Over the next two years, Michelle would take it upon herself to remind the adoring multitudes back in the United States that her husband was all too human. But for now, in Kenya, she was willing to do whatever was asked of her. When Barack wanted to draw attention to Africa’s AIDS epidemic by taking an HIV blood test, Michelle volunteered to take one, too. “It’s really a couples issue,” she explained, “so it doesn’t matter if one half of the couple is tested and the other isn’t.”
The same logic would apply to their next challenge. With his new book, The Audacity of Hope, climbing up the New York Times Best Seller List and the Democratic Party poised for sweeping victory in the 2006 congressional elections, Barack now admitted to Tim Russert on NBC’s Meet the Press that he was no longer ruling out a run for the White House in 2008. “I don’t want to be coy about this,” Barack said. “Given the responses I’ve been getting over the past several months, I have thought about the possibility, but I have not thought about it with the seriousness and the depth that is required.” If Barack did decide to run, he said, “I will make a public announcement and everybody will be able to go at me.”
Far more important than that television appearance—or for that matter, any TV interview that year—was the Obamas’ joint October 19, 2006, appearance on Oprah. Oprah, who had shared a pew with Barack at Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church back in the 1990s, was now an outspoken supporter.
Winfrey had actually begun to see Barack as something more than just another politician back in 2004 when he gave his convention keynote address. When she decided to interview him a few months later for the November 2004 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine, her friends asked the usually apolitical Winfrey, “What’s happened to you?” She replied that in Barack she saw “something above and beyond politics. It feels like something new.”
On September 25, 2006, Oprah said on Larry King Live that she hoped Obama would run for President. Now, three weeks later, she was chatting with Michelle and Barack about whether Michelle sometimes felt like a single mother (“You know, you always feel that way…. That’s always the nature of the beast”) and the fact that once when he called home to report that he was working on an important nuclear nonproliferation bill, Michelle asked him to buy ant traps on the way home.
“She says we have ants,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Ants?’ She said, ‘Yes, we have ants and I need ant traps. We have ants in the bathroom and ants in the kitchen. So on your way home, can you pick up some ant traps, please?’ You know, so I’m thinking, you know, ‘Is John McCain stopping by Walgreens to grab ant traps on the way home?’”
“If he’s not,” Michelle shot back, “he should be.”
Oprah asked Barack to consider running for President, but he declined to discuss it. With good reason. He might have had the backing of the most powerful woman in the country, but he had not yet persuaded the only woman whose opinion really mattered.
In the immediate wake of their Oprah appearance, The Audacity of Hope rocketed to number one on the New York Times Best Seller List. It, too, would go on to sell more than two million copies, boosting the Obamas’ household income in 2007 alone to $4.2 million. (In the meantime, his audio book recording of Dreams from My Father had earned him a spoken word Grammy.) The week following the Obamas’ bow on Oprah, Barack was on the cover of Time magazine with the heading “Why Barack Obama Could Be the Next President.”
Despite the groundswell of support for a presidential run, Michelle was not yet ready to hop aboard the Obama bandwagon. When his former State Senate rival Dan Hynes, now a friend and backer, urged him to run, Barack replied, “Well, Dan, I’m flattered—but Michelle will never forgive you.” He said much the same thing to Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Connie Schultz. “You know,” he confided to Schultz in late 2006, “Michelle really does not want me to do this.” And without her blessing, he told Schultz, there would be no run for the presidency.
It was part of a larger tug-of-war between Barack and Michelle that had gone on ever since he pleaded with her to let him run for the U.S. Senate. “We haven’t had a lot of peace and quiet over the last four years,” he conceded. “Michelle’s always had veto power, and always will, over decisions that have a direct impact on her.”
Michelle’s first concern, recalled Axelrod, was that running shouldn’t be “a crazy, harebrained idea. Because she’s not into crazy, harebrained ideas.” Michelle, who like everyone else believed that Hillary Clinton had the inside track, wanted reassurance that they could really defeat the powerful Clinton machine. She also wanted details on how the campaign was going to be funded. “Where’s the money going to come from?” she asked point-blank. “She didn’t want Barack,” Axelrod added, “to launch some kind of empty effort here.”
During a series of marathon meetings—two of which lasted over four hours—her husband’s team of advisers and trusted longtime friends like Valerie Jarrett, Abner Mikva, and Newton Minow gradually persuaded Michelle that victory was achievable. “Granted, it was a long shot,” said a participant in several of the meetings, “but we showed her how, if all the pieces fell into place, Barack could win enough delegates to secure the nomination.”
Not surprisingly, a major concern was her husband’s safety. “It only takes one person and it only takes one incident,” Michelle told writer David Mendell. “I mean, I know history, too.”
Ever since the keynote address in Boston, Michelle had commented on some of the odd characters who seemed to be among the faces in the crowds that engulfed her husband. She wondered about the obsessed “crazies” who, like John Lennon’s assassin, Mark David Chapman, might seek to harm the very person they idolized.
Like Alma Powell, whose concern for her husband’s safety led Colin Powell not to seek the Republican presidential nomination, Michelle faced the added realization that as an African American her husband made a particularly attractive target. Conversely, she would also use her husband’s race to banish her fears. “I don’t lose sleep over it,” she would say when asked if she worried about the danger to her husband. “Because the realities are that as a black man Barack can get shot going to the gas station, you know, so you—you know, you can’t make decisions based on fear and the possibility of what might happen.”
In any event, Axelrod brought in security experts to go over the plans they had for protecting Barack during a campaign that would take him back and forth across the country for two years. “Mrs. Obama was very realistic,” said one. “She knew there were no guarantees, but she wanted to know precisely what it was we could do to keep her husband safe.”
As for the children, Michelle wanted to make sure that their lives would not be disrupted any more than they already were. Daddy’s absences were inevitable, but Michelle promised herself that she would be home every night by six—to make sure they did their homework, eat dinner with them, tuck them into bed, and be there when they woke up the following morning.
Not that Michelle actually woke Malia and Sasha up in the mornings. Like her mother, Michelle supplied the girls with their own alarm clocks with the understanding that they were responsible for getting themselves ready for school, making their beds, and being down in the kitchen in time for breakfast. Mom was there. So was the Obamas’ full-time “family caregiver,” Marlease Bushnell, and a full-time housekeeper charged with “things I don’t fully enjoy,” Michelle said, “like cleaning, laundry, and cooking.”
Marian Robinson—the person Michelle unhesitatingly referred to as “my best friend”—had already proven herself to be the family’s indispensable backstop. Michelle’s mother, who ran a senior marathon at age sixty and was strongly in favor of her son-in-law’s presidential aspirations, reassured Michelle that she would continue to take care of Malia and Sasha whenever Mommy and Daddy were on the stump.
Michelle had even come up with a new way for the candidate to keep in touch with his family during the campaign. She purchased webcams for Barack and the girls, so that each evening they could connec
t via their respective Macs and recap the day’s events.
In making her own list of needs for the coming campaign, she made one demand nonnegotiable—that she be allowed to spend Saturdays with Malia and Sasha. For years, Michelle had taken the girls to spend Saturdays with her friends Yvonne Davila and Sandy Matthews and their daughters. The drill was usually the same: ballet, then soccer practice or perhaps tennis lessons, lunch at California Pizza Kitchen or Pizza Capri, and then a movie—something along the lines of Harry Potter or the latest offering from Disney. If there was time, they might take the kids to browse the children’s stacks at 57th Street Books. Even if it meant dodging reporters and traveling with a phalanx of bodyguards—which it eventually would—Michelle insisted on preserving the family’s Saturday routine.
At the time, polls showed that New York Senator Hillary Clinton was the overwhelming favorite to win her party’s nomination for President. Given the quixotic nature of her husband’s candidacy, the next question Michelle asked embarrassed even her. “I know it’s crazy, guys,” she asked, “but what happens if we win?”
Michelle and the girls had remained behind during the nearly two years since her husband was elected to the U.S. Senate. They would obviously be living in the White House if he somehow managed to emerge victorious in 2008, but where would the girls go to school? Would they be able to have anything approaching “normal” lives in the White House? How could they make the prospect of leaving their family and friends in Chicago less wrenching for Malia and Sasha?
“It will be a hard transition for these little girls,” she said in one of the meetings. “They’ll be leaving the only home that they’ve known. Someone’s got to be the steward of that transition. And it can’t be the President of the United States. It will be me.”
Barack, meanwhile, had agonized about what a presidential run might mean for him as a father. Indeed, at one of the many book parties celebrating the publication of The Audacity of Hope, Barack broke down while apologizing for all of the time he had spent away from his children. He was crying so hard, Valerie Jarrett recalled, “he couldn’t continue.”
In December, Barack met with Newton Minow and Abner Mikva in Minow’s offices at Sidley Austin. “I just don’t want to be away from my little girls,” he told them. “They need their father to be there for them now.”
“Look,” Minow replied, “I’m no psychologist, but if you’re going to be away from your girls, now is the time to do it—when they’re small and adaptable. It’s far more important to be around them when they’re teenagers—that’s when you’ll have the most impact.”
Barack was skeptical.
“Abner and I have raised six daughters between us—three each,” Minow continued. “We were away a lot when they were little, and they all turned out great.”
By the time Barack left his office, Minow said, “I think he was looking at things differently. We helped ease his concerns enough so that he felt free to move forward. But of course it still all hinged on whether Michelle was willing to go along.”
As he had done so many times before during their Christmas holidays, Barack used this time together to convince his wife to let him make just one more run. There were long walks on the beach and “we just talked it through,” Barack recalled. “It wasn’t as if it was a slam-dunk for me.”
It was during this quiet family time away from the pressures of their public lives that Michelle seriously considered whether this was a quest they could afford to embark upon. She decided it was. “When you’re in Hawaii, on a beach,” Michelle explained, “everything looks possible.”
The fact that her husband had delivered on so many impossible-sounding promises in the past had a lot to do with her decision to give Barack the green light. “Look, he’s done everything he said he would,” she told a friend. “He’s written bestselling books, he’s built this successful political career…. I need to get on board.”
“I think part of the reason she agreed to do it,” Barack said, “was that she knew that she had veto power, that she and the girls ultimately mattered more than my own ambitions…and if she said no we would be okay.”
Michelle’s about-face also had much to do with her own sense of mission. She had long felt—even more strongly than her husband—that it was time to wrest power from the “trust fund brats” and “people with the right daddies” she had had to deal with at Princeton and Harvard.
“To me, it’s now or never,” she said. “We’re not going to keep running and running and running, because at some point you do get the life beaten out of you. It hasn’t been beaten out of us yet. We need to be in there now, while we’re still fresh and open and fearless and bold.”
In the coming weeks and months Michelle would admonish Barack and his inner circle to “not forget what we’re fighting for.” For Michelle, Axelrod recalled, it was important that any campaign remain “consistent with what he is and what he thinks, and we wouldn’t distort that.”
Michelle’s blessing came with two caveats. First, she made her husband vow that he would follow through on the pledge that he had never managed to keep in all the years of their marriage: that at long last he would quit smoking. While they were still on vacation, he began chewing Nicorette gum.
Michelle made it clear that she was willing to put herself and their children on the line “once and only once. This is it,” she told Barack. “If it doesn’t work this time, don’t think we’re doing this again in another four years.”
The next step: explaining it all to the girls. Barack and Michelle sat their daughters down and, as plainly as they could, told them that Daddy was going to be away even more than usual—and that, while Mommy was going to help him out, she would still be there for them most of the time.
While they stressed that becoming President was a great honor, and that as President Daddy could do a great deal of good for a great many people, Michelle and Barack knew what it would take to seal the deal.
Ever since they had seen President Bush’s pet Scottie Barney scampering around the South Lawn during a visit to the White House (“They were so bored until Barney showed up,” Michelle said, “and they started running with him”), the Obama children had been lobbying for a puppy. But Malia’s asthma—which, incidentally, occasionally flared up when Daddy smoked inside the house—made her parents reluctant to bring a dog into their home. Now the girls were so adamant about getting a dog that Michelle decided it was time to begin researching hypoallergenic breeds. “They’re such good girls,” she said. “I can’t deny them this one thing that they want so badly.”
“Win or lose,” Michelle told them, “when the election is over—and if you’ve been good—we’re getting a dog.”
“Promise?” Malia asked.
“Promise,” her father answered.
Malia wanted to know one more thing. “Are you going to try to be President?” she asked. “Shouldn’t you be Vice President first?”
It was enough for Malia to hit the Internet and begin her own thorough search of breeds that are considered hypoallergenic. Over the course of the next two years, she and Sasha would periodically bring up a candidate so the family could weigh the pros and cons of that particular breed. “At this point I think they know more about dogs,” said a Hyde Park neighbor, “than your average vet.”
In January, Barack announced on his Web site that he was forming a presidential exploratory committee. Around this time, Michelle suggested that, by way of heading off any future criticism, Barack pay $375 to clear up the delinquent parking tickets he had racked up years earlier while a law student at Harvard.
Of more concern to Barack’s advisers were the rumors that Obama was Muslim. The campaign issued a statement that Barack had “never been a practicing Muslim.” Yet the candidate himself saw no problem with making known his affection for Muslim culture, and no need to disguise the fact that it was part of his life as a child in Indonesia. During an interview with Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, Barack suddenl
y began reciting the opening lines of the Arabic call to prayer—Allah-u Akbar, Allah-u Akbar (“God is the greatest, God is the greatest”)—with what Kristof called a “first-rate Arabic accent.” Barack described the Muslim call to prayer as “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.”
A few weeks later, Michelle would pull back to a part-time position at the University of Chicago Hospitals so that she could campaign for her husband. It was not the only career concession Michelle would make. In light of the fact that Barack was a vocal critic of Wal-Mart’s labor practices, Michelle’s position on the board of Wal-Mart supplier TreeHouse Foods became problematic. After TreeHouse closed its pickle plant in La Junta, Colorado, displacing 150 Hispanic workers, pressure mounted on Michelle to resign. She resisted, in part because she felt she would need to be able to earn a living if “something unexpected or unfortunate” happened during the campaign.
If her husband were to fall victim to an assassin—something she had thought about long and hard—Michelle said, “I need to be able to take care of myself and my kids.” She allowed that any such tragedy would trigger “great sympathy and outpouring. But I have to maintain some level of professional credibility…. I need to be in a position for my kids where, if they lose their father, they don’t lose everything.”
On February 10, 2007, fifteen thousand people waited in the cold outside the flag-draped Old State Capitol Building in Springfield. It was here where, in 1858, Abraham Lincoln issued his famous warning that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”
Barack had wanted the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who was still railing against America as “a Eurocentric wasteland of lilywhite lies,” to give the invocation. His advisers, fearful that the slumbering press would soon latch onto Wright’s incendiary opinions, wanted Barack to withdraw the invitation to speak.
For the Obamas, who gave $22,500 to Wright’s church in 2006 alone, it was a tough call. “Barack got the title for his book from Pastor Wright talking about the ‘Audacity of Hope’ in his sermons,” said a church member. “But it was Michelle who really wanted him to give the blessing when Barack announced for President. She didn’t like it when they kind of ‘disinvited’ the reverend, but I guess there wasn’t a whole lot she could do about it.”
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