Who could play First Lady Michelle Obama on the silver screen?
Following the European triumph by President Barack Obama and the First Lady last week, that question is not just a Hollywood parlor game -- it is another way of saying that Michelle Obama is now officially the Biggest Star in the World.
Unless you spent last week under a rock, it was impossible to avoid the stunning images of the First Couple beamed around the world from the G-20 Summit. And by now, as Michelle Obama returns here to the nation's capitol, calling her the Biggest Star in the World is not an understatement.
Millions worldwide followed the president and first lady from London to France to Prague, with the media oozing a lovefest that at times bordered on embarrasing:
"Michelle Obama: The Genuine Article," read the headline on the April 3 report by Michael White, the liberal Guardian UK's usually crotchety columnist. "First Lady of Fashion," blurted a headline in the conservative Telegraph on the same day.
Stateside reports were equally gushy, with some commentators virtually swooning in print over the star power that POTUS and FLOTUS showered across the Continent:
"Looking at the news clips from London of Michelle next to all the other well-put-together first ladies," said a breathless Tina Brown in a column at TheDailyBeast, "there’s a red-blooded realness to her that almost makes you feel the warmth of those long, sculpted arms."
The headline on that piece was, "Is Michelle Obama the New Oprah?," and I suppose we can forgive Mrs. Harold Evans for sounding like a line-sitter at Harpo Studios in Chicago's South Side.
But the prevailing comparisons of Michelle Obama to Oprah, or to Jackie Kennedy, are so far off the mark as to be laughable if they didn't so soundly and directly betray the lack of cultural knowledge of our leading media pundits.
No, the Oprah and Jackie O comparisons are quite inadequate.
Well before the Obamas stormed Europe, it crossed my mind that Michelle Obama would present a prickly pear for most journalists and others who serve as the intellectual-property gatekeepers of our popular culture.
She is empathetic, sophisticated, newly middle-aged, smart as a whip, glamorous, dark-skinned, accessible and very, very married.
Michelle Obama is, in other words, a salt-of-the-earth black woman of the kind that has long existed in America -- a type which, sadly, has largely escaped the attention and celebration of the prevailing white culture.
Her star power is exotic and surprising only to those unfamiliar with the particulars of the Black American Experience. For everyone else, me included, she is as familiar as the MLK-embossed fans handed out in the pews on Sunday mornings -- the "togetha sister" who always wore the shiniest Mary Janes, who always handed in her homework on time, who dated sparingly.
