by Peter Slevin
Philanthropy, however, caught his eye. The Joyce Foundation, which distributed about $55 million a year to projects connected to such challenges as schools, urban violence, campaign reform, and the environment, was looking for a new president. The job would pay well, it would be close to home, the hours would be manageable, and the work could have an impact. Barack was already on the foundation board, so he knew the players and the mission. He prepared seriously for his interview with board members, working on a strategy with Dan Shomon, his senate aide.
But when he went into the meeting, he was shaking. Shomon said Barack was more fearful that he would get the job than that he would be turned down. Yes, he had been frustrated at times with Springfield and he had felt “completely mortified and humiliated” by the loss to Rush. He was anxious to please Michelle, make time for his daughters, and add some order to his life. But winning the job would mean quitting the legislature. His political career might be over. Board members sensed his uncertainty. One told him, “For God’s sake, Barack, this is a great job. But you don’t want it.” Indeed, he realized, he did not.
Michelle, for all of her frustration, felt his anguish. “It’s hard to look at somebody with the talents and gifts of Barack and say, ‘Go do something smaller than what you could do,’ ” she said. Also watching the drama unfold was Maya Soetero-Ng, Barack’s half sister, named for poet Maya Angelou the year after the publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Barack agonized, honestly unsure whether to give politics another chance, Soetero-Ng recalled. “And at the same time,” she said, “I think he felt a stirring within and the sense that he was destined for something bigger.”
NINE
Just Don’t Screw It Up
The University of Chicago brass gathered under a tent with local notables in November 2001 to break ground for a $135 million state-of-the-art children’s hospital. Michelle was there in her new role as director of community outreach for the university medical center. Barack dropped by, a local state senator. Through the crisp morning air came the voice of a man on a bullhorn. His name was Omar Shareef, and he was leading a band of protesters who said the university was not giving enough business to African American construction workers. Michelle had only been on the job for a few weeks, but she calculated that this was a community affairs matter. She walked up to Shareef and invited him to talk things over.
Michelle had been on maternity leave after Sasha’s birth, giving little thought to her career, when the new job opportunity came up. Susan Sher and Valerie Jarrett, who had opened doors for her at City Hall a decade earlier, proposed her for the role. Sher was the medical center’s general counsel and Jarrett sat on the board of trustees. Michelle felt torn about working while the girls were young, but her reluctance freed her to seek a substantial salary and, especially, a flexible schedule. The day of the interview, with no babysitter, Michelle bundled up Sasha, who was still nursing, and took her along. “This is my life,” she told hospital president Michael Riordan. Charmed and impressed, he met her terms. She could hardly say no. Not only did the job suit her practical side, it carried the explicit goal of helping South Side communities, a mission largely absent from the University Community Service Center post that she had occupied for the previous five years. It would be her most ambitious job yet. It would also be the last time that her work and her identity would be so independent of Barack.
Michelle saw the largely undefined hospital perch as a way to build on her earlier work and help connect the university with the surrounding neighborhoods. She told colleagues when she was hired that the university hospital, with its staff of 9,500, needed to send people into the community. Borrowing from her Asset-Based Community Development experience, she scheduled staff volunteer days in grittier parts of the city and took trustees and senior staff on field trips. Stepping from a bus at a chosen intersection, the passengers would see in one direction a street of broken-down and boarded-up houses, suggesting decay. Then she would have them turn to see a block of renovated homes with sparkling windows and fresh paint. At her instigation, the hospital supported a Christmas pageant at the Reverend Arthur Brazier’s Apostolic Church of God and participated in Bud Billiken Day and the country’s oldest African American parade, started in 1929 by Chicago Defender publisher Robert S. Abbott. Michelle’s father and her uncle Nomenee had belonged to the Billiken club as young children. She also took part in the medical school’s summer pipeline program, designed to draw under-the-radar minority students toward science and medicine. Urging them to study hard and recognize where education could take them, her message echoed her work at Public Allies and presaged her efforts as first lady. The heart of her pitch, said a colleague, was an admonition not to be a victim of circumstance.
Explaining her goals for the medical center, Michelle wrote in 2005 that the University of Chicago needed to adjust its priorities. “It’s not enough to be at the forefront of medicine if we’re not respected in the community,” she said, maintaining that the university talked “too much about the negative and we don’t embrace all the great assets of the community that surrounds us.” Yet she had words of advice for neighboring black residents, too. “The community also has to be open to the new direction and new leadership that is here. And sometimes we have a tough time stepping away from the past.” She included herself in both camps: the we of the university and the we of the black community. Describing herself as “a regular little black girl from the South Side,” she said, “Somebody like me, who has feet in both worlds, can help to bridge the gap and create solutions.”
WHEN MICHELLE DISCUSSED minority hiring with Omar Shareef, the man with the bullhorn, she brought colleagues from the university. Shareef brought fellow activists. One of his partners, the Reverend Gregory Daniels, was decidedly unimpressed. He complained afterward that the protesters were being fobbed off on underlings “who have jobs to protect or do not have the best interest of blacks at heart.” He cited Michelle specifically and demanded that she be removed, claiming that she was working with the university leadership to split the African American community. He called it the “Willie Lynch method,” a reference to an apocryphal 1712 story about a Virginia slave master who advocated divide-and-conquer tactics to keep black people in line. Michelle persisted, however, and within a month of the protest, the medical center reached a deal with Shareef’s African-American Contractors Association. In return for his promise to end the protests, the university pledged to deliver business to qualified minority-run companies.
Minority contracting was a concern of Michelle’s during a stint as head of the Chicago Transit Authority’s citizens advisory board—Jarrett was CTA chairman at the time—and it would become a significant part of her portfolio during the seven years she spent at the medical center. She saw the strategy as a way to support businesses run by African Americans, Hispanics, and women, and to pump money directly into surrounding communities. To strengthen the contracting program, she hired the Chicago Urban League’s diversity monitor, Joan Archie, a CTA consultant. The hospital made progress and won awards. From the 2002 to 2008 budget years, 42.9 percent of the medical center’s spending on new construction went to firms run by minorities or women, a total of $48.8 million, according to university figures. In Michelle’s final year on the job, the medical center channeled another $16.2 million to such firms for goods and services, or 5.7 percent of the overall budget.
Kenneth P. Kates, the hospital’s chief operating officer, recalled a meeting where the white owner of a large firm thought he could nod agreeably and ignore the minority hiring requirements. Michelle, however, was “tenacious,” he said, and the owner got no more business until he met the hospital’s demands. Kates called her a quick thinker who brooked no nonsense yet managed to be collegial. “She would not shy away from taking a position. No matter what it was, you always knew where she stood,” Kates said. “She was very good at laying out why she thought she was right. Some people come across as holier than thou. That was not her at all.
She never took herself too seriously.” After Michelle got to work, he said, the hospital’s attention to the black community became “staggeringly different.”
Michelle also pushed for greater access to the exclusive University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, which Malia and Sasha attended from an early age. She was among a group of board members convinced that “Lab,” a private school coveted by parents across the city, had wrongly reduced its commitment to diversity by race and class and needed to do more. Opponents countered that allocating more slots for diversity would hurt the university’s recruiting efforts by limiting spaces for the children of faculty and staff. “Let’s just look at the facts,” she would say, according to John Rogers, a friend and fellow board member who would later become chairman. “She has this enormous passion to make sure the Lab School remains this diverse, welcoming place for people of color and people of different socioeconomic backgrounds. It took a lot of courage and conviction to push the agenda. Not only to push the diversity, which can be uncomfortable in a public setting, but also the admissions policy.”
SMILING AND SHAKING HANDS, Barack worked a Chicago ballroom in the summer of 2003. The event was a fundraiser for Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation, but Barack saw it as a chance to talk up his latest quixotic quest: a run for the U.S. Senate. Few people had heard of Barack at that point, surely not enough to make a cerebral Hawaiian-born man named Barack Obama just the third African American elected to the Senate since Reconstruction. “I saw Barack working the crowd,” recalled Geoffrey Stone, a constitutional law scholar and University of Chicago provost. “He was going from person to person, taking their elbows and shaking their hands and looking them in the eye. I was watching this for a while and I thought, ‘Ach, what a waste.’ ”
What chance did he have, this unproven black pol, one of fifty-nine Illinois state senators, a sometime lawyer and law professor who so recently had lost a congressional race by thirty percentage points? It was highly unlikely that he would make it through the primary against a large field of Democrats who were prominent, wealthy, or both. Even if he did, it seemed probable that he would face a moderate Republican incumbent with deep pockets who wielded the advantages of office. Stone found himself standing next to Barack at the shrimp bowl. “Why are you wasting your time on this?” Stone asked him. “Watching you work the crowd like this, it’s sort of pathetic. Why don’t you make a decision, commit yourself. I think you really could have a career as an academic. I think we’d give you an appointment.” In other words, Stone was thinking, Make something of yourself.
“He took my elbow,” Stone recalled, “and looked me in the eye and said, ‘Geof, I really appreciate that. I hear you. I know what you’re saying. But I really feel I have a responsibility and a sense of opportunity and I just have to give it a try.’ I remember thinking as he turned back to go into the crowd, What a putz.”
Much had changed since Barack’s jarring defeat in the 2000 congressional race and his flirtation with the Joyce Foundation. He had climbed out of his funk. He had won a third term in Springfield and was driving around the state, learning about places that bore no resemblance to the South Side. Among them were the long reaches of Illinois that lay closer to Memphis and Little Rock than to Chicago. If he were going to build a winning coalition and win statewide office, he would need voters in places like these. He was nothing if not self-critical, and he intently studied his mistakes in the Bobby Rush debacle. He worked on his delivery, which had sometimes come across as wonkish or disdainful. He redoubled his legislative efforts and made the rounds of the pols, preachers, and money people in Chicago who had scoffed at his candidacy. If he decided not to give up on politics, maybe losing to Rush would turn out to be a lucky break, like flunking a midterm with six weeks left until the final. “A wake-up call,” said Bill Daley, the mayor’s politically minded younger brother. “He didn’t seem to get bitter. He didn’t turn on people. He engaged people more and worked it. And then he decided to throw the bomb, and rightly so.”
Before he could enter the U.S. Senate contest, Barack not only had to convince himself, he had to persuade Michelle. It was late 2002 when Valerie Jarrett hosted a meal among friends to discuss the prospect. She included Marty Nesbitt, a businessman and one of Barack’s closest friends, and John Rogers, a childhood friend of Jarrett’s and a backer of Barack’s as far back as the 1992 Project Vote campaign. Michelle was there, too, of course. She held the most important vote and seemed to be leaving little doubt about how she would cast it. “Walking into that lunch we were resolved we were going to talk him out of this,” Jarrett said. “No one thought it was a good idea, Michelle being the most clear that it was a bad idea.” Looking back, Michelle recalled her reservations: “It was, gosh, this is going to be painful and hard for me, for us. Let’s not go through this again.”
Yet Barack was equally resolved. He told the group that he had spotted a golden opening this time and explained why he thought he could top a field that would eventually number seven Democrats and eight Republicans. He laid out his reasoning and acknowledged the risk, especially the blow to his reputation and his prospects if he became a two-time loser. He promised Michelle that it was up or out. “I’m willing to gamble. I know if I lose, I’m probably done,” he said. “I have the most to lose and I have confidence that I can win—and I can’t do it without you guys.”
The friends were sold. “He’s really hard to say no to,” said Jarrett, who agreed on the spot to be his finance chair. Nesbitt and Rogers, meanwhile, pledged to work their connections to raise money. Early in his deliberations, Barack had toted up the money he thought he could raise. When he added the column of numbers, the figure barely reached $500,000, roughly what he had raised in losing to Rush in a district with fewer than one-twentieth of the state’s population. Barack once mused that Michelle gave a green light to his candidacy “more out of pity than conviction.”
For Michelle, getting to yes meant overcoming yet again her doubts about politics and her dislike of political life. She had to trust Barack not to repeat his miscalculations in running for Congress. She was also considering their finances. An improbable victory would mean setting up a second household in Washington when she was already feeling pressed. “I don’t like to talk about it, because people forget his credit card was maxed out,” she told writer David Mendell. “My thing is, this is ridiculous. ‘Even if you do win, how are you going to afford this wonderful next step in your life?’ And he said, ‘Well, then I’m going to write a book, a good book.’ And I’m thinking, ‘Snake eyes there, buddy. Just write a good book, yeah, that’s right. Yep, yep, yep. And you’ll climb the beanstalk and come back down with the golden egg, Jack.’ ”
The couple took out a second mortgage just to get through the campaign season. On the eve of the Democratic primary in March 2004, the Chicago Sun-Times placed Barack’s net worth between $115,000 and $250,000. When Michelle joked that losing might not be the worst outcome, friends knew she was not entirely kidding. Michelle said wryly about her role as political wife, “It’s hard, and that’s why Barack is such a grateful man.”
MICHELLE, IN FACT, had been doing a lot of thinking about her life amid the gloom of Barack’s losing run for Congress and the dark period that followed. The frustrations crystallized anew after Sasha was born, a period when Barack was traveling the state. She was torn. She felt the familiar tension of wanting to be a good mother and not spread herself too thin. At the same time, she had a sense of purpose, two Ivy League degrees, and plenty of unfulfilled professional drive. She had excelled at work in ways that Barack had not. She had built the Chicago office of Public Allies from scratch, and she had designed and run many components of the University of Chicago’s community service program. At the hospital, she inherited a staff of two and would build a twenty-three-member team. It sometimes bothered her that Barack’s career always took priority over hers. Like many professional women of her age and station, Michelle was struggling with balance and a partner
who was less involved—and less evolved—than she had expected.
Michelle was sometimes in tears “because she couldn’t figure out how to juggle everything that she was doing,” Barack recalled. Competing visions of herself were at war, he said, “the desire to be the woman her mother had been, solid, dependable, making a home and always there for her kids; and the desire to excel in her profession, to make her mark on the world and realize all of those plans she’d had on the very first day that we met.” She was certain that she was performing neither of her main roles well. Yet for all of her frustrations, Michelle was not prepared to leave the workforce and become part of what The New York Times dubbed the opt-out generation—educated, accomplished women who quit white-collar jobs to raise their children. Beyond her attraction to professional pursuits, including the chance to preserve her independence and her earning capacity, she doubted she had the temperament to tend children full-time. “Work is rewarding. I love losing myself in a set of problems that have nothing to do with my husband and children. Once you’ve tasted that, it’s hard to walk away,” she said. “The days I stay home with my kids without going out, I start to get ill. My head starts to ache.”
Michelle realized she was spending an awful lot of energy tugging on Barack to be different: to put his socks in the hamper, hang up his coat, put the butter away, stop smoking, be home with the family. All the while, she was working at the university, running the household, embracing her extended family, and acting as chief organizer of the lives of two small girls. It was exhausting. Through the fog of fatigue, it dawned on her that she was staking too much on Barack changing in ways that seemed increasingly unlikely. He did have a guilty conscience about his absences, he told friends, suggesting that she could probably coax or cajole a few minor adjustments. But she decided the better course was to address what she could hope to control. That meant, first of all, her own frame of mind. “Figuring out how to carve out what kind of life I want for myself beyond who Barack is and what he wants,” Michelle said. “I cannot be crazy, because then I’m a crazy mother and I’m an angry wife.”