by Peter Slevin
MICHELLE WAS at the table when Barack and a small team of advisers gathered in David Axelrod’s Chicago office on November 8, 2006, to discuss his prospects. The working theory of his candidacy was developed by Axelrod, a wordsmith and former Chicago Tribune political reporter who had done much to propel Barack out of the pack in the 2004 Democratic Senate primary. Amid growing dissatisfaction with George W. Bush’s handling of the Iraq War, Axelrod spotted a narrow path to victory for an unconventional presidential candidate who could run against the establishment. The candidate needed to be perceived as a unifier, a problem solver, a change maker, a leader from a new generation. The establishment, in this case, would include Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, a Wellesley and Yale graduate and former first lady whose husband had developed the richest and deepest Democratic network in modern times. She was trying to make history as the first woman elected president. To compete against an aspiring Republican successor to Bush, Barack would first have to stop the Clintons, and it was clear from the start that this would be the harder task. But Axelrod, David Plouffe, Steve Hildebrand, and other members of Barack’s team reasoned that if they could outwork Clinton in the four early states—especially neighboring Iowa, which was rural, midwestern, and 95 percent white—well, anything would be possible. It would be Cassius Clay standing over Sonny Liston, the champion flat on his back on the canvas, stunned by the upstart who trained harder, fought smarter, and performed best when the pressure was on. During his longshot Senate campaign, Barack bought a poster-sized photograph of that very scene and hung it on his office wall.
In Axelrod’s conference room, Michelle listened and asked questions, just as she had when Barack launched his Senate campaign after the Bobby Rush debacle. “She was interested in whether it was a crazy, harebrained idea,” Axelrod said, “because she’s not into crazy, harebrained ideas.” She wanted to know about the finances, about the logistics, about the schedule in a typical campaign week, about what it would mean to their home life and to Barack’s relationship to the girls. It was not so long ago that they had struggled to mesh their lives. Now this? Plouffe, who would run the campaign, was meeting Michelle for the first time. “I was impressed by her directness and the no-nonsense focus of her questioning,” he said. “She clearly wanted all the facts and I could tell that running was not going to be solely Barack’s decision. They would decide together.”
When Michelle asked whether Barack could be home every weekend and take Sundays off, Hildebrand nodded his head yes, only to be corrected by Plouffe. “No one had good news for Michelle. There could be no shortcuts,” Plouffe recalled. “It would be grueling and then more grueling. The candidate would only be home for snatches of time and when he was, there would be calls to make and speeches to review.” During the meeting, Michelle wanted to make sure that Barack, too, knew what was coming. The stakes were high. When he tried to explain something to the advisers, she interrupted to declare, “We’re talking about you right now,” and he said no more. On his way to the airport, Plouffe called Axelrod, who said he thought Barack wanted to run, “but he’s drawn more to the idea of running than actually running. We’ll see how he processes the reality of what this will mean, how hard it is, and how long the odds are. Michelle is the wild card. If she is opposed, there is no way this is going to happen. And I can’t read yet where she’ll come down.”
MICHELLE WAS METHODICAL in making decisions. She made lists. She tracked every question, considered every permutation, mapped everything that could go wrong. She inclined toward worry. To describe their differences, Valerie Jarrett said Barack was “the kind of person who, the day before the final exam, would open the book, read it and get an A.” Michelle, on the other hand, was “the kind of person who, the first day of class when they were discussing dissertations, would plot out how to finish hers.” Michelle had said in 1996, when Barack went into politics, that she was trying to learn to be more comfortable with risk, to relinquish some of her need for control. Yet there are no political risks quite like a presidential campaign. An Obama ’08 campaign would be a maelstrom and victory would mean giving up her career for four years, maybe eight. It would mean, far more thoroughly than before, seeing her identity attached to Barack’s. And, to put it bluntly, it would mean accepting a heightened chance that her husband would be assassinated. “I took myself down every dark road you could go on,” she said, “just to prepare myself before we jumped out there.”
Michelle had veto power. “The person who was most important in that decision was Michelle,” Jarrett said. She framed her exploration of the possibility in two parts. One was logistical. “Okay, how are we going to do this?” she asked herself. “How’s this going to look? What am I going to do about my job? How will we manage the kids? What’s our financial position going to be? How do we make sure we’re still contributing to the college fund? Once I got a sense of how this could work not just for me or him but for our family and the people in our lives, once I had that vision in my head, then I could say, ‘Okay, we can do this, I can manage this.’ I know what I need things to look like and what resources I need to make sure that all bases are covered.”
The other part, more complicated, was the grand conundrum of what would be right for her partner, her family, herself, and—this being the presidency—the country. She saw immediately that running for president was something Barack needed to do or else forever wonder what might have been. And a determination to make a progressive difference had been an essential component of their relationship and their choices from the start. “I’ve never doubted the mission,” she said early in the campaign, “and I’ve never doubted Barack’s ability to carry out the mission.” It was the White House, it was his ambition, it was his life. And yet it was her life, too, and the lives of their daughters, their family and friends. “The selfish part of me says, ‘Run away! Just say no!’ because my life would be better,” she said. “But that’s the problem we face as a society, we have to stop making the me decision and we have to make the we and us decision.” She was in.
“It had taken a little convincing to persuade me that this whole running-for-president thing was a good idea,” Michelle explained in late 2007, with the campaign in full swing. “And by ‘a little convincing,’ I mean it was a lot of convincing, because we had two very young daughters at home, I had a full time job that I loved, and I worried about what it would mean for our family. So it took me a while to get out of my own head, and to set aside my own fears and self interest, and focus on all the good that I believed a man like my husband could do as president.” Further, a campaign role for her would not only be expected, but required. “To tell you the truth, I was scared. I was worried that I’d say the wrong thing. I was nervous that someone might ask a question that I didn’t know the answer to. And I have a tendency to do that thing a lot of women do, where you get 99 things right, but then you stress and beat yourself up over the one thing you mess up.”
The choice Michelle made for her husband was a familiar one, especially to working spouses. Connie Schultz, a sharp-witted Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, was in her late forties when she met and married Representative Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Cleveland. Soon after, he told her that he wanted to run for the U.S. Senate. It was sure to be a brutal race, but he thought he had a chance. She had doubts. “I was really the holdout,” Schultz said. “We were in a very new marriage. I was not a political spouse. I knew how you could blow a marriage.” As they talked, she came to see that Brown needed to run or forever regret it. As she put it, “The stars had aligned, and I was going to be the big, fat moon in the way.” Once Brown entered the 2006 Ohio Senate race, it was only a question of time before Schultz would give up her column, for reasons of ethics, especially, but also of logistics. She made appearances for him, and made sure there were mango slices and carrots in his campaign car. On the bright side, she figured they would share the ride. It would be an adventure, and weren’t the best adventures alwa
ys a bit frightening? She was frightened. After she told her editors that she was relinquishing her column for the duration of the campaign, she opened her journal and wrote in big block letters, “WHAT IS TO BECOME OF ME?”
In Michelle’s case, there was one other thing. She insisted, in return for her support, that Barack quit smoking. He was an inveterate smoker and he had tried to quit before. Michelle declared that, this time, it would be for keeps. The results during the campaign would be mixed, but it was not for Michelle’s lack of trying. Asked if Barack used a nicotine patch, Craig Robinson laughed and said, “Michelle Obama! That’s one hell of a patch right there!” Or, as Barack later joked in a conversation caught on an open microphone, he had a good reason to quit: “I’m scared of my wife.”
ON FEBRUARY 10, 2007, the campaign began in brilliant sunshine on the steps of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, where Abraham Lincoln had delivered his “House Divided” speech 149 years earlier. The symbolism was intentional for Barack, who looked for strength and inspiration to the sixteenth president and his struggle for a more perfect union. Michelle stood by his side, bundled against temperatures barely in double digits. Stretching out in front of them, filling the square and flowing into the side streets, was a crowd fifteen-thousand-strong that considered Barack the man who would restore compassion and good judgment to the White House and a measure of humility to American actions abroad. From Springfield, the Obama caravan rolled west across the Mississippi to Iowa, the corn-fed state that more than any other would determine the success or failure of the entire Obama ’08 enterprise.
It was difficult to overstate the challenges that Barack faced in becoming a credible candidate, much less a winning one. He was not a polished campaigner during the early going. Energized at first, the candidate was in a funk after only a couple of months on the trail. “Meandering, unmotivated, and hesitant,” Plouffe said. He did not like political combat or the shallow necessities of winning the daily news cycle. He needed to build a national organization capable of raising vast sums of money, yet he disliked the care and feeding essential to doing so. He missed the solitary time when he did his best thinking. He missed his family. Arrayed against him, meanwhile, was a deep field led by Clinton, whose political organization had done nothing but win, and former vice presidential nominee John Edwards, a North Carolina trial lawyer who threatened to emerge as Clinton’s chief rival. Another obstacle was the perception fueled by much of the national media that Clinton, heir to the best parts of her husband’s legacy and beneficiary of his political mind, was a lock to win the Democratic nomination. Viewed through a national lens, it was hard to disagree. For months on end, even after the Obama campaign showed it could raise startling sums, national polls showed Clinton ahead by a cool thirty percentage points.
But Team Obama was making a very different bet, one that required a persistent effort to tune out the doubters, the pundits, and the polls. The Obama forces calculated that they could slow Clinton nationally by beating her locally, in Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucus on January 3, 2008. If they could do that, then deliver strong showings in New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada, they might weaken Clinton’s candidacy significantly, possibly fatally, before almost half the country voted on Super Tuesday—the day in early February when her campaign confidently expected to claim the crown. The strategy was audacious, even quixotic, to use words more polite than the ones Barack and his strategists were hearing. One afternoon in October 2007, when Clinton appeared to be lapping the field and Barack’s chances looked bleak, one of his most faithful supporters was worried. Abner Mikva, who had served Bill Clinton as White House counsel but wholeheartedly backed Barack for president, had been hearing from friends that the upstart candidacy was doomed. Mikva suspected they might be right, but did not want to believe it. As he discussed the race over lunch at the Cliff Dwellers, his Chicago club, he held out hope on two counts. “Barack is the luckiest politician in America,” Mikva said, “and the Clintons always make a mistake.”
IOWA, AS IT HAPPENED, all but perfectly fit the needs of the Obama forces. For one thing, the state chose its nominees by caucus, a quirky and complex process that rewarded candidates who cultivated the grassroots and thought two steps ahead—in other words, a community organizer’s dream. For another, Iowa caucusgoers were accustomed to giving candidates a good, long look in coffee shops, living rooms, and high school gyms, where they listened and questioned, chewed things over, and questioned some more. In contrast to later primaries, where voters mostly got their information from advertising or the news, Iowans had months to study candidates who offered themselves for close inspection. One October afternoon, Michelle spent more than an hour in an Iowa Falls bookstore, the Book Cellar and Coffee Attic. She delivered remarks, gave interviews to local reporters, and talked with every prospective voter who wanted a word with her. One middle-aged voter, who lived on a farm outside of town, said she was impressed. Asked whether she would caucus for Barack, she said, “Well, I would have to meet him first.”
Barack was a senator from neighboring Illinois, which helped with name recognition, knowledge of regional issues, and the logistics of shuttling staff and volunteers into the state. He came across as a fresh voice, and unlike Clinton and the other Democrats, including Senators Joe Biden and Chris Dodd, he had opposed the Iraq War. “I am not opposed to all wars, I am opposed to dumb wars,” he said at a Chicago antiwar rally in October 2002, five months before the U.S.-led invasion. The stance earned him a hearing from progressives at a time when the heartland was bearing the brunt of casualties in a war that had cost Republicans control of the Senate in November 2006.
Could a brainy black man become the forty-fourth president of the United States? To do the unthinkable and win Iowa, his advisers believed, Barack would need to show that he was not a one-speech wonder and that he had a sturdy message and a vibrant organization. If he won, he would demonstrate that white voters in middle America would support a black candidate named Barack Hussein Obama. It would be his Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, helping him not just with many whites who had never backed a minority candidate for president, but with many African Americans disinclined to spend a vote on a black candidate unlikely to win enough white support to become a contender. In other words, a victory in overwhelmingly white Iowa, especially if he could draw a smattering of Republicans and independents, could deliver exactly the validation he needed.
MICHELLE SET OUT to demystify Barack, “to introduce the Obamas the people, not the Obamas the résumés,” as she put it. She strode into unfamiliar settings in dozens of cities and towns and returned the questioning gaze of strangers. She urged them to look deeply at her husband, the one who was not white and was not named Washington or Adams or Johnson or Ford or Clinton. Speaking without notes or evident nervousness, she gave her listeners license to share her initial doubts by relating her initial impressions of Barack at Sidley & Austin eighteen years earlier: “I’ve got nothing in common with this guy. He grew up in Hawaii! Who grows up in Hawaii? He was biracial. I was like, okay, what’s that about?” Her stump speech resembled a narrated short story, describing how she learned of their very different upbringings and very similar values, a discovery confirmed one summer afternoon in a sweltering church basement in one of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods. She said it was there, as he spoke with people who felt the world was failing them, that he made plain an individual’s obligation to act purposefully in a society too often mean-spirited and unfair. He urged his audience not to settle for the world as it is, but to strive for the world as it should be. “What I saw in him on that day was authenticity and truth and principle,” Michelle told her invariably rapt listeners. “That’s who I fell in love with, that man.” She was saying, Yes, I know what you’re thinking. I know. But hear me out. This is the kind of candidate you said you wanted. He’s ready. Are you? She telegraphed confidence. “I guarantee you,” she said one afternoon in the basement of the Rockwell City Public Library, “if I
could talk to everybody in this state, they would vote for Barack Obama. I’m pretty convincing.”
What began as Barack’s quest soon became her own. Everything she said was defined by the goal of getting Barack to the White House, yet Michelle made certain that the message was true to herself and her convictions. She told a story not just of Barack’s life, but of her own, always against the daily hum of Chicago’s South Side and the people she knew there. To appeal to varied audiences in Iowa, South Carolina, and New Hampshire, she took themes familiar to urban voters and broadened them into conundrums faced by families of modest means across the land. She said people weren’t asking for much, just a fair shot at a steady job, affordable health care, good schools, and a secure retirement. The archetype was her father, the blue-collar Chicago water plant worker with multiple sclerosis who managed to support a stay-at-home wife and see his two children reach Princeton. Even the most elemental ambitions seemed increasingly remote to ordinary people, she said, and the decline had come in her lifetime. She pointed to politicians too often cynical and a government and society too often cold. She said, “You can’t just tell a family of four to suck it up and make it work.”
As for the candidate himself, Michelle declared at a June 2007 women’s rally in Harlem, “I am married to the answer!” To her depictions of Barack’s achievements at Harvard and his bipartisan efforts in the Illinois legislature, she added the occasional putdown, a familiar tactic from the Senate campaign that hinted at her sense of humor, so often under wraps, and helped show his ordinary-man side. “There’s Barack Obama the phenomenon,” she said at a Beverly Hills fundraiser in February 2007. “And then there’s the Barack Obama that lives with me in my house, and that guy’s a little less impressive. For some reason this guy still can’t manage to put the butter up when he makes toast, secure the bread so that it doesn’t get stale, and his five-year-old is still better at making the bed than he is.” She described heart-to-heart talks with Malia and Sasha, often on mornings when Barack was not home, and said, “He’s too snorey and stinky, they don’t want to ever get into bed with him.” New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd said such revelations made her “wince a bit.” She wrote after the Beverly Hills event, “Many people I talked to afterward found Michelle wondrous. But others worried that her chiding was emasculating, casting her husband—under fire for lacking experience—as an undisciplined child.” A reporter asked Michelle about that later. “Barack and I laugh about that,” she said. “It’s just sort of like, do you think anyone could emasculate Barack Obama? Really now.”