Let Us Now Praise Famous Women

[Geee]

Free Beacon:

The critic James Wolcott is peeved. “Mitt Romney’s fateful decision this January not to pursue the presidency for a third futile time deprives those of us in the bleachers of a rare-ish opportunity to watch a representative of the 1 percent in plastic action,” he writes in Vanity Fair’s April “special issue” on “the age of money.” There are few chances, Wolcott avers, to observe in public a member of the financial and social caste that rules America. “It is not often we get to study how a scion moves, behaves, and simulates reflective thought under changeable conditions.”

 

Really? Wolcott could always flip through the ads for Secret Clinical Strength and Versace’s Eros Pour Femme to page 172 of his own goddamn magazine, where begins the article “Hobson’s Choice” by Bethany McLean. It is the best opportunity I’ve had in some time “to watch a representative of the 1 percent in plastic action.” Trigger warning, though: None of the oligarchs mentioned therein is a Republican.

 

“Hobson’s Choice” is a rather ironic title for this celebratory profile of Chicago investor and Democratic donor Mellody Hobson, since it is unclear whether in the days since high school she has ever faced a decision between something and nothing. Her most consequential choice seems to have been enrolling in Princeton rather than Harvard in 1987. John Rogers, the founder of Ariel Capital Management and a fixture of the Chicago establishment, was the deciding factor. A Princeton alumnus, he put Hobson in touch with Bill Bradley, the basketball legend and U.S. senator from New Jersey, who became another of her mentors. Upon graduation she took a job at Ariel, where she is now president. In 2013 she married filmmaker George Lucas, with whom she has a daughter. Hobson’s portfolio of investments, McLean writes, “is worth tens of millions of dollars.” Lucas is worth $5 billion. Not struggling to make ends meet, those Hobson-Lucases.