Celebutards of the Week: Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey

Jackie Kennedy did it graciously.

Hillary Clinton did it grudgingly.

First Ladies have reinvented themselves into softer, gentler, more user-friendly versions of their former ornery selves since the dawn of TV. But none has done it so radically and dramatically – and quickly – as Michelle Obama, relaxing the arches of her disturbingly angry eyebrows, covering her naked upper arms, and putting a figurative muzzle across her disapproving lips. She has emerged, butterfly-like, as vacuous and silly as any chick you’d meet in a shopping mall. And she’s performed this metamorphosis with the expert encouragement of your friendly neighborhood celebutard, Oprah Winfrey.

And that is why Michelle and Oprah take home the honors as my Celebutards of the Week, in keeping with my book, Celebutards: The Hollywood Hacks, Limousine Liberals and Pandering Politicians Who Are Destroying America. (Kensington).

As he moved into the presidency, Barack Obama had a serious Michelle Problem. She said not once, but twice, after Obama took the Wisconsin primary: “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country.” The lefty firebrand evidently was ready to move to Canada previously. But where would she buy her sleeveless dresses?

In 2007, she famously told 60 Minutes, “…The realities are that, you know, as a black man, you know, Barack can get shot going to the gas station, you know…”

I wondered if Michelle was suggesting that gangs of racist whites might go after Obama – or whether his supposed attacker was a more statistically significant African-American man. She never said.

Enter Oprah.

Oprah had a little foot-in-mouth disease on her resume. She called herself the victim of racism – suffering a “Crash Moment” – after she was denied the right to shop at the outrageously expensive Hermes boutique in Paris the night she arrived after closing time.

But Oprah had moved millions of votes into the Obama column, and she was all about rehabilitating Michelle, too. By inauguration day, the incoming First Lady had softened the arches of her infamous eyebrows. The sleeveless dress that showed off her gym-toned arms that appeared, to snorts of derision, in her official White House portrait, suddenly went the way of the hoop skirt.

More dramatically, the woman bred at Princeton and Harvard Law gleefully engaged in vigorous chick chat with Oprah in her magazine, O.

They talked interior decorating.

The White House “will reflect our family,” quoth Michelle. “I want comfortable sofas, I want art that reflects contemporary and traditional, I want to bring in new American artisans. And you’ve got to be able to make a fort with the sofa pillows! Everything must be fort-worthy.”

Michelle said the inauguration reminded her of getting married. No mention of taking pride in America here.

“It was almost like a wedding,” she said. “A huge, very complicated wedding. The last visitors didn’t leave until Sunday [after the inauguration]. And then the first Monday was kind of weird. You know: Now we live here, and Barack is getting up and going to work, and it’s just us. This is our home now.”

Now, the only “danger” she sees for her family now is in the White House kitchen.

“The pie in the White House is dangerously good.”

I never thought I’d say this. But the old, unpredictable Michelle was way more fun than the Stepford model.