Michelle Obama

by Peter Slevin

  It went without saying that Barack’s triumphs did not give unalloyed satisfaction to Michelle. She saw his rise pulling him yet further from the home life she preferred. Even for Barack, who seemed to delight in his cascading successes, the victories could be bittersweet. The day after he scaled the heights in Boston with his convention speech, he said, “Malia is six years old and, you know, I can’t believe it, but a third of her childhood is over already.” When someone asked how much of her childhood he had missed because of politics, he said, “Too much.”

  IN YET ANOTHER lucky Barack bounce, Jack Ryan, his Republican opponent, quit the Senate race because of revelations that he had tried to pressure his actress wife—Jeri Ryan, who appeared in Star Trek: Voyager—into having public sex with him in nightclubs. That left Barack without an opponent until the Illinois GOP recruited Alan Keyes, a sharply conservative black Harvard graduate with no ties to Illinois. It was a preposterous choice. By the end, Barack was so far ahead that he had time to cement his star status and earn a some political IOUs by campaigning across the country for other Democrats.

  “I don’t take all the hype too seriously,” Barack said on one of those trips, acknowledging that he had gotten “some unbelievable breaks.” As a jet chartered by his campaign waited on a nearby tarmac, he insisted that it was not going to his head. “The attention has come very rapidly and late. I’m a forty-three-year-old who has worked in obscurity for twenty years on the issues I’m working on now. I’m married with two kids. I’ve been on the receiving end of bad press. I know what it’s like to struggle to pay the bills, know what it’s like to lose.” He described himself as someone who tried not to get too high when things were going well or too low when the bottom seemed to fall out. “I’m a big believer in not jinxing myself by thinking I’ve got it made,” he added when the plane was airborne. “I get more nervous when things are going well.”

  Things went well. In fact, they could hardly have gone better. On November 2, 2004, Barack became the country’s only black senator and just the third elected since the 1880s. When the votes were counted, Barack had won 70 percent of the vote to Keyes’s 27 percent, the largest Senate victory margin in Illinois history. Amid the clamor of his swearing-in ceremony at the U.S. Senate in January 2005, Michelle rolled her eyes in bemusement at the turn their lives had taken. “Maybe one day,” she laughed, “he will do something to warrant all this attention.”

  THE BIGGEST QUESTION the Obamas faced after the Senate victory was where Michelle and the girls would live. It would be difficult for her to move away from Chicago, where she was firmly rooted in her professional life, her family, and her social circle. She looked at houses in the Maryland suburbs, but somehow she could not see herself being happy there. And even though living near the nation’s capital would mean more family time with Barack when the Senate was in session, he would often need to make the reverse commute to Illinois, leaving them behind in a city where her network was small. They decided to stay in Hyde Park and find a bigger house—a much bigger one, now that they were flush. Money was pouring in, from the sale of Dreams, as well as from Michelle’s most recent promotion and raise, which more than doubled her earnings to $273,000 a year. She also joined the board of TreeHouse Foods, which paid her $51,000 in her first full year as a director. In July 2005, the Obamas spent $1.65 million on a red-brick neo-Georgian house with four fireplaces at 5046 South Greenwood Avenue. The home, Michelle said, would be her refuge.

  The house purchase, as it happened, was fraught, for Barack had made the mistake of consulting real estate investor Antoin Rezko, a prominent Democratic campaign contributor and future convicted felon who made a habit of befriending up-and-coming Illinois politicians. The house and an adjacent corner lot were for sale by the same owner, but the price of the two together was more than Barack and Michelle wanted to pay. When the Obamas closed on the house in July 2005, Rezko’s wife bought the lot on the same day. Seven months later, the Obamas purchased a piece of the empty lot and folded it into their property. Rezko would later go to federal prison for conspiring with Blagojevich to profit illegally from state business, a clandestine scheme under way at the time of the Greenwood Avenue transaction. There was no evidence that the Obamas did anything illegal. They had occasionally dined with the Rezkos. Tony Rezko contributed to Barack’s campaigns. Barack called him a friend. But he said he missed the warning signals, including news coverage about shady deals and a political buzz that seemed to foretell Rezko’s fall. Barack said of the real estate transaction in 2006, “There’s no doubt that this was a mistake. ‘Boneheaded’ would be accurate. There’s no doubt I should have seen some red flags in terms of me purchasing a piece of property from him.” New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd asked in print why Obama’s “tough, smart and connected” wife, the skeptical and careful one with the Harvard law degree and the eye on the bottom line, did not see trouble coming.

  The Rezko incident did no permanent harm to the Obama brand, but it revealed the deep waters into which Michelle would soon plunge. Everything she did would be examined for motive, for plan, for her ability to execute without mishap. She was navigating the political netherworld without a map. Her promotion to vice president of community and external affairs at the University of Chicago raised eyebrows, coming as it did shortly after Barack’s election to the Senate. Hospital executives denied to reporters that her elevation had anything to do with his political success. They said the institution was afraid of losing her and that her pay package was in line with the salaries of other vice presidents. This was the first of many times the Obamas would be questioned about their finances and their connections, much to Michelle’s frustration. “It’s just like, dang, is that what you think? Is that who you think we are? Of all the stuff that we have done over our lifetimes and how Barack has carried himself as a politician, I mean, it’s like, is there any basis for that assumption?” she asked in a December 2007 interview with Chicago Tribune reporter John McCormick. She was also sensitive to sotto voce suggestions that she was getting ahead professionally because of his success. “The problem is that in this modern day life, where you’ve got a wife who works—and I’ve got a job—there is going to be some appearance of something. I can’t even think, could I be a babysitter? I really do think about this. What could I do where I would get credit for it completely?”

  BY STAYING IN CHICAGO, Michelle found a way to do well and do good without giving up her profession, even if Barack’s absences made her life more difficult. Equipped with her new title, she launched the Urban Health Initiative, the most ambitious project of her career. As Valerie Jarrett put it, “We are going to change the way we deliver health care and change life on the South Side of Chicago.” It started with a cost-benefit analysis. The university, which estimated that it treated one in ten South Side residents, found that disadvantaged and often uninsured residents were using the emergency room as a primary care clinic. This was not only expensive and time-consuming for patients, who might wait hours to see a doctor for a routine complaint. It was also expensive for the hospital, which calculated that it cost about $1,100 each time a patient walked through the door. Every patient who was running short of insulin or suffering an asthma attack was taking the attention of medical staff trained and equipped to do more complex work. A family doctor or clinic could perform the same service for $100, but one in every four patients who reported to the emergency department had no doctor.

  What the hospital saw as a more rational way to allocate resources and expertise, Michelle saw also as an opening to improve options for poorly served residents. The inequity in access to health care was a subject she knew through personal and professional experience. There was her father’s long struggle with multiple sclerosis and the haggling that Barack’s mother had done with insurance companies as she was dying of cancer. There were relatives with debilitating health problems, limited insurance, and unsteady access to quality care. And, on the flip side, there was the relief she experienced,
when Sasha contracted meningitis and Malia suffered an asthma attack, of dialing a doctor, going to a first-rate hospital, and being able to pay.

  The scale of Chicago’s health care deficit was startling. Among the 1.1 million inhabitants of the sprawling South Side of one of the nation’s largest cities, there was no logic to health care, and certainly no system that anyone might recognize as such. Clinics were scattered and family doctors few. Too many patients got too little care until small problems became big ones. Others who were not very sick went straight to emergency rooms. Cook County could barely begin to handle the need. Faced with soaring budget deficits, it started to cut back on public health services. Medicaid helped, but patients and doctors alike often felt shortchanged. As a result, for tens of thousands of the working poor and the unemployed poorer, the concept of a regular doctor and easy access to affordable care was a fantasy. Beyond the simple fact of limited access were the frustrations of seeking care in a part of town where a trip to the doctor often meant waiting in rough weather for an unreliable bus, waiting at a clinic to see an overstretched doctor, and then waiting again for the bus home. Each unpredictable excursion tested the will of the patient, the employer, and those who looked after the children.

  In what would become the largest experiment of its kind in the country, the University of Chicago developed the Urban Health Initiative to attract residents to neighborhood doctors’ offices or family clinics, a “medical home,” where a primary care doctor saw them at nominal cost and tracked their progress and their needs. Clinic staff attended to many problems, from broken fingers and split lips to allergic reactions and chronic maladies. The theory held that if the clinics were nearby and the care first-rate, patients would return more readily for follow-up visits, checkups, and referrals to community hospitals or specialists. Fewer would show up in emergency rooms. People would be healthier. The cost of their ailments would decline. And at the top of the hierarchy, the university medical center could focus on more cases that demanded specialists.

  “We have to create a system where people can go. It doesn’t exist and we’re trying to build it,” said Eric Whitaker, a close friend of the Obamas, who departed as director of the Illinois Public Health Department to run the initiative. One partner was the nonprofit Chicago Family Health Center, a group of four clinics where 98 percent of the roughly twenty thousand patients were African American or Hispanic. More than 40 percent were uninsured. The center billed Medicaid and Medicare and collected money from the university, federal grants, and private sources. A sliding-fee scale started at $10 for a visit and lab study. Another partner was the independent Friend Family Health Center, which drew on university money and doctors to expand into the gap created by the new emergency room policy and the closing of two university health clinics. While Friend Family Health, five minutes north of the university hospital, recorded tens of thousands of visits a year, staff members sometimes found it difficult to persuade patients to return for checkups and further care. No-show rates were as high as 50 percent. “People are so used to going to the emergency department. The behavior change is really hard,” said Laura Derks, the university’s chief liaison to the community clinics.

  Michelle increasingly became the face of the project, as well as one of the most high-profile African American figures at the university. She addressed meetings in churches and community centers and spoke with doctors and staff, explaining the university’s intentions and plans at a time when skepticism ran deep. “I have seen her in a meeting with the board of trustees, giving a presentation. I have seen her with angry patients and community residents,” recalled her friend Susan Sher, the medical center’s general counsel.

  Reviews of the new urban health project were not entirely positive, and the model was unproven. After Michelle left for Washington, Representative Bobby Rush, who had vanquished Barack in 2000, demanded to know whether the hospital was dumping some of its poorest patients to save money. The Illinois College of Emergency Physicians warned that plans to shrink the emergency department and cut the hospital budget by $100 million would compromise patient safety. In response, the hospital said it was doing no dumping and insisted that time would prove the strategy to be correct.

  EARLY IN HIS TENURE as a senator, Barack was already thinking about his next moves. There was really only one, as everybody knew: the presidency. The talk was outlandish, yet also increasingly common. The morning after he was elected to the Senate, reporters in Chicago asked him repeatedly whether he would run for president four years later. As often as they asked, he said no. He called it a “silly question.” He declared, “I am not running for president in 2008.” He finally said, “Guys, I am a state senator. I was elected yesterday. I have never set foot in the U.S. Senate. I have never worked in Washington. And the notion that somehow I am going to start running for higher office, it just doesn’t make sense.”

  The hype never died down, nor did the expectations. He was, plain and simple, a phenomenon. Yet he could always count on Michelle to keep things in perspective. In 2006, his second year in the Senate, he was busy in his three-day-a-week Washington existence and he felt he was making progress on the Senate floor. One day, he called Michelle at home in Hyde Park after a hearing on an anti-proliferation bill that he was co-sponsoring with Senator Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He launched into an exuberant explanation, but Michelle cut him off. “We have ants,” she said. “I found ants in the kitchen. And in the bathroom upstairs.” She wanted him to pick up ant traps on his way home from the airport. She would do it herself, she said, but the girls had doctor’s appointments after school. “Ant traps. Don’t forget, okay, honey? And buy more than one. Listen, I need to go into a meeting. Love you.” Barack said he wondered as he hung up whether Ted Kennedy or John McCain ever bought ant traps on the way home from work.

  TEN

  I’m Pretty Convincing

  It was late 2006 when Barack, still not two years into his Senate career, approached his brother-in-law to ask a favor. “He comes out of nowhere, like just says, ‘Hey, I think I’m going to do this,’ ” Craig recalled of the conversation in the Obamas’ kitchen. “I’m thinking, ‘Do what?’ ” Barack said he was planning a presidential race. “Whoa,” Craig thought to himself, “you don’t grow up on the South Side of Chicago thinking that somebody’s going to walk up to you, who you’re related to, and say they’re going to run for president of the United States.” Handicappers put Barack in the mix for 2008 largely on the strength of his Democratic National Convention speech. Truth be told, his early chances registered somewhere between improbable and not gonna happen, but Barack and his strategists believed that the 2008 election offered as strong a shot at the presidency as he was going to get. “You will never be hotter than you are right now,” David Axelrod wrote in a strategy memo. The advisers concluded that they could develop a message that would resonate, an organization that could compete, and a bankroll that would keep Barack in the game. The last hurdle was Michelle. “Have you talked to your wife about this?” Craig asked. Barack said he hadn’t, and added, “You’ve got to do me a favor. You’ve got to talk to her because she’s not going to go for it.” As Craig recalled the conversation, “I was like, you’re darn right she’s not going to go for it.”

  For all of the popular excitement surrounding Barack’s meteoric rise to the Senate and his place on the national stage, his newfound success had done nothing to make Michelle’s life easier except in the ways that money could buy. She was working at the university and doing the lion’s share of the work of raising Malia and Sasha, who were then eight and five. Surrounded though she was by friends and relatives, there were days when she felt lonely. Barack was commuting to Washington and somehow had made time to write The Audacity of Hope, released in 2006 to strong reviews and stronger sales. Greeted in some places like a rock star, he embarked on a book tour that started to resemble the early stages of a campaign. He was in constant deman
d on the national lecture and fundraising circuit.

  On the plus side, Barack’s job appeared secure and he was learning the ropes as Michelle continued her successful run at the University of Chicago medical center. At home, the girls were settled into the routine of a top-notch private school and the embrace of a close group of friends. Marian had retired from the bank to spend afternoons with them. Michelle would later describe the advantages of working down the street from the Lab School: “I’ve got great access to them, which, you know, you need when you’re basically doing it all.” As Michelle saw it, a presidential campaign would disrupt even this unsatisfying equilibrium in ways she could barely predict.

  Following through on Barack’s request, Craig decided to try Marian first, borrowing liberally from the lessons that she and Fraser had imparted to their children. “They talked about passion, talked about doing what’s best for everyone. Mom and Dad said you never know when an opportunity is going to arise.” Like Michelle, who turned her back on the big money prospects of corporate law because it did not make her happy, Craig had quit investment banking in his late-30s. “I had a Porsche 944 Turbo. I had a BMW station wagon. Who gets a BMW station wagon? It’s the dumbest car in the world. Why would you buy a $75,000 station wagon?” Instead, he became a basketball coach and was soon running the program at Brown University. In his pitch to Marian, he asked her to imagine that he had suddenly received an offer from Kentucky, one of the country’s most storied hoops programs. Outlandish, yes, but he would accept in a heartbeat, he told her. And here was Barack, a junior senator with huge promise who had a shot at becoming the most powerful man in the world. You shouldn’t penalize him, Craig said, for being good at what he does. “Well that’s fine,” Marian replied, “but I don’t think you’re going to get your sister to go for it.”