Michelle Obama

by Peter Slevin

  One epiphany came as she stewed over the fact that she was always the one who dragged herself out of bed to feed Sasha. The couple operated on different circadian rhythms, with Michelle usually asleep by 10 p.m., if not earlier, and Barack savoring the quiet apartment into the wee hours, writing, reading, or watching sports. “I am sitting there with a new baby, angry, tired and out of shape,” she said. “The baby is up for that 4 o’clock feeding and my husband is lying there, sleeping.” It dawned on her that if she escaped to the gym, Barack would have to get up to feed Sasha. So, she started slipping out of the house before dawn to drive to a gym in Chicago’s West Loop. By the time she arrived home, Barack would have Sasha and Malia up and fed.

  Michelle made peace with the situation, and with Barack. If he was not home because he was out raising money or commuting to a distant job, “it didn’t mean he wasn’t a good father or didn’t care. I saw it could be my mom or a great babysitter who helped. Once I was okay with that, my marriage got better.” She said looking back, “The big thing I figured out was that I was pushing to make Barack be something I wanted him to be for me. I believed that if only he were around more often, everything would be better. So I was depending on him to make me happy. Except it didn’t have anything to do with him. I needed support. I didn’t necessarily need it from Barack.”

  Her mother’s advice helped. “Don’t sweat the small stuff. Get up. Get over it. He’s a good man. Don’t be mad at him,” Marian Robinson told her daughter. Reflecting on her daughter’s journey, Marian offered a theory about what it took for Michelle to come to terms with her marriage. In Marian’s view, Michelle needed to accept the fact that her husband was different from the father she revered. “I just think that’s a normal thing that people go through,” she said. “The sooner you realize that’s the case, the more successful you are.”

  Barack did some reckoning of his own and saw how unthinking he had been. Although he had lived much of his life in the households of strong women—his mother, his grandmother, and now Michelle—he tended to float above the details, never quite focusing on how certain things got done or where the burden fell. He realized that Michelle was right. The burden most often fell on her, “no matter how much I told myself that Michelle and I were equal partners, and that her dreams and ambitions were as important as my own.” His role at home? “Sure, I helped, but it was always on my terms, on my schedule. Meanwhile, she was the one who had to put her career on hold.” Whether it was scheduling activities for Malia and Sasha or staying home when the girls got sick or the babysitter cancelled, the task usually fell to Michelle, whatever the implications for her professional life. To some men of his generation, raised in the 1960s and 1970s by women who worked, such observations amounted to commonplaces. Barack, however, was a little slower on the uptake. At the end of what Michelle called “an important period of growth in our marriage,” he attributed their endurance to “Michelle’s strength, her willingness to manage these tensions and make sacrifices on behalf of myself and the girls.” He said he had learned his lesson.

  NOT THAT HE WOULD be around much during the Senate campaign. As the race intensified, Barack became less and less available. There was cash to raise, by the million. There were rings to kiss and umpteen hands to shake. Nearly every Sunday, it seemed, he headed to a black church on the South Side or West Side, laboring to build credibility among working-class African Americans who had largely rejected him in the campaign against Bobby Rush. He sounded a lot less Ivy League one day after the Internet bubble had burst, when he talked about U.S. economic troubles during an appearance at Pleasant Ridge Missionary Baptist Church: “We ain’t seen no recovery on the West Side. We don’t see no recovery in East St. Louis.… If there ain’t no jobs, there ain’t no recovery.” The campaign was difficult, and it often seemed that the arrow pointed down. Barack called press conferences that nobody attended. He sat through church services and union meetings where no one acknowledged his presence. He sometimes drove alone downstate, a trip lasting hours, to find just two or three voters waiting for him. Yet he found himself happy. Really happy. “Freed from worry by low expectations, my credibility bolstered by several helpful endorsements, I threw myself into the race with an energy and joy that I’d thought I’d lost.… I felt like working harder than I’d ever worked in my life.” Adjustments to the work-life balance, it seemed, would wait.

  At first, Barack’s six Democratic opponents seemed to pose an array of threats. Dan Hynes was the scion of a prominent Chicago political family close to the Daleys. Blair Hull was a wealthy newcomer who would spend $29 million of his own money on the race. Gery Chico was a former Chicago School Board president who had served as Mayor Richard M. Daley’s chief of staff. Joyce Washington was an African American health care executive who threatened to split the crucial black vote. With Hull and Hynes considered the frontrunners, Michelle offered a pithy comment about Illinois politics and the meaning of Barack’s candidacy a few days before the Democratic primary. She urged her audience to send a message to the political establishment and to African American children alike. Introducing Barack at the Community Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church, she said, “I am tired of just giving the political process over to the privileged. To the wealthy. To people with the right daddy.”

  Month by month, the campaign gathered steam, fueled by Barack’s legislative success in Springfield, his elbow grease, and, perhaps most of all, his ability to win favor among progressive Democrats, most of them white. Some of the very qualities that doomed his congressional candidacy in a predominantly African American district were now working in his favor. In a stroke of good fortune, it also turned out that his opponents were less formidable than they appeared, with Hynes a lackluster campaigner and Hull undone by divorce records that alleged he had cursed, punched, and menaced his former wife.

  In the final weeks, Barack broke through. His campaign husbanded its cash for a burst of television advertising when voters were most likely to be making up their minds. The message, a harbinger of campaigns to come, centered on branding Barack as ethical and upbeat, a skilled legislator who worked across party lines in Springfield and would labor to change the tone in Washington. A new advertising slogan would become his signature: “Yes, we can.” At first, Barack did not like the line. It sounded corny. But strategist David Axelrod thought it had a certain simple assertiveness, and Michelle believed it would work with African American voters disenchanted, as she was, with Illinois politics. “She understood before he did that it had some power,” said Forrest Claypool, a Chicago politician and consultant who worked in Axelrod’s firm. The television ads began running and Barack “took off like a rocket.”

  On March 16, 2004, Barack swamped the rest of the Democratic field. Surprisingly, given the large field, he piled up 53 percent of the vote and avoided a runoff. He also regained his swagger.

  THEN CAME THE BIGGEST BREAK of a very big year: John Kerry, his party’s prospective presidential nominee, invited Barack to deliver the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. “We believe he represents the future of the party,” Kerry spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said simply. Barack would get twenty minutes in the brightest of political spotlights just four years after he failed to land a floor pass to the festivities. For a politician who had never won an office higher than state senator—who had lost his only race for Congress—the odds of landing the assignment were incalculable. But there he was, putting Kerry’s name into nomination against President George W. Bush and pulling his own name, which writer Scott Turow once said “rhymes uncomfortably with Osama,” out of obscurity. On July 27, 2004, as he prepared to speak, he had butterflies. Michelle gave him a hug, looked him straight in the eye, and said, “Just don’t screw it up, buddy.” And they laughed.

  Screw it up he didn’t. The soaring speech by the unknown politician caught the delegates by surprise, producing paroxysms in Boston’s Fleet Center and Democratic households across television land. “This guy�
�s going places!” one newscaster crowed. David Mendell, in the hall for the Chicago Tribune, recalled the scene: “Michelle sees this happening and she has tears streaming down her cheeks. I’m sitting in the crowd and a woman next to me is crying, bawling her eyes out. She just keeps screaming, ‘This is history! This is history!’ ”

  “Tonight is a particular honor for me because, let’s face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely,” Barack began. He traced his family history to a village in Kenya and a small town in Kansas. Piecing together bits of his Senate stump speech and the values that drove him into public service, he spoke of the social contract and a politics greater than the partisanship and petty sniping that defined the era.

  If there’s a child on the South Side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child. If there’s a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for their prescription and having to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandparent. If there’s an Arab-American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It is that fundamental belief—I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper—that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family.

  Barack went on to tell the crowd that “there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America, there’s the 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.” He insisted that he was not speaking of “blind optimism.” Rather, he was issuing a call to service grounded in the historical argument that progress comes when people fight for it. He wove a sense of optimism for the country into the narrative of his life, borrowing a line passed among black churches, and invoked by his pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ, the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. It was the “audacity of hope.”

  It’s 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 that America has a place for him, too. Hope in the face of difficulty, hope in the face of uncertainty, the audacity of hope: In the end, that is God’s greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation, a belief in things not seen, a belief that there are better days ahead.

  The cheers rang on and on. The next day, the circus began. Barack was in demand, for interviews, television appearances, campaign stops, autographs. He was becoming a pop icon. Debra Messing, star of one of the most popular sitcoms on television, Will & Grace, soon had a memorable dream on the show: she was showering with the candidate and he was “Ba-racking my world.” His Senate gamble—one more shot, up or out—could hardly be paying off bigger. He was famous, and he and Michelle would soon be rich, with the reissue of Dreams from My Father and his signature on a $1.9 million contract to write two more books. The looming question was no longer whether he would reach the Senate, which seemed a foregone conclusion. It was whether he would seek the presidency.

  IF BARACK WAS a helium balloon, Michelle was the one holding the string. In public, she developed a wry patter designed to affirm his humanity and just maybe keep his ego in check. “Absolutely the messiest person in the household,” she said when Oprah Winfrey interviewed them. She called his home office “the hole.” When he interjected, she replied, “You had dirty clothes on top of the basket this morning. And I’m just like, ‘There’s a basket with a lid. Lift it up. Put it in.’ ” Besides, she would say later, the country needed leaders “who have their feet on the ground.” Michelle also tried to put a ceiling on voters’ expectations, for their benefit and her husband’s. “Barack is not our savior. I want to tell it to the whole country and I will if I get the opportunity,” she informed a crowd at Illinois State University. “There are many of us who want to lay all of our wishes, fears and hopes at the feet of this young man, but life doesn’t work that way and certainly politics doesn’t work that way.” It was an observation that would prove prescient.

  Michelle played her part on the campaign trail, speaking up for Barack, standing in for him, raising money. She and the girls accompanied him when he went to the summer home of Penny Pritzker to seek the support of the prominent Chicago Democrat, businesswoman, and Hyatt heiress. Very occasionally, the Obamas campaigned as a foursome, an experiment in family togetherness that proved challenging. Michelle was no more convinced than before that politics was a worthwhile pursuit, at one point that year calling it “a waste of time.” But he was in it to win it, as the saying goes, and so was she. On the stump, she vouched for his motives by contrasting her own disdain for the profession with Barack’s abiding faith. “I didn’t believe that politics was structured in a way that could solve real problems for people, so you can imagine how I felt when Barack approached me to run for state senate,” she told the audience at Illinois State. “I said, ‘I married you because you’re cute and you’re smart, but this is the dumbest thing you could have ever asked me to do.’ Fortunately for all of us, Barack wasn’t as cynical as I was.”

  In a campaign where Barack’s race mattered to voters in myriad ways, Michelle also offered a sturdy defense of his commitment to urban African Americans. The shorthand question confronting the Hawaiian-born, Harvard-educated candidate—Is he black enough?—replayed the caricature and the criticism advanced by Barack’s opponents in the congressional campaign. Michelle would have none of it. Leaning heavily into her own history, she told a Chicago interviewer, “I’m as black as it gets. I was born on the South Side. I come from an obviously black family. We weren’t rich. I put my blackness up against anybody’s blackness in this state, okay, and Barack is a black man. And he’s done more in terms of meeting his commitments and sticking his neck out for this community than many people who criticize him. And I can say that because I’m black.”

  IN HYDE PARK, Michelle continued to carry the weight of what used to be called homemaking, taking care of the girls’ welfare while also pressing forward with her work at the University of Chicago. She started her fourth year at the medical center—her ninth at the university—and continued to build a loyal, tightly knit team. Looking back, she said she loved her work, but it was never easy. “Balancing a full-time job and the round-the-clock needs of my family. Juggling the recital and the conference calls. Making the endless to-do lists that I never got through and often lost. Feeling like I was falling short at work and at home.” To make the gears turn at work, she set a standard of efficiency that would become familiar to aides through the years. When, for example, her hospital outreach team proposed a community meeting on a Saturday, cutting into family time, Michelle wanted evidence that the purpose was clear, the scheduling was essential, and the meeting would run on time. “It was never willy-nilly or just to meet,” said Leif Elsmo, her longtime deputy. Her colleague Kenneth Kates also recalled the family imperative. Time was valuable and time away from the girls was precious. “The girls came first,” he said. “Period.”

  To make the logistics work, Michelle employed babysitters and paid a housekeeper to corral the flotsam of their busy lives. She also made efforts to look out for herself in other ways. An inveterate list maker, she put herself on her own to-do list, as one aide put it. She also took stock of society’s gendered roles. “What I notice about men, all men, is that their order is me, my family, God is in there somewhere. But me is first,” Michelle said. “And for women, me is fourth, and that’s not healthy.” She cared about food and, increasingly, about fashion. She took an occasional trip to a spa. She had hair and manicure appointments with Michael Flowers, better known as Rahni, owner of Van Cleef Hair Salon in downtown Chicago. She first visited the salon with her mother as a teenager, and later took Malia and Sasha. Located in a refurbished church on West Huron Street, the salon was welcoming and busy. Having your hair done at Van Cleef’s was a sign of status for black women in Chicago. “A stellar
, classy place. If you can, you do, if you know what I mean,” said Haroon Rashid, a Van Cleef stylist who founded an organization to support the DuSable Museum of African American History.

  Marian Robinson remained a consistent and welcome presence for the Obama family, living less than fifteen minutes away in the Euclid bungalow and working downtown as a secretary. She cut back her hours to help look after the girls on weekday afternoons. Sometimes Michelle took Malia and Sasha to meetings, as did Barack. Dan Hynes recalled seeing Barack at a Saturday morning candidate forum without Michelle. Sasha was two years old, Malia was five. He was “trying to herd these two little kids and they’re knocking things over and taking pamphlets and throwing them. And here he is trying to be this dignified Senate candidate.” It was an established household rule, however, that the girls were not to be trotted out on the campaign trail as props, although they appeared at ritual election night celebrations. A day or two after Rod Blagojevich won his second term as Illinois governor in 2002, historian James Grossman bumped into Barack in the produce section at the Co-Op, a Hyde Park grocery store. Grossman mentioned that the camera-ready Blagojevich, a sometime Elvis impersonator who would later land in federal prison on a corruption conviction, had stood onstage and prompted his small daughter to wave to the crowd. “If I did that even once,” Grossman recalled Barack saying, “I would be divorced.”