“So,” Barack asked after yet another run-through, “what do you think?”
“I think,” she said with a wry smile, “that you’re not going to embarrass the family.”
Unless, she added, he didn’t change his tie. Although Michelle often pointed out with some irritation in her voice that Barack “is thin so he looks good in everything,” she decried his lack of fashion sense. “He just doesn’t care about clothes,” she observed. “Buy him a black shirt for Christmas and he is a happy man.”
Now that he was to appear before a national audience for the first time, she gave him one last once-over. The dark suit was perfectly acceptable, but not the rust-colored tie with the geometric patterns. “Now that,” she said, pointing to his communications director’s new powder blue tie, “is very nice.”
That afternoon Barack, looking particularly handsome in his new powder blue tie, attracted a crowd as he and Marty Nesbitt walked down the street toward the Fleet Center. “This crowd was building behind us,” Nesbitt said, “like it was Tiger Woods at the Masters.”
Nesbitt was astonished at his friend’s overnight fame—and even more surprised at how none of the attention seemed to faze the Illinois State Senator.
“Barack, man,” Nesbitt told him, “you’re like a rock star.”
“Yeah,” Barack replied without missing a beat, “if you think it’s bad today, wait until tomorrow.”
Nesbitt paused for a moment as Barack quickened his step. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“My speech,” Barack replied with a wink, “is pretty good.”
Michelle had faith in the speech, but even more so in the man who was giving it. She told Axelrod and the others that she had total confidence that Barack, whose skills as an orator had grown exponentially over the past few years, would make history with his keynote address. What concerned her that night wasn’t the prospect of failure but the likelihood of success—and how it might transform her little family forever. In an unguarded moment, she shared her doubts with the others. “I’m just kind of worried,” Michelle said wistfully, “that things will never be normal again, you know?”
I’m the badass wife who is sort of keeping it real.
—Michelle
If I ever thought this was ruining my family, I wouldn’t do it.
—Barack
I always told Michelle to step out of her comfort zone in life. But I never thought she was going to step this far out.
—Marian Robinson
No, no, no. I would never cheat. Michelle would kick my butt.
—Barack
My sister doesn’t suffer any fools. If there was any foolishness to him, they wouldn’t be married right now.
—Craig Robinson
7
He had been too busy honing his speech to concentrate on all that was hanging in the balance. Now, as her husband was about to step onto the national stage for the first time, Michelle could tell that he was showing unmistakable signs of stage fright. Was he okay? she asked.
“I’m just feeling a little queasy,” he confessed.
Then Michelle leaned in, gave her husband a reassuring hug, and said sweetly, “Just don’t screw it up, buddy!”
They both laughed and, with the tension broken, waited for Illinois Senator Dick Durbin to introduce him to the crowd. Then Barack calmly walked up to the podium to deliver the speech that would make or break his political career.
“Tonight is a particular honor for me because, let’s face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely,” he began. “My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack…. While studying here, my father met my mother. She was born in a town on the other side of the world, in Kansas.”
Over the next seventeen minutes, cheering delegates jumped to their feet again and again as Barack exhorted them to join in the crusade to elect John Kerry President. Attacking the “spinmasters and negative ad peddlers” and the pundits who “like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states,” Barack insisted that “there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America—there’s a United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America!”
As he wound up his speech, Barack turned to the words of Jeremiah Wright to invoke hope as an underlying theme: “the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores; the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes America has a place for him, too. The audacity of hope!”
Michelle, elegant in a white satin suit and pearls, watched from the wings. Struggling to maintain her composure, she reached up at one point to wipe the tears from her eyes. When it was over, she joined Barack onstage and, arm in arm, the couple waved to the rapturous crowd.
Barack knew he had electrified the crowd—a point that would be driven home with hyperbolic glee by the very pundits he had accused of dividing the nation. Literally overnight, Barack’s stirring keynote address propelled him from relatively obscure state legislator to political megastar. During the next few days, he was mobbed wherever he went at the convention, upstaging everyone—including Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards.
When he returned to Illinois to resume his Senate campaign, Barack was now mobbed wherever he went. Women, not surprisingly, continued to be his most enthusiastic fans. They pushed their bodies up against his, slipped phone numbers into his pockets, and on rare occasions whispered untoward suggestions in his ear as if none of the surrounding multitude could hear.
For the first time on the campaign trail, Barack now found himself the victim of groping by some of his more ardent female admirers. On more than one occasion, Barack tried not to look startled when some random woman in the crowd would grasp him firmly by the derriere—and sometimes try hard to hold on.
“Jesus,” he said after sliding into the back of his SUV after an appearance in Peoria, “I wish they’d stop grabbing my ass!”
At an Illinois Dental Society dinner, one comely guest sidled up to the Senator. “If you were my husband,” she purred, “I wouldn’t let you go around alone.”
Michelle, understandably, was not amused. Now that her husband’s career was in overdrive, his would-be groupies were becoming more aggressive—a fact that had not gone unnoticed by her friends or by the press. Political cartoons already poked fun at Barack’s obvious sex appeal, depicting starry-eyed female delegates swooning over him at the convention. As for the women who insisted on what amounted to full-body contact with her husband, Michelle was in no mood to be charitable. “I want to tell these women, ‘Back off. Get a life,’” Michelle admitted. “It’s just embarrassing, that’s all.”
Moreover, Michelle knew that all this unseemly fawning nourished Barack’s admittedly already oversize ego. “He’s loving it,” she muttered at one point. “He’s a man, isn’t he?” Once again, she resorted to giving him the silent treatment. He in turn complained that she was being “unfair” and had no appreciation of the “incredible stress” he was under. “The tension between Michelle and her husband,” said Chicago Tribune reporter David Mendell, “was palpable.”
There were, in fact, rumors afoot that it was more than just the random flirting from strangers that was getting to Michelle. Her husband, it would later be reported, had grown close to an attractive young African American member of his campaign named Vera Baker.
Born and raised in San Francisco, Baker attended tony Mills College for Women, where she received dual bachelor’s degrees in political, legal, and economic analysis and African American studies. She later earned her master’s in political science from Howard University and her master’s in African American studies from Columbia.
In 2000 Baker teamed up with another Howard alum, Muthoni Wambu, to start Baker Wambu & Associates, a firm that would go on to raise over three million dollars for the congre
ssional campaigns of African American candidates. While Wambu would later become an adviser to Delaware Senator Joe Biden, Baker allied herself with Barack’s Senate campaign.
According to Federal Election Commission records, Baker was paid a hefty fee for her services as Finance Director for the Obama Senate campaign. But in fact, Claire Serdiuk was officially and repeatedly referred to as Obama’s Finance Director throughout the campaign.
When Baker suddenly and inexplicably vanished from the campaign and resurfaced on the Caribbean island of Martinique, tongues reportedly began wagging. A jealous Michelle, it was suggested, had engineered Baker’s departure.
“No,” Baker would later insist. “Nothing happened. I just left…at the end of the campaign.” If Michelle had complained that she and Barack were getting too cozy, Baker wasn’t saying. “I have no comment on anything,” she told writer Sharon Churcher. “I switched careers. That’s it. I’m a Democrat and I support Senator Obama. I don’t have anything to say.” Baker did add, however, that it was love that had brought her to the Caribbean in the first place—she moved there, she said, to live with the man she had fallen in love with. (In a strange twist, Baker later went to work for Alta Capital Group, a municipal bond brokerage founded by Michelle’s longtime friend Adela Cepeda.)
Rumors aside, tensions between Barack and Michelle ran especially high during a five-day, sixteen-hundred-mile, thirty-three-county campaign tour the Obamas embarked on right after the convention. The whirlwind tour was originally designed as a leisurely SUV trip with the family, including stops in small downstate communities where voters would get a chance to see Barack, Michelle, Malia, and Sasha up close and personal. There would, Barack and Michelle were told, be plenty of time for ice cream, picnics, visits to zoos and country fairs, swimming, boating, and even some fishing.
Instead, the campaign staffer who organized the tour, Jeremiah Posedel, had loaded up the schedule with an average of seven campaign stops per day. With Barack’s newfound fame, hundreds of people flocked to see him at every appearance, making it impossible for him to spend any quality time with his family. “Like an idiot,” Posedel conceded, “I neglected to plan for the huge crowds.”
So while the girls were whisked off to local amusement parks by staffers and her husband shook thousands of hands and signed countless autographs, Michelle spent much of her time alone in the SUV.
Some of her time was spent reassuring Posedel that Barack, despite his grumblings to the contrary, would not hold it against him for devising such a punishing campaign schedule.
Back at the very beginning of the Senate campaign, Posedel had hosted several Obama events in his living room. “People would say, ‘Are you crazy? This guy hasn’t got a chance.’ I’d have to scour twenty-six counties to find twenty-five people who were willing to come and listen to him.” Ever since, the two men had enjoyed an easy rapport—until now. “We would normally be joking around with each other,” Posedel said, “but now he spoke to me only when he had to. I knew he was angry.”
What Barack could not forgive Posedel for was the fact that he was spending virtually no time with Malia and Sasha—family time that he had been looking forward to for weeks. While he gave Posedel the silent treatment, Michelle would occasionally sneak away with Posedel to grab a Big Mac. “Barack would never, ever eat at McDonald’s or any fast-food place,” Posedel said, “unless maybe it was some veggie sandwich at Subway. He was incredibly careful about what he ate.”
Michelle, on the other hand, enjoyed the occasional hamburger. “He’s not around!” she told Posedel at one point during the tour. “We can eat what we want!” At a later stop, Michelle took Posedel to celebrate his birthday at a nearby Friday’s. “It was just nachos and a couple of drinks,” he said, “but she was so upbeat and nice that I almost forgot her husband was still mad at me.”
When it was all over, Barack took Posedel aside and thanked him for all the hard work he had put into the tour. Then, without ever raising his voice, Barack added, “Now, don’t ever do that to me again. Understand?”
Incredibly, Barack was once again campaigning unopposed. Because he had not faced a strong opponent since the 2000 congressional primary race against Bobby Rush, Barack had never really been the victim of anything approaching a political attack. Nor, conversely, had he had to come out swinging against a political foe.
All that changed that August when, with only three months left before the election, former radio talk show host and two-time presidential candidate Alan Keyes agreed to replace Jack Ryan on the Illinois ballot. A flamboyantly outspoken African American conservative with a taste for the jugular, Keyes did not actually live in Illinois. A longtime Maryland resident, he established his Illinois residency by moving into the upper story of a Calumet City “two-flat” (duplex).
No sooner had he set foot in the Land of Lincoln than Keyes blasted Barack for his “anti-Christian” support of abortion rights. Employing his trademark hellfire-and-brimstone technique, Keyes kept hammering away at his opponent, accusing him of advocating policies that condemned thousands of unborn black babies to death every year.
“My God,” Barack complained to Michelle, “have you heard the stuff he’s saying about me?”
She was not surprised; Keyes was merely living up to his hard-line reputation. When Barack, who was confident that he could win over anyone, told her that he was going to try to reason with Keyes, she laughed. “Yep, okay,” she cracked. “You just go ahead and do that thing.”
If anything, Barack’s overtures provoked even stronger attacks from Keyes. Not that it mattered. Keyes was widely viewed as both a token and a carpetbagger—certainly no match for the promising young man who had captivated the nation with his soaring rhetoric and the beautiful Michelle at his side.
What Barack hadn’t expected was persistent criticism from radical factions that saw him as a traitor to the African American cause. After he gave a speech at Liberty Baptist Church on the South Side, Michelle walked out the back door and into what former Black Panther Party associate Ron Carter called “a bunch of hoodlum thugs.”
Michelle, who at five eleven towered over most of them, put her hand on her hip and glared at the men. “Y’all got a problem or something?” she asked.
“They all froze,” Carter recalled, “guys who would slap the mayor, who would slap Jesse Jackson in the face, even.” In that moment, Carter said, Michelle proved herself to be “a very strong woman. She knows how to stand up for herself, to put on her street face. I was very impressed.”
On November 2, 2004, the Obamas were ensconced with friends and family members in a suite at the Chicago Hyatt Regency watching election results on television. While Barack coasted to a comfortable 70 percent to 27 percent victory over Keyes—the largest margin for a statewide race in Illinois history—he and Michelle posed for photos with Malia and Sasha.
As TV camera crews and photographers trooped in for the inevitable photo op with the family, the girls grew more and more impatient. “Can we stop taking pictures now?” Sasha asked as she fidgeted in Daddy’s lap. “I want to go home.”
The smiles, like the enthusiasm for a victory that had been all but assured for months, were forced. That night, Barack’s uncharacteristically low-key acceptance speech reflected the reality of his situation: while he had been elected to the U.S. Senate, the Kerry-Edwards ticket had gone down to defeat.
The next day, reporters asked Barack if he intended to make a run for the White House in 2008. “I can unequivocally say,” he replied, “I will not be running for national office in four years.” Later, Michelle sidled up to him. “I will hold you to that,” she said.
As he was sworn in, with a third of the Senate, as a member of the 109th Congress—Barack had already been told he would be assigned the same Senate desk used by Robert F. Kennedy—the Illinois freshman marveled at what he would call “my almost spooky good fortune.” Having won every one of his State Senate primary contests (and even the 2002 general election)
unopposed, Barack had sat back during the U.S. Senate race and watched as one formidable opponent after another self-destructed. Then he was handed the opportunity of a lifetime—the chance to deliver the keynote address at his party’s convention before a TV audience of millions. “It seemed like a fluke,” Barack had to concede. On his arrival at the Capitol, he felt like a rookie in a spotless uniform surrounded by “mud-splattered” players who “tended their wounds.”
Michelle would have none of it. After they took the children to watch Daddy replay the swearing-in ceremony with Vice President Dick Cheney for the cameras—six-year-old Malia shook his hand properly, but Sasha, three, slapped the veep’s palms—Michelle reminded her husband that he had worked hard to get here. As they walked out of the Capitol toward a reception at the Library of Congress, Michelle grabbed Barack’s hand and kissed him on the lips. “Congratulations, Mr. Senator,” she said.
“Congratulations, Madame Senator.”
Not to be outdone, Malia blurted out, “Daddy, are you going to be President?”
Careful not to answer his daughter in front of the reporters who were trailing them, Barack merely smiled. Michelle’s usual poker face was set firmly in place.
At the reception, Barack and Michelle greeted family members and friends from Africa, England, Hawaii, Illinois, Boston, and New York. All the Jacksons—Jesse, Jesse junior, and Santita—were there, as were Valerie Jarrett, Marty Nesbitt and his wife, Dr. Anita Blanchard, Emil Jones, and the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Toot, who was suffering from a variety of medical problems at age eighty-four, couldn’t travel from Hawaii, but Barack’s sister Maya made the trip with her husband of two years, University of Hawaii Assistant Professor of Creative Media Dr. Konrad Ng. A half-dozen relatives from Kenya were also on hand, celebrating the fact that one of their own had become only the second black man (after Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke) elected to the United States Senate since Reconstruction.
Barack and Michelle Page 24