Rod points to a story about Michelle Obama’s Princeton senior thesis, which ties into something that Mickey Kaus was talking about in a recent bloggingheads, in which he applies to Mrs. Obama some speculation about the anger and insecurity created by affirmative action.  If I am reading the story right, the frustration expressed doesn’t come entirely from anxiety about preserving community solidarity, but might also stem from dissatisfaction that she was never really accepted on the basis of merit and felt the anxiety that comes from what Kaus called “affirmative action insecurity.”  Of course, more damaging to the Obama campaign than anything she says in the thesis or in most of her speeches is the growing perception that she feels resentful of or alienated from the majority of the country.  Once that perception sinks in, her unfav ratings will shoot up and will have a negative effect on Obama’s ratings as well.  Obviously, anything that puts a dent in the public’s favourable attitudes towards Obama and his “likeability” is particularly harmful to a candidate who has thrived to some significant degree because of his personality and “likeability.”

By way of the Obama campaign, Politico has acquired access to the thesis and has uploaded the entire thing, so that you, too, can delve into the mind of a Princeton undergrad from the ’80s.  From what I have seen of it so far, there isn’t much outside of her opening remarks and conclusion that will cause anyone much alarm, and even these statements strike me as being rather unremarkable.  Then again, I don’t assume that my responses to this are at all representative. 

All of this thesis talk makes me wonder: what my senior thesis on Iconoclasm would tell people about me in another 15 years?  Probably not that much.