Mama Bin Cranky

In the last few days, in the brouhaha about Hilary Rosen’s comments about Ann Romney, PresBO has come out talking about how Michele didn’t have the luxury of not going to work after the girls were born.  He speaks lovingly about the fact the Michele had to suffer being a working mother (worrying endlessly about where to best put her attentions, worrying about the girls, etc.).  He says this is because he was a state senator, a law professor, a lawyer, always out-of-town.  He tells us how hard that was on Michele, what a great woman she was juggling the girls and bread-winning because they had no choice.

Compare and contrast Mitt and Ann Romney.  They took a more traditional road.  Mitt did have the privilege of being able to obtain a great education because of his hard-working father.  He inherited some money from his parents, and he gave it to charity.  He chose to then go to work and make a fortune while Ann raised 5 boys.  They worked together to provide for the family.  It worked for them.

The take away I have from this is that Obama is the problem here.  Just as he did with his mother, he watched her fight with the insurance company as she was dying of breast cancer.  Why did he watch her fight?  Why didn’t he fight for her?  Here he and Michele have decided to have children and Michele has to go back to work.  Obama could have decided to put off his career in politics.  He could have chosen to go to work and earn enough money so that Michele didn’t have to work, but he put his ambitions first, ahead of the family unit.  Obama was a Harvard educated black man with no limits to his earning ability.  Two autobiographies prove he had the ability to make the money, yet Michele went back to work anyway.  She did this not because they had to, they did it because of Obama’s ambition.  He came first.  Michele wanted to work, she didn’t have to.

Yes, Ann Romney could have worked if she wanted to.  I doubt Mitt would have kept her at home by force.  She wanted to be at home and Mitt work hard to make that possible. Wealth affords more possibilities, but Obama is exaggerating to say that Michele “had to work”.  There were other options.  You don’t have to be rich to have a stay at home mom.  Our family is proof of that. Of course, we weren’t buying our first mansion in Chicago.