5. The White House is like a “really nice prison.” That would mean that the First Lady failed to make parole in November 2012. Ms. Obama made that complaint at the African First Ladies Summit in Tanzania, among fellow inmates, some from countries where the opposition occupies really nasty prisons.
4. Our student loans were “higher than our mortgage.” That complaint, at the 2012 Democratic National Convention, sounds awful, except that both of the Obamas went to Harvard Law School, one of the most elite and expensive schools in the country. Many young people today would love to have a mortgage.
3. I “feel like a visitor” at Princeton. Ms. Obama wrote her undergraduate thesis about the conundrum of black identity on an Ivy League campus, despite the “liberal and open-minded” attitude of some students and professors. An interesting topic, but not what most people would regard as a serious grievance.
2. Law clients like Barney and Coors not interesting enough. As a second-year associate at the prestigious Sidley Austin law firm, Ms. Obama asked for more interesting work–and received it, but working on major cases involving public television simply was not good enough to suit her ambitions.
1. America is “just downright mean.” Ms. Obama lodged that complaint on the campaign trail in 2008, explaining why America needed the kind of radical change that only her husband could bring. The country had “become a nation of struggling folks who are barely making it every day,” needing urgent redistribution.