According to people I know who worked with Michelle Obama when she was employed by the City of Chicago, Michelle hated being a lawyer. The work was too hard and she was not very good at it. The reason Michelle went to work for the City is because she was hired via a recommendation from Jesse Jackson which then qualified her as a “Jesse Hire”; this is slang here in Chicago for an “untouchable hire”, meaning this is someone on the City payroll who can never be fired or even disciplined in any way because their employment was a political favor to someone. In Michelle’s case, that someone was Jesse Jackson and Michelle was thus one of the many black people working for the City at Jackson’s insistence who were not expected to actually do their jobs and instead could read newspapers, shop in catalogs, play Minesweeper on their computers, or just spin aimlessly around in their swivel chairs all day. Michelle reportedly took two or even three lunch breaks a day, would disappear for hours, went on constant “personal appointments” and treated her work space at the City like it was an airport lounge: a place to go for a while to kill time where she could snack, peruse magazines, gossip, and talk loudly on the phone with girlfriends and laugh and laugh and laugh.
No one could say boo to her and a LOT of resentment developed, of course, but this is how Chicago operates and even Mayor Daley (who ruled the city as a king) was terrified of angering Jesse Jackson because Jesse’s big threat was always to find some excuse to dispatch the Rainbow Push Coalition to the streets to rant, rave, scream, and protest that Daley was…wait for it…bet you can’t guess…RACIST!
So, “Jesse Hires” were a form of extortion of the City that required people Jesse personally recommended for jobs be essentially given paid positions to read newspapers and talk about babies for as long as they wanted. It’s not just Jesse who gets these “hires’ though. A lot of Aldermen have them, too…and as long as the Aldermen are in power and have votes the Mayor needs for certain things, then friends and family of the Aldermen get to work for the City in positions similar to the one that Michelle Obama held after she left Sidley Austin. This is all pretty common knowledge in Chicago. Before I was identified as a political writer and my cover was blown (I used to write this site anonymously until Fran Eaton of the Illinois Review outed me for personal reasons because she wanted to help an ex-boyfriend get back at me), I used to work freelance gigs for the City doing event planning or coordinating special projects…which was ridiculously lucrative and a lot of fun. I will never, ever be able to land one of those freelancing assignments again because I’m clearly no fan of Rahm Emanuel but back in the Daley days when I was doing these gigs I saw a lot of these “untouchable hires” just taking up space in the various offices I’d visit in my day. These people were always kept in the very back, in cubicles, and some of them would even sleep during the day. Once, I saw a group of them playing cards…in a work area, not a break room. Some of these positions require driving around town but it’s not really with any particular goal in mind. They might be listed as delivery people, but they don’t deliver much and spend about 7 hours just cruising around, stopping for snacks, maybe going to a movie. Whatever they want.
Michelle Obama “worked” in this capacity for a few years, until Valerie Jarrett (whom she became friends with during her stint as a “Jesse Hire”) took her with her when she went over to the University of Chicago Medical Center. I believe at that time that Barack Obama was already a state senator and it was clear he was being pushed for bigger things…so it was natural for the Medical Center to want the senator’s wife on the payroll so that they could funnel money to him through her as rewards for steering legislation towards passage that would benefit University of Chicago. This is how Chicago works, folks. Michelle didn’t do any more work at the Medical Center than she did for the City and her job duties involved trying to keep black people from going to the emergency room at the hospital for treatment without insurance and instead go to these sub-par “medical clinics” that the Medical Center wanted them steered towards instead. At one point, Michelle received a ridiculously large raise right around the time that the University of Chicago received a massive funding infusion for the Medical Center from Springfield, where Barack Obama was on his way to becoming a United States Senator. Surely this was just a coincidence and was not a way for University of Chicago to buy favor from the next US Senator representing Illinois by dramatically increasing his wife’s pay to over $300,000/year for doing relatively nothing all day.
Source: http://hillbuzz.org/why-the-obamas-really-lost-their-law-licenses-answer-may-surprise-you-63641
Hat tip: Baracuda Brigade
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