First lady Michelle Obama has figuratively evicted her 74-year-old mother from the White House in an apparent effort to boost her appeal to middle-class voters.
The eviction notice came April 30 when the first lady told fellow Democrats at a fundraiser that she shared their values. “My family, we lived in a little bitty apartment on the South Side of Chicago over my aunt’s house [and] my mom still lives in that house to this day.”
However, the first lady’s mother, Marian Robinson, has lived in the White House since March 2009, when Essence Magazine announced her move from Chicago to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
“She will stay as long as her son-in-law and daughter want her to stay there,” Angela Burt-Murray, the editor of Essence Magazine, said in an April 2009 “Today” show interview.
White House officials have largely kept Robinson out of sight, and she makes relatively few public appearances. One recent exception came on April 9, when she publicly read ”The Rainbow Fish” at the 2012 White House Easter Egg Roll.
The first lady’s effort to distance herself from her mother’s White House stay comes as both she and President Barack Obama try to stress their middle-class roots, amid a stalled economy and high unemployment.
The cost of visible first family trips — to Spain, Hawaii, Martha’s Vineyard and other locations — has spurred some level of resentment among Americans, whose income has stalled since 2008, even as their costs for gasoline, health care and education have risen.
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/05/01/in-stump-speech-michelle-obama-evicts-mother-from-white-house/#ixzz1uo1eiE7S
Comments