by Peter Slevin
As their lives became ever more public, and publicly dissected, Michelle and Barack talked about each other in interviews and on the campaign trail. This was not uncharted territory. Each had discussed their relationship with interviewers and, in Barack’s case, shared details in The Audacity of Hope. For all of their professional success and their emerging celebrity, they painted themselves as essentially ordinary on the home front, their marriage intact and the two of them feeling good about each other. “She’s smart. She’s funny. She’s honest. She’s tough. I think of her as my best friend,” Barack said, allowing that maybe he was becoming a better partner. “What I realize as I get older is that Michelle is less concerned about me giving her flowers than she is that I’m doing things that are hard for me—carving out time. That to her is proof, evidence, that I’m thinking about her. She appreciates the flowers, but to her, romance is that I’m actually paying attention to the things that she cares about. And time is always an important factor.”
TIME SEEMED in ever shorter supply. Michelle carried two BlackBerry mobile phones, symbols of her split existence. One was for the campaign and one for her job at the University of Chicago, where she worked part-time on urban health issues until she was sucked into the vortex of the presidential race. She began an unpaid leave of absence in January 2008. The job had kept her tethered to a professional pursuit outside of politics, but it was the girls who most thoroughly occupied her thoughts. “I am going to be the person who is providing them with the stability,” she said in December 2006. “So that means my role with the kids becomes even more important. What I am not willing to do is hand my kids over to my mom and say, ‘We’ll see you in two years.’ … There has to be a balance and there will be a balance.”
Michelle took to telling campaign audiences that it was Malia and Sasha whom she thought of first when she woke up and last before she fell asleep. The girls were doing fine, she would say, occupied by school and play dates and the typical busyness of childhood. To keep it that way, Michelle strived mightily for normalcy in a life that was becoming anything but. She instructed the campaign staff to mark certain days as off-limits. When she traveled, roughly once a week, her schedulers tried to place the first speaking engagement in the middle of the day, to give her time to get the girls fed, dressed, and off to school before she hopped a private jet at Chicago’s Midway Airport. She kept trips as short as possible and tried to avoid spending the night on the road. When she was away, she relied on her mother and Eleanor Kaye Wilson, fondly called “Mama Kaye,” the girls’ much-loved godmother. A consultant to nonprofit organizations, Wilson had spent a significant part of her career developing urban education projects, from a welfare-to-work training program to an anti-delinquency project for elementary school children in Chicago housing projects. Wilson was also Marian Robinson’s yoga partner. Their instructor was often Marian’s youngest brother, Stephen Shields, who ran a studio on the North Side.
Central to Michelle’s sanity was the group of friends who, over the years, had become her support group and safety net. Professionals and mothers, they had careers whose fates and fortunes tended to be far removed from the vicissitudes of national politics. Michelle had always had close girlfriends, in high school, at Princeton and Harvard, at City Hall. Linked principally by motherhood, the early gatherings, ostensibly for the benefit of the children, “were for us,” Michelle said. “We just shared all those things. And those friendships continued because our girls continued to be friends. Many of those women are still the women that I count on to kick ideas around with, to let my hair down, to vent, to laugh. It’s been so important. And I think I had to learn that because Barack traveled. I just realized having some kind of support around, whether it was my mom or a set of friends, was essential to keeping me whole and not so angry or frustrated. Because I could always pick up the phone and somebody would come over with a pizza or we’d just go and have dinner at a friend’s and we wouldn’t have to cook. And you just share the load.”
One of the friends was Sandy Matthews, a children’s advocacy group executive married to former Chicago Cubs left fielder Gary Matthews Sr. Another was Yvonne Davila, a publicist and onetime City Hall colleague who lived near the Obamas. She sometimes hosted Malia and Sasha on weekend sleepovers. “We’re co-parenting our children. Her kids have toothbrushes at my house,” Davila said during the campaign. She described a day when she had felt sure Michelle could use a break. Davila drove over to the house on Greenwood Avenue and swept the girls into the car for an outing. “It’s just a silent thing that we as her friends know and do. We’ve all seen each other through all kinds of things.” Good and bad alike, she said.
In the group of friends, Michelle probably spent the most time with Anita Blanchard and Cheryl Rucker Whitaker, women who rose from modest means to become doctors. Blanchard was an obstetrician; she delivered Malia and Sasha, served on the University of Chicago faculty, and led annual South Side seminars for black girls and their mothers about preparing for adolescence, including matters of reproductive health. Whitaker, a medical doctor from Georgia with a Harvard public health degree, conducted research on hypertension and other chronic illnesses in African American communities. They had children of similar ages to Malia and Sasha, and all attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. The families lived close to one another and the husbands were close friends, as well. While the kids took tennis lessons, the fathers sometimes lolled near the courts, reading the morning papers and shooting the breeze. The group vacationed in Hawaii and on Martha’s Vineyard, often joined by Valerie Jarrett, divorced years earlier after a short marriage.
The connections could seem dizzying. Blanchard’s husband, Marty Nesbitt, the businessman in the group, chaired the Chicago Housing Authority and worked closely with members of the Pritzker family, later becoming treasurer of the 2008 presidential campaign. Eric Whitaker, raised on the South Side, had run a men’s health clinic in nearby Woodlawn and led the Illinois public health department before Michelle and Jarrett recruited him to lead the Urban Health Initiative. Whitaker knew Barack from the basketball courts at Harvard. Nesbitt met Craig Robinson on a basketball recruiting trip, when Princeton coach Pete Carril invited him to watch the Tigers play Ohio State. The two met again in business school, and Nesbitt met Barack while playing basketball at Chicago’s East Bank Club. Finally, as medical students at the University of Chicago, Anita Blanchard and Eric Whitaker were mentored by James Bowman, Jarrett’s father.
Smart, funny, loyal, down-to-earth, and discreet, they supported one another as they rose to prominence and prosperity. When the campaign began, Cheryl Whitaker asked Barack what he and Michelle needed from the group. “We need you all to be the same,” he replied. “I just need to know that if all of this goes south, our friends are still there and that we can still come over and sit in your backyard and we can still come over for dinner.” Whenever they could, the friends got together, away from the fray. But it was true that “this running for president thing,” as Michelle called it, was altogether different. It astonished them to think that Barack, so recently a state senator, so typically the guy they saw playing Scrabble or basketball or watching ESPN, so essentially a black man in a contest that no black man had ever won, was a genuine contender capturing the nation’s attention. “I believe [he] will be president,” Jarrett said in July 2007. “It gives me goose bumps and if we continue talking, I’ll probably start to cry.”
STARTING WITH his first trip to Cedar Rapids on February 10, 2007, Barack had a little more than ten months to win the Iowa caucuses and give himself a chance to claim the Democratic nomination. He assembled an experienced campaign staff that understood Iowa’s dynamics in a way that the Clinton team never did. Bill Clinton, deferring to the favorite son candidacy of Senator Tom Harkin in 1992, had not competed in Iowa, while much of Hillary’s Washington-based senior staff was slow to recognize the peril. By contrast, virtually every ranking member of Team Obama knew how the first-in-the-nation I
owa contests were won, starting with a willingness to indulge voters their long moment in the spotlight. The needs of the campaign also conveniently dovetailed with the community organizing techniques that Barack and Michelle had studied and adopted—the purposeful personal stories, the one-on-one connections, the principle that grassroots volunteers and voters should not just be asked to follow, but inspired to lead. “Paint the fence!” was one Iowa staff motto, recalling Tom Sawyer’s strategy to entice his friends to pitch in, do his work for him, and feel happy about doing it.
Michelle, ever the disciplined student, spent hours reading briefing books, aiming to speak fluently about the Iraq War and the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the contours of the Iowa landscape. On Michelle’s first overnight trip to the state, chief of staff Melissa Winter said, “She takes this so seriously because every day not with the girls has to be validated.” In a period of thirty-six hours, she traveled to Davenport, Ottumwa, Centerville, Corydon, Lamoni, Indianola, Waterloo, Iowa Falls, Rockwell City, and Fort Dodge. Shaken, she also made an unscheduled stop in Mason City to offer support to a reckless motorcyclist who crashed at high speed into her campaign van and was lucky to be alive.
As the appearances piled up, the staff discovered that Michelle possessed political skills her husband lacked. When a precinct captain in an Iowa town was wavering, many campaign workers preferred Michelle, not Barack, to make the final sale. More than one aide recalled watching as she backed an Iowan against a wall in a high school gym and pressed to know what would seal the deal. They started calling her “the closer.” Pete Giangreco, a Chicago political strategist who had worked with the Obamas for years, said of the couple, “He has natural political gifts and he’s not a natural politician. She has natural gifts and she’s a natural politician. He’s rootless, all over the place. She’s grounded. People think she’s very real. They get where she comes from.” This was particularly true of women, the campaign learned, making her role in the duel against Hillary Clinton that much more important. “She connects with women in a really, really powerful way,” Giangreco said, “because it wasn’t too long ago that ‘she was me.’ ” Jobi Petersen Cates, Michelle’s Public Allies recruit and colleague, took the thought one step further. “If you had asked me which one of them would have been in the White House, I’d have said Michelle,” Cates said. “Why? Heart. She’s a badass.”
To succeed in Iowa, the Obama campaign sought to bring thousands of first-time caucusgoers into the mix. They moved beyond the Democratic Party regulars, many of whom had been sewn up by Clinton and Edwards, to court newcomers. They learned their issues, their passions, the names of their children and their dogs. They sat alongside them in church, talked high school sports at the local diner, and invited them to the busy Obama offices that popped up in dozens of storefronts across the state. In that spirit, Michelle put black pen to white notepaper, laboriously writing thank-you notes to Iowa supporters in her neat and unadorned cursive. In the same spirit, far from the spotlight, Barack spoke six times to Douglas Burns, columnist for the Daily Times Herald, circulation six thousand, in Carroll, Iowa. Through Burns and his small-town colleagues across the state, the campaign aimed to reach Iowans whom no number of column inches on the front page of The New York Times could persuade. Iowans were the ones who counted most. They were the golden ticket. “It’s Iowa or bust,” David Axelrod said privately, and for many months in 2007, the smart money was on bust.
Then came the biggest event on the political calendar before caucus night: the Jefferson Jackson Dinner, held November 10 in a downtown Des Moines arena. On his way there, Barack calmly reassured Emily Parcell, the campaign’s worried Iowa political director, “I’m a fourth-quarter player. I’ve got this.” Required by house rules to speak without notes, he had been rehearsing. He delivered a fast-paced, energetic performance, painting Clinton as the status quo candidate. “We are in a defining moment in our history,” he declared. “Our nation is at war. The planet is in peril. The dream that so many generations fought for feels as if it’s slowly slipping away. We are working harder for less. We’ve never paid more for health care or for college. It’s harder to save, and it’s harder to retire. And most of all, we’ve lost faith that our leaders can or will do anything about it.” As he worked his way through his campaign pledges, the crowd roared. The media took notice, as did voters.
TEN DAYS LATER, Michelle made her way to Orangeburg, South Carolina, where her singular mission was to persuade skeptical black voters to believe in Barack and his chances. A CBS poll in late 2007 showed that 40 percent of the state’s African American voters thought the country was not “ready to elect a black president.” Their doubts mattered because the early road to the White House passed through the heart of the old Confederacy. Black voters were likely to cast half of the ballots in the South Carolina primary, sixteen days after Iowa and ten days before Super Tuesday, and Barack needed them. The campaign asked Michelle to make the sale. No one was closer to Barack or had stronger bona fides in the black community. No one told a better story.
To many African American voters, especially women, Michelle herself was a sign that Barack was all right. He had dated white women, but he married a black woman from Chicago. “Had he married a white woman, he would have signaled that he had chosen whiteness, a consistent visual reminder that he was not on the African American side. Michelle anchored him,” said Melissa Harris-Perry, who knew the Obamas in Chicago and authored Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America. “Part of what we as African Americans like about Barack is the visual image of him in the White House, and it would have been stunningly different without Michelle and those brown-skinned girls.” As writer Allison Samuels put it, “Michelle is not only African American, but brown. Real brown.”
Amid a campaign that had tacked away from explicit talk about race, Michelle’s Orangeburg speech could not have been a more direct appeal. The setting itself made a statement: South Carolina State University, a historically black college that made news for lunch counter sit-ins and a 1968 protest against segregation at a bowling alley, a demonstration that ended with three students shot dead by state police. Drawing on themes and convictions that had long animated her, she placed herself, and Barack, firmly in a historical narrative about racism and racial politics in America. She said she stood on the shoulders of Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks and Mary McLeod Bethune, an honor roll of women “who knew what it meant to overcome.” She owed her own opportunities, she said, to “their courage and sacrifice all those years ago” and to the voices of parents, pastors, and elders “who taught me to work hard, dream big and then bring my blessings and my knowledge back to my community.” She spoke of her grandfather Fraser, raised just two hours up the road in Georgetown, who taught her that her destiny had not been written before she was born.
Michelle’s own success had not been assured, she told her audience, for she, too, had experienced naysaying that could have sapped her soul had she surrendered to it. “From classmates who thought a black girl with a book was acting white. From teachers who told me not to reach too high because my test scores were too low. And from well-meaning but misguided folks who said … ‘Success isn’t meant for little black girls from the South Side of Chicago.’ ” She had made it, but her life remained out of reach for “too many women, too many little black girls.” Reciting details of disparities, Michelle said pay discrimination resulted in black women being paid 67 cents for every dollar a white man earned for doing the same job. Forty-five percent of children from black middle-class families were ending up “near poor,” compared with 16 percent from comparable white families. She said, “We know that millions of women over the past decades have been dropped from the welfare rolls and left to fend for themselves without adequate child care. We know that too many black women don’t have quality, affordable health care. That we are more likely to die than white women of a whole host of diseases. That we are dying too young, too needlessly. That o
ur babies are dying, too.… And we are learning that the dream of giving our children a better life is slipping further out of reach.”
Then came the pivot to Barack, first to his story, then to his candidacy and a tribute to those in generations past who “stood up when it was risky, stood up when it was hard.” She was asking her audience to do the same, to see Barack in a long line of civil rights luminaries, to trust him and to believe that he would not be defeated and he would not be shot. Months before, uncommonly early in the election cycle, he had started receiving around-the-clock Secret Service protection. “Now I know folks talk in the barber shops and beauty salons,” Michelle said, “and I’ve heard some folks say, ‘That Barack, he seems like a nice guy, but I’m not sure America’s ready for a black president.’ Well, all I can say is we’ve heard those voices before.… Voices that focus on what might go wrong, rather than what’s possible. And I understand it. I know where it comes from.… It’s the bitter legacy of racism and discrimination and oppression in this country. A legacy that hurts us all.”