By piecing together every clue to Sasha and Malia's existence, journos have managed to fashion — sort of — a picture of the first daughters' lives.
From a combination of factoids dropped by President and Michelle Obama, the girls' grandmother Marian Robinson and what would seem to be conjecture, the AP (via the Daily News) has managed to deduce that...they have totally normal lives. Here is what we know!
- Malia has braces
- Malia cares about tigers
- They play the piano
- Malia plays flute
- Sasha enjoys dancing
- They get an allowance
- They can't watch TV during the week
- They have separate bedrooms
- They can only use the computer for school
Yeah, that's it. Which, considering that the girls attend school and presumably have contact with hundreds of others, is a pretty laudable achievement. Of course, the press corps has traditionally respected the privacy of presidential kids - not to mention safety - so this is pretty much par for the course, not to mention as it should be.
What's goofy about the piece, though, is lines about "tidibits" coming from "a surprising source: mom and dad" and "the first lady is also guilty of breaching the privacy wall she and her husband put up around the girls" as if the occasional innocuous personal detail isn't routinely given to the press by politicians. And in a sense, doesn't it make more sense to give the world some sense of kids' normalcy than to keep them completely hermetically sealed, thus whetting everyone's appetites for detail even further? It's bad enough that young girls have to go through their awkward stages publicly - and even without "obvious" awkwardness the early teens are rough - without a little complicity.
From Braces To Flute Lessons, Inside The Daily Lives Of The First Daughters [NYDN]
DISCUSSION
They can only use the computer for school
... proof that the Obamas are soul-sucking fascists! Quickly, to the Beckmobile!