that makes you a feminist failure?

Women of all races and economic backgrounds will be allowed to make their own individual decisions concerning how they will live their personal and professional lives without impacting universal concepts regarding professional and economic ambition or intellectual acumen in the female gender in entirety. I look forward to that day.

Just ewwww.

Actually, I'll add something encouraging. While at a supermarket checkout yesterday (in Florida), I overheard a conversation among a shopper (buying O Magazine), the checker, and the grocery bagger - all female, white, and over 50 - about their unreserved admiration for Michelle Obama. It doesn't require analysis to figure out why they feel that way.

Now that just chaps my hide. Bill Clinton became president, they raised an accomplished young lady. Which must mean that the path Hillary chose worked out just fine for her family!

Why is Michelle a "better" role model? She's just a different person plus, didn't Barack state at some point that Michelle had been earning more money than he did? Since when is a salary over 200 grand a year, modest? Plus, what is with the intellectual heavy lifting jab, now I'm not up to date on Michelle's resume, but I can't imagine earning that kind of salary with a laid back thinking process going on. What a backhanded compliment, she's great, just didn't use her brain to it's fullest! Michelle always said she never wanted to do politics which is her right, I never want to do politics either.

Who are these people who just feel the need to pick at Hillary who went on to be a Senator and now Secratary of State?

David Samuel's commentary is beyond inane - it's delusory. If graduatind Cum Laude from Princeton, getting a law degree from Harvard, and settling into a job for over a quarter-million a year defines "limited ambition" and being an intellectual lightweight... Well, I guess Mr. Samuels must be a houseplant.

Come to think of it, maybe that explains the article.

Of what will turn out to be one of the most powerful and wealthiest black dynasties in America. I dare anyone to find any corporation, foundation, university, hospital, NGO or government that will from now on say no to anyone related to Obama.

You read this dreck so I don't have to. Thank You.

is pulling down a 250k+ salary a modest ambition. Yes to her working class (not middle class) roots. Yes to her demands for normalcy (and good for her). But I wouldn't call her ambitions modest. Again, maybe by intellectual New Yorker standards - but isn't that what we liberals fight against? Sounds like damning with faint praise to me.

I'll take half her modest salary. Always interesting how journalist can shade things so far off reality and sound good doing it.

So the article suggests that Michelle knows her place and Barack doesn't know his. The article sounds like sexist and racial bullshit.

No one is saying Michelle Obama is a "feminist failure", whatever that is even supposed to mean.

But anyone who offers or embraces the idea that women setting clear limits on their own ambitions are a better example for others than women with high ambitions might indeed be termed a "feminist failure". In this particular instance, that honor goes to David Samuels, and anyone who shares his stated position.

I have to wonder about the age of the writer and editor of the piece - assuming NYmag still uses editors. Typically, someone is around to demand accuracy and relevance but that someone seems to have gone missing. The writer reminds me of those pseudo sidewalk intellectuals New York burps up by the million parts who had the title "Hero's Foil" in mind and needed a story to go with it. That there was no support for the header mattered not. He just went ahead and wrote what he felt like any way. I've been guilty of that too but then, I called it what it was - fiction.

I think it's great that the Obamas have worked out a balance between work and family that is perfect for their family. I suspect that the Clintons did the same. Why? Well, one hint might be that Chelsea is a very accomplished young woman in her own right--and remarkably well-adjusted given what must have been an unbearable amount of scrutiny and criticism during her teenage years.

Let's be honest, though: NY Mag is certainly not to be counted on to provide relevant, unfiltered information about someone like our new first lady. I'm sure a similar profile about Laura Bush would try to portray her as a liberated, feminist icon. The Michelle profile is simply doing the same in reverse.

"No Hillary Clinton–like pretending"

Oh, please. Michelle owes much of the country's acceptance and love of her to Hillary Clinton's struggles as First Lady. Michelle lauded back in 1992 and praised for doing her own thing? Please. No way, no how.

I think "limited ambitions" is a bit harsh, but I don't think the sentiment is that insane. She's a highly-educated woman who set aside her career entirely to put her efforts behind her husband's campaign. Michelle, like many women before her, hitched her star to her husband's wagon. Obama himself addressed this in his book and also wrote that Michelle herself was angry about it. I don't see why this is such an outrageous contention.

That stung. I can't fault the New York magazine writer for not thinking more of Michelle Obama - she has, after all, taken the position of first lady back to the one held by Jackie Kennedy. Fasion icon, mother, and faithful, supportive partner to her famous husband. Well, there is one difference. Those wonderful arms. This is not a good time for feminism.

The author is clearly deranged.

I'm not a Katie Roiphe hater (can't say I really know her work) and I think her commentary on how great the three-generational family is working for the Obamas is mostly apt.

BUT the details she provides in support of that thesis are bizarre, and opportunistic. She maintains that modern parents are too strict with such things as bedtime.

On the one hand, it's a refreshing change from the usual complaint that today's parents let their kids stay up too late--usually at fancy restaurants after 8 pm--for their own two-career convenience.

On the other hand, I think that today's parents are much less strict about bedtime, as everyone except Katie Roiphe seems to agree. Whether that's good or bad, I have no opinion. But I look forward to her discovering this and writing a very complimentary article about people currently parenting young children.