to quote her as unambiguously as McCain evoked the Reagan/Stallone '80s by marching onstage to the Rocky theme for his victory speech. Michelle Obama's donning of the hue is more complex. Obviously, this choice is supposed to recall the general optimism of the morning-in-America days. But is it also meant to reassure us that Michelle, who only last year left her high-powered job as an executive at the University of Chicago hospitals, will remain safely on the Nancy-esque sidelines when her husband becomes president, confining her role to charity work like the cleft-palate foundation whose board Cindy McCain serves on (and through which she adopted their now-16-year-old daughter from Bangladesh)? At any rate, the color-coded association of both women with the ultimate loyal-but-silent political spouse clearly serves to distance them from a certain prospective first husband who doesn't need to wear loud colors to get himself noticed.
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