OPINION:
Valerie Jarrett, the fabled White House whisperer who famously, behind scenes, prodded Barack Obama’s presidential policies into shape and effect, has stepped from the shadows to press this current batch of Democratic Party 2020 candidates to please, oh please, remember the women-folk.
Title this “That Time Valerie Jarrett Got Down With The Common People.” And insert LOLs here.
Jarrett, in a piece for The Hill, spoke of the “embarrassment of riches” of the party’s candidates for president, their “rich diversity,” their “robust” debating abilities, their “thoughtful” reflections on “issues that matter” — which, admittedly, may make you wonder, and rightfully so: Now which group of Dems is she speaking about again?
But stay the course.
Don’t get distracted.
Jarrett is indeed speaking of this present bunch of presidential contenders, and while she’s praising their emphasis on platforms like climate change and the “gun-violence epidemic” and LGBTQ rights and so forth and so on, she also called for better treatment of “women’s issues.” Women’s issues like “gender equity” and “strategies to ensure that America’s working families are able to thrive.”
Stay the course.
Don’t get confused.
She’s talking about pay disparities between men and women. She’s talking using the force of government to make private companies and businesses open their employee books to scrutiny and pay everybody a level deemed fair and equitable by the public sector bureaucrats. That’s been a wish-list item of the left for years; it’s the way Jarrett goes about bringing this wish-list item to light that’s eyebrow raising.
This is where the LOLs should be inserted.
“As a young working mom,” Jarrett wrote, “I had a good job, with health insurance, four months paid leave, equal pay with my male peers, workplace flexibility and affordable, excellent child care. Nonetheless, I often felt as though I was holding on by my fingertips as I tried to fulfill my responsibilities at work and at home.”
Did she? Did she really?
’Cause by all historically truthful accounts, those fingertips were pretty darned manicured.
She was born in Iran to a well-educated, scholarly mother and a pathologist father — and to a maternal grandfather who happened to be a bigwig housing official in Chicago named Robert Taylor. She attended elementary school in London, an elite private middle school in Chicago, an elite private boarding high school in Massachusetts, Stanford University for psychology followed by the University of Michigan for law.
Here’s how History Makers describes Jarrett’s humble, oh-so-humble life journey: “Beginning her career as a corporate banking associate at Chicago’s Pope, Ballard, Shepherd and Fowle, Jarrett then joined the real estate department of Sonnenschein, Carlin Nath and Rosenthal. In 1987, she was tapped to serve as deputy corporation counsel for finance and development for the city of Chicago under Mayor Harold Washington, and continued service under Mayor Eugene Sawyer and Mayor Richard M. Daley.”
She served in several cushy spots for Chicago, overseeing budgets of millions and millions, before being elected chair of the city’s Stock Exchange and named president of the Habitat Company.
But throughout it all, Jarrett maintained devotion to the little people. Hmm. Let’s rephrase: But throughout it all, Jarrett maintained devotion to the little people?
“I often worried about the working families who did not have a safety net of support,” she wrote, in The Hill. “Addressing the policy, political and cultural impediments that prevent working families from thriving has been a top priority of mine for over three decades.”
If she did care, if she does care, it’s not because of any genuine concern for hard-working Americans.
It’s because that’s where the control is — that’s where the power lies.
Jarrett no doubt learned early on that the key to the top rests in making the many reliant on the few. So, too, the company with whom she keeps.
But ask yourself, is it better to teach a person to fish or to give out fish? Or, as the left is even more prone to do, to redistribute the fish?
Answer: Those with true concern for the “working families” always go for the teaching moment. It’s the one that brings self-reliance, self-esteem, self-sustenance — in other words, freedom, over government control.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley.
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