Heather Wilhelm, Real Clear Politics:

Life in the White House can be notoriously isolating. Harry Truman called the famous presidential residence, which boasts 132 rooms, “the great white jail.” Ronald Reagan labeled it a “gilded cage.” Bill Clinton, who liked the White House so much he sidled out with almost $190,000 worth of furniture, china, silverware, and decorative accessories when he left, called it both “the finest public housing in America” and “the crown jewel of the prison system.”

This federally funded Alcatraz-lite with servants, chefs, and a bowling alley isn’t all bad, of course. “To be sure,” as Kenneth T. Walsh wrote in “Prisoners of the White House,” his 2013 book on the subject, “the president deals with a particularly splendid form of isolation … [and] is pampered and privileged.” Also, unlike, say, Folsom Prison, where trapped inmates wistfully listen to passing trains, wishing they could join the rich folks eating in the fancy dining cars, the White House offers a pretty decent on-demand, taxpayer-funded private jet.

Unfortunately, recent events have left me wondering whether the endless list of White House amenities also includes a giant Anti-Self-Awareness Transmogrifier, conveniently located between the gluten-free flour garden and the ever-useful “Instantly Produce a Federally Employed Yes Man” call button. Speaking at commencement exercises at historically black Tuskegee University last Saturday, first lady Michelle Obama told a crowd of bright-eyed graduates the following: “The road ahead is not going to be easy. It never is, especially for folks like you and me.”

Let’s pause for a moment to remember that the speaker is an intelligent, attractive woman who went to Chicago’s prestigious Whitney Young magnet school, then to Princeton, then to Harvard, then on to a rather mysterious six-figure job at the University of Chicago, which I’m sure was totally unrelated to her husband’s political work. Next, she was off to the White House, proceeding to globe-hop to places like Cambodia, where, in March, she booked 85 hotel guest rooms at a cost of $242,500 for 33 minutes of public speaking. This was a drop in the bucket, of course, compared to the estimated $44 million in taxpayer-funded vacations she and her husband have racked up over the years.

Ahem. Moving on. “There will be times,” the first lady continued, “when you feel folks look right past you, or they see just a fraction of who you really are. … My husband and I [have] both felt the sting of those daily slights throughout our entire lives — the folks who crossed the street in fear of their safety; the clerks who kept a close eye on us in all those department stores; the people at formal events who assumed we were the ‘help’ — and all those who questioned our intelligence, our honesty, even our love of this country.”

More.