MICHELLE OBAMA IS HEP!

I haven't read the profile of Michelle Obama in the new New Yorker, but there's a short preview here, from which we learn just how fashion-forward and taboo-shattering Mrs. O is.

According to the article:

She "is also cool in the other sense of the word; her tastes, references and vocabulary -- 'freaky,' '24/7,' 'got my back,' 'American Idol,' Judge Mathis -- if not exactly edgy, are recognizable, which, for a political spouse, makes them radical."

Wow. American Idol -- that's that weird new cult show all the kids are watching on their bafflingly modernistic two-way wrist TV iPhones, isn't it?

And "24/7" -- that's such a trendy, urban, street expression that mulleted R&B wannabes glommed on to it twenty years ago:

(Come on, you remember the annoyingly catchy "I Like It," right?)

I know this isn't meant disapprovingly, but I'm not sure why it's noteworthy at all. And doesn't John McCain do this, too, even though he's a generation older than the Obamas? Didn't he say when Alan Greenspan retired that we should keep him as Fed chairman even after he died, "like Weekend at Bernies"? Does it seem "safer" somehow coming from him, because he's older? Because he's whiter? Because to some people (who apparently don't get out much), some of her references seem (what euphemism am I looking for here?) urban?

(Of Mitt Romney saying "Who let the dogs out?" on Martin Luther King Day, the less said the better.)

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Oh, and the New Yorker article also reminds us that, according to her husband's second book, the scary angry dangerous militant radical Michelle Obama likes to watch reruns of The Dick Van Dyke Show.

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(Cross-posted at Too Sense.)