Michelle Obama appears to be the next Democrat figurehead. In a May 14 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Douglas Schoen and Andrew Stein give voice to a fear that has been haunting those deranged by the very thought of Donald Trump: “He could be elected president again in 2024.”

These two savvy Democrats understand how vulnerable President Joe Biden is, both politically and medically. To prepare a “backup plan,” they speed through the likely suspects for a substitute but soon realize that none is viable.  The “strongest candidate by far,” they conclude, is a seeming outlier, former first lady Michelle Obama.

As recently as April, Michelle disavowed her interest in running for president — or at least seemed to. “At no point,” she told Oprah Winfrey, “have I ever said, ‘I think I want to run.’ Ever.” Schoen and Stein hope Michelle can be persuaded. Los Angeles filmmaker Joel Gilbert believes she already has been. In his doggedly researched film and book, Michelle Obama 2024, Gilbert makes a compelling case that Michelle’s post–White House persona has been crafted for just this moment.

Michelle’s ‘Black Flight’ Past

Although he can only speculate about her future, Gilbert nails Michelle on her past. Michelle, Gilbert argues, has been running from the black community since she was a little girl (Yes, Virginia, she is a female). Michelle, it seems, has a “black flight” problem.

As I discovered in doing research for my book, Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities, middle-class blacks were as likely to flee the urban decay of the 1960s and 1970s as were whites. Michelle’s parents, Marian and Fraser Robinson, were among those to pull up stakes.

They were in good company. Whitney Houston’s parents, John and Cissy Houston, left my hometown of Newark, New Jersey, for the same reasons my friends and family did. Their instincts varied little from those of every other responsible parent in the city. “Our home no longer resembled the safe haven we had envisioned for our children,” writes Cissy in her memoir, Remembering Whitney. “After the [1967] riots, John and I started thinking about leaving Newark.” A few years later, they did just that, hightailing it for the suburbs.

Kanye West’s mom, Donda West, left her South Shore, Chicago, neighborhood for similar reasons. “I was through when Kanye told me about it,” writes West in her memoir, Raising Kanye, the “it” in question an assault on her young son by other black youth. “If it wasn’t safe for him to ride his bike in the park that backed right up to our backyard, then it was time to move.”

“I began looking for someplace else to live,” West continues. “Call it black flight or whatever, I was ready to go.” Kanye grew up in the same neighborhood as did Michelle, 13 years later. In the interim, the neighborhood had continued to deteriorate. “Crime did rise sharply in South Shore during its era of racial turnover,” writes Carlo Rotella, a Boston College professor who grew up in South Shore at the same time as Michelle.

As Rotella notes in his unusually bold book The World Is Always Coming to an End, the working blacks of South Shore blamed the crime spike on what they called “the element,” the refugees from the city’s public housing projects. The phrase Rotella heard over and over from blacks on their way out of the neighborhood was “enough is enough.”

Before moving to South Shore, Michelle lived with her parents in Chicago’s Parkway Gardens, once a showcase housing complex for the black middle class. A block away was the John Foster Dulles Elementary School, a shiny new school opened two years before Michelle was born in 1964.

Michelle’s older brother Craig attended Dulles for kindergarten and first grade. By the time Michelle was ready, her mother Marian, a would-be educator, had seen enough. The problem wasn’t the facilities. The problem was the students, many of whom came from the nearby Washington Homes housing project.

Rather than send her daughter to Dulles with the “project kids,” Marian registered Michelle and Craig at Bryn Mawr Elementary in South Shore, a 15-minute drive from their Parkway Gardens home. This was illegal. To send a child to a school out of district was a Class C misdemeanor. The Robinsons risked it. 

Bryn Mawr was reputed to be a much better school than Dulles due largely to South Shore’s history as a Jewish neighborhood. Unlike Catholic ethnic groups, Jews depended on and had high expectations for public schools. Once the schools began to slip, Jews were quick to leave. Bryn Mawr’s reputation outlasted the Jewish parents — but barely.

Two years after Michelle started elementary school, the Robinsons moved to South Shore. By the time she and Craig were ready for high school, South Shore High, just down the street, was virtually all black. Once again, the Robinsons put their children first. Marian, who had been a stay-at-home mom, took a job downtown to afford Catholic school tuition for Craig, this despite the fact the Robinsons were not Catholic.

Craig’s school was beyond the neighborhood and predominantly white. Michelle left the neighborhood as well, taking a lengthy bus ride each day to attend an integrated magnet school in downtown Chicago. From there it was off to the rarefied air of Princeton and Harvard.

Once back in Chicago, Michelle took a series of jobs in which her primary task was to keep “the element” at bay, first from high-end North Side housing developments and, later, from the University of Chicago Medical Center. Gilbert details her role as protector of elite white interests convincingly. Meanwhile, she and Barack lived in hip mixed neighborhoods and sent the girls to Chicago’s best private school.

Michelle’s Gift for Hypocrisy

It is hard to fault the Robinsons for the choices they made, but for Michelle to scold white Chicagoans for making the same choices took real brass ones. At a 2019 Obama Foundation forum, Michelle displayed her gift for hypocrisy. “As families like ours, upstanding families like ours, who were doing everything we were supposed to do and better, as we moved in, white folks moved out,” she told the moderator, adding, “They were afraid of what our families represented.” 

To exploit the guilt of her largely white female audience, Michelle pointed to herself and to her mild-mannered brother Craig and continued, “I wanna remind white folks that y’all were running from us, and y’all still runnin’.” Among the things that frightened white people, said the shameless Michelle, were “the color of our skin” and the “texture of our hair.”

Michelle, who was harassed by neighborhood bullies for talking “like a white girl,” deceives her audience — and not just with her phony patois. Whites left South Shore for good cause. “Crime had previously been low in South Shore,” writes Rotella, “so it came as a shock when the neighborhood’s rate of FBI-designated index crimes—murder, assault, rape, robbery, burglary, larceny, car theft (arson was added later)—soared from well under the citywide average to double and almost triple that average, among the city’s highest.”

As a candidate, Michelle will excite her liberal white fan girls just by showing up. Even if they see through her, black women will honor the party line. They always do. But in a real campaign, if there is one, Michelle’s brittle duplicity will undo her. Women with common sense and men of every color will say, “Enough is enough.”

Jack Cashill’s Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities is available for pre-order in all formats.