Michelle Obama

by Peter Slevin

  She asked the crowd to overcome the fear—remove the old plastic protecting Grandma’s living room furniture, as she put it—and elect her husband. “Ask yourselves, of all the candidates, who will fight to lift black men up so we don’t have to keep locking them up? Who will confront the racial profiling and Jena justice that continues to afflict this nation, the voter disenfranchisement that rears its ugly head every few years and the redlining that persists in our communities, keeping prosperity out and hopelessness in? Who will use the bully pulpit of the presidency to call on black men to accept their responsibility and raise their children? Who will refuse to tolerate Corridors of Shame in this country, of all countries? The answer is clear: Barack Obama.… So I’m asking you to believe in Barack, but most of all, I’m asking you to believe in yourselves. I’m asking you to stop settling for the world as it is and to help us make the world as it should be.”

  More immediately, she was inviting black voters—essential, if he were to win—to abandon the Clintons and join them. The next step was up to Barack. If he could win in Iowa six weeks later, these voters might just conclude he had a chance to become president and turn his way for good.

  MICHELLE AND THE GIRLS DESCENDED on Des Moines for the final push with an army of relatives, friends, and babysitters. The adults spread out and campaigned while the kids frolicked. It was Michelle’s seventeenth trip to Iowa since March. She was bone-tired and on edge. “Exhausted,” said Jackie Norris, a campaign aide who often staffed her. “There’s an emotional exhaustion that you can never know until your spouse runs for office.” Michelle worried that Barack might lose. And yet as the day drew nearer and the odds grew brighter, she worried even more that he might win. What if he did win, she wondered. What would happen to her then?

  The night of January 3, 2008, was bitterly cold. Given a chance to see a caucus, the peculiarly democratic phenomenon that had defined the last ten months of his life, Barack headed to a high school in suburban Ankeny. With a Secret Service agent at the wheel, he was accompanied by Plouffe, Jarrett, and two aides. They pulled into the parking lot and were elated to see throngs of people, varying in age and party, ethnicity and class. Barack thought of his late mother, and how she would have appreciated the human tapestry. Afterward, he joined Michelle and Craig, family and friends, at dinner in West Des Moines. He told Plouffe not to call with predictions, only when the results were clear. When the news did arrive, Barack’s victory was assured. He would gather 37 percent of the caucus vote, with Clinton slipping into third, a fraction of a point behind Edwards. He won decisively, by eight percentage points, in a state where one year earlier no one had given him a chance. He took the stage, all smiles, at the Hy-Vee Center, with Michelle, Malia, and Sasha beside him, their fashion choices coordinated, a striking family tableau that would soon become familiar.

  “Thank you, Iowa!” he called out. “You know, they said this day would never come. They said our sights were set too high. They said this country was too divided, too disillusioned to ever come together around a common purpose. But on this January night, at this defining moment in history, you have done what the cynics said we couldn’t do.” He thanked the precinct captains, the volunteers, and the campaign staff. He thanked one person by name: “The love of my life, the rock of the Obama family and the closer on the campaign trail. Give it up for Michelle Obama.” Thousands of supporters cheered and shouted and grinned from ear to ear. For the Obamas and their growing legion of believers, the moment was electrifying. Tougher days were yet to come, starting five days later in New Hampshire, but there would always be some magic to Iowa.

  ELEVEN

  Veil of Impossibility

  Barack’s campaign rocketed into New Hampshire on a high and came crashing down nearly as fast, a victim of its own hubris and a comeback that surprised even his opponents. Hillary Clinton won. The margin was just 7,589 votes, 39.1 percent to Barack’s 36.5 percent, and the two candidates each earned nine delegates. But the result reset the narrative and erased the possibility that Barack could knock her quickly out of the race. Amid the gloom in a Concord hotel, it was Michelle who moved among the staff, embraced them one by one, and told them to buck up. Never too high, never too low, was a family mantra. Barack felt blue, but he came to consider the defeat one of the most useful things to happen to his unseasoned campaign. In a long march to the nomination that would toughen them all, Barack faced a political pummeling that was new to him, while Michelle found herself labeled “Mrs. Grievance” on the cover of the National Review. Hope might have triumphed over fear in Iowa, but it faced a few other opponents down the road. Washington news reporter Gwen Ifill had been right the year before when she wrote, “The Obamas could not possibly have any idea what awaits them.”

  In Nevada, eleven days after her New Hampshire victory, Clinton won more votes—if fewer delegates—than Barack, setting the stage for South Carolina, the pivotal battle before Super Tuesday. The pressure was growing and both sides felt increasingly testy. In New Hampshire, where Barack staged large rallies with a triumphant feel, the Clinton troops painted him as condescending during the final debate. During a discussion about likability, he glanced up from his notes and cracked, “You’re likable enough, Hillary.” Three days later, Bill Clinton disparaged Barack’s efforts to distinguish his Iraq War record from Hillary’s as “the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.” Spinning the upcoming South Carolina contest, the former president said the candidates were getting votes “because of their race or gender, and that’s why people tell me that Hillary doesn’t have a chance of winning here.” In a state with a sorry history of racially coded language, many African Americans found Clinton’s assertion dismissive, at best. “The Clintons are disturbing, telling half-truths and being fearmongers. They’re trying to scare white voters away,” DeDe Mays, a fifty-nine-year-old black woman, said after attending a multiracial Michelle rally in Hilton Head. “If the Obama camp doesn’t do something to counter it, it will probably work.”

  Michelle did not take kindly to the political punishment that Barack was enduring and she did set out to counter it. She started by lending her name to an unusually pithy fundraising letter. It began, “In the past week or two, another candidate’s spouse has been getting an awful lot of attention. We knew getting into this race that Barack would be competing with Senator Clinton and President Clinton at the same time. We expected that Bill Clinton would tout his record from the nineties and talk about Hillary’s role in his past success. That’s a fair approach and a challenge we are prepared to face. What we didn’t expect, at least not from our fellow Democrats, are the win-at-all-costs tactics we’ve seen recently. We didn’t expect misleading accusations that willfully distort Barack’s record.”

  For all of her public protestations that she wanted no seat at the strategy table, Michelle was not shy about speaking up when she believed the Obama campaign was falling short. “If she thinks we’re being treated unfairly or doesn’t think we’re being aggressive enough in debunking attacks, she will say so,” strategist David Axelrod said in early 2008. “She does not fold up in the lotus position and start chanting Kumbaya. She’s against gratuitous attacks but she’s not against defending our position and making sure we don’t get punked.” Michelle shared this trait with her brother, Craig, who was talked down by campaign manager David Plouffe when he wanted to fight back harder. As Michelle’s chief of staff, Melissa Winter, said in South Carolina, recalling times when Michelle was more keen than Barack to go on the attack, “My girl’s tough.”

  INCONGRUOUS AS IT MIGHT SEEM, Michelle Obama and Bill Clinton were increasingly measured against one another. She was a recent political recruit—“a conscript,” Axelrod said—matched against one of the most gifted politicians in modern times. Clinton was the commander in chief while Michelle was still a young lawyer trying to divine her future. Seventeen years apart in age and vastly different in experience, they were the history-making spouses of history-making Democratic presidential cand
idates, stating their case the best way they knew how. Both were confident and funny, opinionated and very smart. Both were Ivy League lawyers with working-class roots. Both had formidable identities independent of their formidable partners. They shared an ability to please a crowd, although in styles as different as the instruments they played, saxophone and piano. His riffs were showy and wide-ranging, often roaming exuberantly through complex material; hers were typically smooth and tart, usually understated, always controlled. His speeches often resembled a State of the Union address as he ricocheted through Pell grants, health care reform, stem-cell research, green-collar jobs, Medicare, Iran, the Geneva Conventions, and the tax code. Hers were more focused, befitting a person who prepared carefully, wasted no words and took her time with the ones she used.

  To Michelle, the personal was political. “It isn’t just about hope and inspiration. It is about character, quite frankly,” she said in South Carolina, drawing an implicit contrast with the tumult of the Clinton White House, whose echoes she heard in the attacks on her husband. “I am here, away from my kids, talking like this all over the country because Barack is different. It is about character.” Often asked how she and Barack were handling the rough-and-tumble, she said nothing surprised her. “Power concedes nothing without a struggle,” she said. The line alluded to Frederick Douglass, who said in 1857, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what any people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them.”

  “My fear is that we don’t know what truth looks like anymore,” Michelle said the day before the January 26 primary, as Bill Clinton campaigned an hour away. “I desperately want change, personally. A change in tone, a change in the tone that creates division and separates us, that makes us live in isolation from one another. Sometimes our politics uses that division as a tool and a crutch. We think we can mend it all up after all the dirt has been thrown, but we can’t.” Later that day, she directly addressed the former president’s allegation about Barack’s position on the Iraq War. As a U.S. senator, Hillary Clinton had voted to give President Bush the authority to wage war, while Barack as a state senator had given a speech opposing a U.S. military role. “Well, let me tell you something, I live with the man,” Michelle said, her tone combining authority and incredulity. She said Barack had always opposed the war and spoke against it at a risky time for him, when he was launching his run for the U.S. Senate, a detail that “his opponents won’t tell you.”

  Barack walloped the field in South Carolina, taking 55 percent of the vote and beating all projections. Clinton was second with 27 percent. John Edwards, son of a North Carolina millworker, won four in ten white votes, but just 18 percent overall. Barack earned 78 percent of the black vote and 24 percent of the white vote. “Race doesn’t matter! Race doesn’t matter!” supporters chanted at his victory party. When Bill Clinton commented archly that Jesse Jackson, too, had won South Carolina primaries, a host of pundits and politicians quickly called him out. The January skirmishes made plain that race was bound to surface more widely as the campaign churned onward. Sooner or later, the topic was going to burst into the open, however ebullient the victory party chants.

  BARACK’S CANDIDACY CAPTURED the hearts of his Democratic supporters in ways unseen since Robert F. Kennedy ran for president forty years earlier. Ally Carragher, a young organizer who joined the campaign in Carroll, Iowa, grew up hearing about Kennedy from her mother, whose eyes sparkled as she told stories from the 1960s. “I know what I will be telling my kids about, and it will be about Obama,” Carragher said of the candidate on the eve of Super Tuesday. “What I saw in her eyes is what I feel.” A music video capturing that spirit cascaded from giant video screens at Obama rallies and went viral on the Internet when going viral was a relatively new concept. Known as “Yes We Can,” the video spliced together Barack’s New Hampshire election night speech with scenes of actors and musicians singing the same lines. Its creator was Will.i.am, frontman for the Black Eyed Peas. He said he came up with the concept and the tune because the speech made him think of “freedom … equality … and truth … and that’s not what we have today.”

  The campaign’s upbeat call for “change we can believe in” was, in fact, undergirded by a measure of truth telling, and one of the principal tellers was Michelle. Often the more direct of the two Obamas, Michelle did not hesitate to describe the inequities she perceived in the United States at the end of the Bush years, when the Census Bureau estimated that 39.8 million people lived below the poverty line. That meant an individual who earned less than $211 a week and a family of four that collected less than $425. The poverty rate was at an eleven-year high and half the households in the country earned less than $50,303 annually, with corresponding constraints on their access to education and opportunity. The Obamas had recently become wealthy—they reported income of $4.2 million in 2007, almost entirely from book royalties. But Michelle knew the stories behind the numbers through her work on the South Side, her years at Public Allies, and the lives of her own extended family, many of whom were still in the working class or just a decade or two beyond it.

  “I look at my life since I was a little girl and things have gotten harder, progressively harder, for regular people. The struggle has been getting worse, not better,” she told supporters in Hilton Head, South Carolina. “And we’re still a nation that’s a little too mean. I wish mean worked, because we’re good at it. Our tone is bad and we’ve grown to believe that somehow mean talk is tough talk … and we reward it. Not just in politics, but we reward it in every sliver of our culture.”

  The same day, up the road in rural Estill, Michelle carried her message to more than 100 black voters in a storefront office of Obama for America. “This nation is broken,” she said. “Our souls are broken and we’ve lost our way. We have lost our will and the understanding that we have to sacrifice and compromise for one another.” Ordinary people were being thwarted again and again, she said, even when their goals were clear and the bar was set. “You reach the bar and they move it. This is true regardless of the color of your skin. This is true regardless of your gender. This is the truth of living in America.”

  The image of the moving bar, which she used for months, suggested a faceless establishment and a rigged game. In September 2007, she counseled the National Conference of Black Women “to understand what we are up against. You see, for so long, we’ve been asked to compete in a game where we are given few of the rules and none of the resources to win. And when we do the impossible, when we beat the odds and we play the game better than those who made up the rules, then they do what they do. They change the rules, they move the bar and too many are left behind.” They were faceless leaders, privileged, unconcerned, or out of touch. The result, she said, was often fear and uncertainty that created a “veil of impossibility.” Change would come only when voters became “frustrated and a little angry about the way things are going.” In an appeal that could have been pulled from a community organizing handbook, she said “regular folks” needed to talk up Barack’s candidacy. They needed to vote their interests and not their fears.

  As she toggled between conundrums of race and class, Michelle’s campaign message contained both ends of Barack’s elemental equation of the world as it is and the world as it should be, the first representing need, the second signifying purpose. For all of the gloom, she always tacked back optimistically to Barack and what he could do for the country. It was Barack Obama, she said, who best represented a step toward fairness, integrity, decency, and dignity—and most represented a break with the established ways. Not Hillary Clinton, not a Republican. “I’m here right now,” she said in Hilton Head, “because I think that the only person in this race who has an honest chance of changing the game—not playing it better than those who have played it, but changing the game—is my husband, Barack Obama.” She took to ending her speeches with a story about a ten-year-ol
d black girl who approached her in a barber shop in Newberry, South Carolina, birthplace of nineteenth-century AME Church leader Henry McNeal Turner. The girl told Michelle, “If Barack Obama becomes the next president of the United States, it will be historical.” Michelle asked what that meant to her. “It means that I can dream of being anything I imagine,” the girl replied and began to sob.

  “That little girl started to cry, see, because she’s 10 and she gets it,” Michelle told her audience. “She knows what happens when that veil of impossibility suffocates you, when you live in a country that tells you what you can’t do and who you can’t be before you even get a chance, when you live in a country that gives education to some and not to all, when you live in a country where politics trumps all reason. That’s what’s at stake in this election.”

  KATIE MCCORMICK LELYVELD’S phone rang. It was February 18, 2008, and the young press secretary was in Wisconsin on a campaign swing with Michelle, her boss. At the other end of the line were Bill Burton and Dan Pfeiffer, senior members of the campaign’s communications staff, calling from Chicago. They had seen the reports and they wanted to know what had gone wrong. Lelyveld, too, had seen the news reports, but did not think anything was amiss. “It’s her normal sort of thing,” Lelyveld recalled saying. “She doesn’t speak in sound bites. She was getting to a bigger point that everybody understood. There’s not time in a short broadcast to get there.” The Chicago men, already fielding calls from reporters, were worried. When Lelyveld hung up, she flipped the Play button on her ubiquitous pocket recorder and began to transcribe the offending part of the speech.