White House Run By Valerie Jarrett, Not Rasputin, But Jane Austen's Emma Woodhouse

AKA Valerie Jarrett?

[From article]
Some people seem to be just discovering the odd position Valerie Jarrett has held in this administration. They also seem to be struggling to find a metaphor for her role. I have seen her compared to Rasputin, but that doesn't fit the dynamics of the relationship. Barack Obama may be as detached from the threats of his day as Tsar Nicholas II was 100 years ago, but Rasputin was very much his and the Tsarina's social inferior. I suspect Jarrett considers herself at least the Obamas’ equal if not their superior.
When I consider Valerie Jarrett's role in things, I imagine that Jane Austen's Emma Woodhouse had gotten the idea in her head that she was a top-notch political adviser as well as matchmaker extraordinaire. For Valerie Jarrett is a Black American Princess version of Austen's spoiled heiress. She shares Emma's wildly misplaced confidence in her abilities, misreads what is going on under her own nose, and shares a penchant for encouraging those she sees as social inferiors to improve themselves. Unlike Emma, however, there doesn't seem to be any dawning self-awareness on the part of any of the characters.
[. . .]
one has to look at two spheres as insular and cliquish as those occupied by many of Austen's characters among the landed gentry of Regency England -- that of upper class Chicago blacks and that of the red diaper babies,
[. . .]
Some members of the American black middle class go as gaga over anyone who is African in the same way some American whites go gaga over any Brit who speaks with a plummy Oxbridge accent. That is probably why Barack Obama's literary agent’s biography had him born in Kenya. Residents of the Hyde Park community he, Jarrett, and Bill Ayers all lived in tend to eat that stuff up with a spoon.
[. . .]
It would be funny if we were reading it in a novel rather than watching it happen in the White House.

http://americanthinker.com/2014/10/jane_austen_in_the_white_house.html

October 8, 2014
Jane Austen in the White House
By Rosslyn Smith