Michelle Obama

by Peter Slevin

  Mikva, then a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, tried and failed to recruit Barack for a clerkship following his law review election. Barack informed Mikva that he intended to return to Chicago and go into politics. His political ambitions at that moment remained unchanneled, but they were not entirely unknown. He was twenty-six years old and on his way to Harvard when he had a drink in Chicago with Bruce Orenstein, an organizer for the United Neighborhood Organization. The two men had worked on a proposal, supported by Harold Washington, to fund South Side neighborhood improvements with fees from local landfills. After they ordered beers, Barack asked Orenstein what he wanted to be doing in ten years. Orenstein said he hoped to be making film documentaries and batted the question back to Barack. In ten years, Barack said, he wanted to be mayor of Chicago.

  Back in Chicago after graduation, Barack lived with Michelle on the top floor of the Euclid Avenue house, upstairs from Marian Robinson, as he studied for the Illinois bar exam. As he considered his future, he set out not only to identify opportunities, but to preserve options, including political ones. He wanted no baggage that might later limit his choices or his chances. “Barack thinks about everything. He doesn’t do things serendipitously,” said attorney Judson Miner, who shared long lunches with Barack that summer of 1991, often at a local Thai restaurant. “He has got one life and he has got to figure out, ‘How do I use it effectively? How do I position myself?’ ” Fresh from the intellectual ferment at Harvard, Barack was discussing with Miner the pros and cons of using the courts as a tool for social change.

  Miner, two decades older, had served two years as Harold Washington’s corporation counsel, or principal city attorney, and led a small progressive law firm housed in a red-brick townhouse just north of downtown. The firm, then known as Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, made its name in civil rights law while advising nonprofit organizations and doing some general litigation. When he read of Barack’s election as Harvard Law Review president, Miner had called the law review office. The person who answered essentially told him to take a number. He left a message. Barack telephoned Miner at home that night and surprised him by knowing of his work in the Washington administration. As their conversations unfolded, Miner encouraged him to come to work at the firm, promising that he could choose assignments “that would let him sleep soundly at night.” At the same time, it was clear to both men that the activist, anti-establishment nature of the work might carry other costs, two years into what would become the twenty-two-year reign of Mayor Richard M. Daley. Barack “knew full well that the mayor of Chicago was not enamored of us,” Miner said, recalling that some people warned Barack against joining the firm. Being labeled an independent Democrat could be a liability, but Barack was sufficiently savvy about Chicago’s fractured politics to know that the approach could have the twin benefits of suiting his personality and winning more votes than it would cost him.

  Barack signed on at Miner’s firm, which represented most of the city’s African American aldermen and worked with the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund. Barack took the side of minority residents in Chicago who challenged Citibank’s mortgage practices. He worked on behalf of black voters and aldermen in a St. Louis voting rights case and helped develop a novel legal theory to defend an Illinois redistricting map that had been challenged on grounds of reverse discrimination. For several years, he devoted time to Barnett v. Daley, which sought greater representation for African American voters in Chicago. An appellate court said the case tested “the outer limits of minority rights in redistricting situations.” Barack also did legal work for the Reverend Arthur M. Brazier’s Apostolic Church of God in Woodlawn, as well as a community health network for low-income residents and two nonprofit organizations intent on developing affordable housing. Miner said Barack’s efforts were “enormously thoughtful.”

  As Miner had pledged, the work did feel worthwhile to Barack, and if he did not always sleep soundly, it was more likely due to his tendency to overcommit. While he was working out details with the law firm, he was under contract to write a book that started as a reflection on American race relations and ended as a memoir. He accepted the challenge of registering tens of thousands of new voters and agreed to teach constitutional law at the University of Chicago. And there was his relationship with Michelle, who was not content to be just one item on an endless list. He loved her; it wasn’t that. He wanted to be a good partner; it wasn’t that, either. He simply wanted to do a lot of things, he wanted to do them well and, it often seemed, simultaneously, a tall order even for Barack Obama.

  AS VALERIE JARRETT HAD OBSERVED, he and Michelle were very much a couple, but there was the question of marriage. Not one to wait in silence, Michelle made clear in 1991 that she was ready. “If this isn’t leading to marriage, then, you know, don’t waste my time,” she told him. He usually replied by saying they had a great relationship, why did they need a piece of paper to confirm it? He did not get far with that argument, as anyone who knew Michelle could have told him. “He would sometimes say, ‘If two people love each other, what is marriage?’ ” she recalled. “And I would say, ‘Marriage is everything.’ ” Meanwhile, without telling her, he quietly spoke with her family about his intentions. One night, at a fine dinner for two, ostensibly to celebrate his efforts on the Illinois bar exam, Michelle again raised the question of marriage and began haranguing him for his refusal to commit. Dessert came. On Michelle’s plate was a box containing an engagement ring. She was floored, and thrilled. Barack laughed, “That kind of shuts you up, doesn’t it?”

  THEY WERE MARRIED on October 3, 1992, at Trinity United Church of Christ, the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. officiating. It was Barack who first joined the church—motto: “Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian”—near the end of his community organizing days. Trinity offered a sense of community and mission. Anything but staid, it was especially popular with African American professionals, who were variously provoked, entertained, or inspired by Wright’s theatrical sermons. One of Barack’s signature lines, and the title of his second book, The Audacity of Hope, came from Wright—as did trouble for his presidential campaign.

  Standing in for their father, Craig walked his sister down the aisle. For the reception, the party moved to the South Shore Cultural Center, formerly the no-Negroes-allowed South Shore Country Club, now owned by the Chicago Park District. In a ballroom facing Lake Michigan, maid of honor Santita Jackson sang Stevie Wonder’s “You and I (We Can Conquer the World),” a song Michelle cherished from Talking Book, the first record album she owned. It was also the first record album Barack bought with his own money. The bride wore a dramatic white gown. Barack dressed in white tie. The families dined, danced, and got to know each other. Barack’s mother, Ann, was there from Indonesia; she was soon to start a job at Women’s World Banking, a New York nonprofit that used microfinance to help low-income women establish businesses. Madelyn Dunham, Barack’s grandmother Toot, made the trip from Hawaii. “Everybody was delighted with Michelle,” said her brother, Charles Payne. “I think people thought Barack was damn lucky to get her.”

  Family and friends of the bride and groom recognized the strength in each that would help the other. Barack struck Craig as a partner who would appreciate Michelle and earn her respect. Michelle’s personality reminded Payne of the inner toughness of Barack’s mother and grandmother. For Kelly Jo MacArthur, a colleague of Michelle’s at Sidley, the analogy was hydrogen and oxygen: “We understood that together they were going to be so much more than they would have been individually.” Harvard law professor David Wilkins recalled the moment he heard that Michelle and Barack were getting married: “I remember thinking to myself, ‘That’s perfect.’ He has somebody who will complement him perfectly, both by being unbelievably supportive and by being unbelievably tough and honest. I said that’s what Barack Obama needs. He’s going to get every temptation in the world and she is going to ground him.”

  AT CITY H
ALL, still in her late twenties, Michelle was one of several staff members with the title of administrative assistant, a moniker that only sounded like a fancy title for secretary. When Jarrett became the commissioner of Planning and Economic Development, Michelle joined her. There, in pursuit of jobs, services, and advancement in neglected neighborhoods, she had money to spend and scissors sometimes just sharp enough to cut red tape. Michelle’s job was “operational,” as a friend put it. She was a troubleshooter whose interests and assignments ranged widely. She worked on business development, but also on issues connected to infant mortality, mobile immunization, and after-school programs. Her portfolio included black neighborhoods unused to attention from the mayor’s office. One question was whom to help. Another was how. An elemental question, said colleague Cindy Moelis, was “whether city government could have a positive impact.”

  Michelle proved to be flexible and practical, capable of steering her way through a problem, colleagues said. Co-worker Sally Duros recalled Michelle as a “straight shooter” who moved with confidence despite her inexperience. “She was not the type of person who would do you wrong,” Duros said, referring to infighting in the bureaucratic vortex of a city powered by politics. “She had a strong value system, a strong sense of what she wanted to do, and so she wasn’t going to put up with people who were giving her crap, which is a pretty tough stance to take in City Hall.” Duros worked with Michelle on a project designed to improve the distribution of Community Development Block Grants, a program that used federal dollars to attract economic activity to hardscrabble communities. The program was administered downtown, which proved inefficient and ineffective. A better approach, Michelle believed, was to pipe the money directly into the neighborhoods and help recipients avoid the wasteful effects of patronage and graft. “I remember a sense of frustration about the pace of decision making in government and the complexity of the number of characters and actors involved,” said David Mosena, Mayor Daley’s chief of staff when Michelle was hired. He remained a mentor. “She was ‘Let’s get this done. Don’t tell me stupid stories, don’t lie to me, don’t BS.’ She’s got a great laugh and a great smile, but I don’t recall her telling a lot of jokes and yukking around the water fountain. She wanted to see things get accomplished.”

  The city job got Michelle into working-class communities far from the antiseptic corridors of the downtown office towers, and it gave her a taste of the possibilities of government. But it also delivered an education in the obstacles and the infighting that so often inhibited worthy projects. She felt dissatisfied, as she had at Sidley. “It still wasn’t enough, because city government is like a corporation in many ways,” she said later. Not eighteen months into the job, she was ready to move on. “She wanted to be on her own, wanted direct control, wanted to see the results of her actions,” Mosena said. The answer would be an organization called Public Allies.

  WHILE MICHELLE WAS WORKING at City Hall, Barack took time to run Project Vote, a drive that added more than 100,000 African American voters to the rolls ahead of the 1992 election. He raised money, hired ten people, recruited seven hundred volunteer registrars, and saturated black radio with the slogan “It’s a Power Thing.” His goal was to energize Chicago’s African American community in ways not seen since Harold Washington’s campaigns and help make Carol Moseley Braun the second black U.S. senator elected since Reconstruction. He was calculating where he could make the biggest difference, said his boss, Sandy Newman, who was struck by the way he expanded the scope of the job. Barack raised more money than any of Project Vote’s state directors ever had. “It wasn’t part of the job description, but it was part of what he did,” Newman said. “He did a great job of enlisting a broad spectrum of organizations and people, including many who did not get along well with one another.”

  For his financial team, Barack turned to John Rogers, a black Princeton graduate, friend of Craig Robinson, and chairman of Ariel Capital, a mutual fund he started. Rogers was joined by John Schmidt, a well-connected white lawyer who had been Richard M. Daley’s chief of staff and a candidate for Illinois governor. For grassroots help, he not only developed an array of supporters, but he approached them in ways that made them feel valued. It was no accident that the techniques reflected his community organizing experience. “He went around to each of us individually, sat us down, and said, ‘Here’s what I’d like to do. It’s daunting.’ He’d say things like, ‘Do you think we should do this? What role would you like to play?’ One-on-one is what we call it in organizing. It’s such a sign of respect,” said Madeline Talbott, chief organizer for Illinois ACORN. “Everybody else just puts out an email and says ‘Y’all come.’ Barack doesn’t do that. He talked to people individually and it’s just so different.” West Side alderman Sam Burrell called it the most efficient campaign he had seen in twenty years in politics.

  There was no doubt that his own political future was on Barack’s mind. Asked at the end of 1992 about running for office, he answered, “Who knows? But probably not immediately.” He then smiled and said to his interviewer, “Was that a sufficiently politic ‘maybe’? My sincere answer is I’ll run for office if I feel I can accomplish more that way than agitating from the outside. I don’t know if that’s true right now.” His work at Project Vote earned him attention and contacts. The next year, Crain’s magazine named thirty-three-year-old Barack to its list of “40 Under 40” rising stars. The magazine noted his passion for social justice, his commitment to the wonky concept of “building institutions,” and his decision to teach classes on racism and the law at the University of Chicago. “If you have the chance to go to Harvard Law School, it’s no accomplishment to be a partner in a law firm,” Barack said. “It’s an accomplishment to make a difference.”

  Despite its praise, the magazine also demonstrated that he might not have the ideal name for the political future he was beginning to imagine for himself. The brief story spelled his name incorrectly three different ways, identifying him as “Borock Oboma” in the first paragraph and “Barock” in the third.

  THE IDEA THAT BECAME Public Allies, the organization Michelle would join after leaving City Hall, emerged from the minds of two young women looking to attract members of their generation to public service. Vanessa Kirsch and Katrina Browne polished the concept in November 1991 at a Wingspread conference in Wisconsin, where one invitee was Barack Obama. On the roster of participants, he listed his address as the Robinson bungalow and his profession as “writer.” At first, the new organization took a very Washington name, the National Center for Careers in Public Life. But as several participants drove away from the conference in a van, they discussed how young people so often were seen as public enemies. Public Allies was born. They received an early grant from Elspeth Revere at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and, soon, federal backing for a program that would provide training and public service apprenticeships. After the first class of “Allies” graduated in Washington, D.C., in 1993, Kirsch and Browne looked to start a chapter in Chicago. In search of an executive director, they turned to Barack, who had become a board member. He pointed them toward Michelle and stepped down from the board as the search proceeded.

  The job called for creating a mentoring and internship program. The director would build a curriculum, recruit a board, raise money, choose a diverse array of Allies—thirty per year at first, then forty—and find positions for them. Four days a week for ten months, Allies served as apprentices. Some went to City Hall, where Michelle retained her contacts, while others worked with education programs, youth development agencies, economic development projects, and environmental organizations. One lawyer did legal work in a Hispanic neighborhood. Time on Fridays and some evenings was reserved for leadership training sessions and team projects. Jacky Grimshaw, a former Harold Washington aide, was one of the board members who interviewed Michelle. Grimshaw’s first impression: “Boy, she’s tall!” Michelle spoke confidently about how to structure and administer the progra
m and how to connect with young people from a wide array of backgrounds. “She was quick to smile. She was very personable. She had that warm personality, which is what we were looking for,” Grimshaw said. “We were talking about young persons who needed guidance and we needed a young person to be their leader. She was a perfect fit.” Grimshaw also felt sure that anyone admitted to the Chicago program would see that Michelle was direct. There would be no trifling.

  As Michelle developed the leadership training and community organizing components of Public Allies, she drew on the ideas of John McKnight and Jody Kretzmann, Northwestern University faculty members who had spotted a flaw in the way outsiders typically perceived the neighborhoods they were trying to help. As they saw it, do-gooders too often failed to appreciate the abilities of people they were trying to help and too rarely drew on them for solutions. Calling their model ABCD, for Asset-Based Community Development, they said solutions needed to be crafted from the inside out and the ground up. Projects should build on neighborhood efforts in order to avoid becoming beholden to outsiders, their theories and their money. A key goal was self-reliance. Only if the project were practical and made sense to the residents would it be sustainable. And only if it were sustainable would it make the neighborhood stronger.