Michelle Obama Is No Jacqueline Kennedy

The comparisons were inevitable: two charismatic presidents in their forties and their dazzling wives moving into the White House with young children.

“When Michelle Obama took to describing her new role as mom in chief,” Ruth Marcus wrote in the Washington Post last week, “my first reaction was to wince at her words…What does it say about the condition of modern women that Obama… sounded so strangely retro–more Jackie Kennedy than Hillary Clinton?”

Marcus recalled that Cherie Blair “who managed to keep her barrister job while her husband was in office, grandly decreed that Tony, prime minister or not, would be taking paternity leave after the birth of their fourth child.” But in advice to Michelle Obama, Mrs. Blair has now changed her tune:

“You have to learn to take a back seat, not just in public but in private. When your spouse is late to put the kids to bed, or for dinner, or your plans for the weekend are turned upside down again, you simply have to accept that he had something more important to do.”

When Jacqueline Kennedy was about to become First Lady, she sounded like a Stepford wife, telling a reporter I sent to interview her, “The most important thing for successful marriage is for a husband to do what he likes best and does well…If the wife is happy, full credit should be given to the husband because the marriage is her entire life.”

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