With Spain, Michelle Obama's crafted 'everywoman' persona is forever broken

*

• 8/12, "Royal Treatment for the First Lady: Obama claims working class roots, but her lifestyle is luxury," NY Daily News by Andrea Tantaros

"When images of Jean Paul Gaultier-clad First Lady Michelle Obama on a $75,000-a-day Spanish holiday hit the wires, controversy was bound to erupt back home.

• Her carefully crafted image as "everywoman" was blown.

In addition to the high cost, the evolving justifications for the trip offered by the White House's flack were just as dizzying.

• First it was a private, mother-daughter trip that press secretary Robert Gibbs refused to comment on.

Then, the White House said she was paying for most of the trip, but that the

• taxpayers would pay for some of it because she'd be meeting with the King and Queen of Spain.
  

• The East Wing's final justification was that the First Lady traveled to Spain to comfort a friend who'd lost her husband.

The spin revealed that the White House had a public relations problem: After attempting to further the notion that she was just the woman next door, it couldn't help that the First Lady looked positively royal. That only cemented the suspicion that

• she is far fancier and higher maintenance than she, or her handlers, would like us to believe.

"The First Lady is doing her part - and then some - to be an ambassador of total glam when she travels.

• Have you ever seen a First Lady looking quite so now?"
  

• Glamour magazine asked.

I don't know about Glamour's perception of now, but currently 14.6 million people are unemployed. Now is a time when people are losing their homes.

• Now should be an era of restraint, a time to spread the wealth around,
  
• according to the First Lady's spouse.

The backlash from her vacation also showcased an antithesis to the story line of moderation and

• humble roots that Michelle Obama has sought to perpetuate.

"We like to joke that the South Side of Chicago is our Kennebunkport," she said to Vogue in 2008. Months later,

• she stepped out in $540 Lanvin sneakers to volunteer at a food bank.
  
• The disconnect was obvious.

In April 2007, she told a crowd that "my life now is not really that much different from many of yours. Every woman that I know, regardless of race, education, income, background, political affiliation,

• is struggling to keep her head above water."

Staying above water on the luxurious Costa del Sol junket must have been a real challenge. And now, while we eat cake, she eats her words.

• Fashion magazines have long displayed two competing theories in their profiles on the First Lady.

While they're more than willing to advance the narrative that she's just a down-home gal, some

• can't help but play up her penchant for the highlife,
  

• revealing the persona as fiction.

Andre Leon Talley, an editor for Vogue, wrote after the 2008 election, "She almost seems like any other mom recently relocated to a city because of her husband's new job."

• Almost. Until the wardrobe references: Isabel Toledo, Narciso Rodriguez, Jimmy Choo.

Oprah Winfrey has said Obama is "bringing a sense of connection and accessibility to that position that no nation has ever witnessed."

• That's what they wanted the country to think.
  

Spain, however, revealed the reality: Obama isn't an average mom and wife,

• and she doesn't think so of herself, either.

That's why the Marie Antoinette comparison is apt: The trip evokes a similar contempt for the plebeians.

• We might expect such detachment from celebrities, but not public servants. A leader shouldn't be living like a monarch when the rest of the country feels like paupers.
  

At least Antoinette was being candid about it. Now it's the First Lady's turn."...

• via Lucianne.com