by Peter Slevin
THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION opened in Denver on August 25, 2008, with Michelle as the keynote speaker on the tone-setting first night. The campaign knew it had work to do to introduce not only Barack but Michelle, whose unfavorability numbers were uncomfortably high. Earlier that month, 29 percent of respondents to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll viewed Michelle negatively, including 18 percent who described their feelings as “very negative.” Only 38 percent viewed her positively, while 28 percent were neutral and 5 percent did not know her name or were unsure. “It’s scary,” an undecided voter told the St. Petersburg Times after connecting her “proud of my country” comments with her Princeton thesis, which was circulating on the Web. “To think she’s going to be whispering in the president’s ear when he’s in bed.”
The campaign saw Denver as a chance to hit the reset button. “It was important to us for a whole range of reasons for her to do well and to address some of these questions that were lingering about her,” Axelrod said. “And it was important to us for her to do what she did to explain Barack to people.” For Michelle herself, it was a chance to regain her confidence and demonstrate her value on the biggest stage yet. The criticism “really hurt her,” Axelrod said, especially as someone accustomed to “excelling and always being prepared and always being able to do the right thing. I think it also gave her a sense of just how exposed she was … in this hair-trigger environment.” She asked for a draft of her speech more than a month before the curtain went up, then spent weeks refining and practicing it until she knew the words nearly by heart. Her share of the evening began with a six-minute campaign video titled “South Side Girl,” borrowing the regular folks frame that she had adopted on the trail. Enveloped by soft voices and soothing music, the film emphasized the themes of family and community and a commitment to give back. Marian served as narrator and Craig and Barack made cameos. No character, however, figured more prominently than her father, Fraser, who had died seventeen years before.
MARIAN: Michelle was especially close to her daddy.
CRAIG: My father was in his 50s and my sister would still sit on his lap and put her head on his shoulder, as she used to do when she was a kid. And that sort of one picture epitomizes their relationship.
BARACK: Her dad was just a sweet man, a kind-hearted man and somebody who thought everybody should be treated with dignity and respect. And I think that carried over to Michelle.
MARIAN: Michelle has always reached out to others. It was something I loved about my husband, too.
CRAIG: Michelle’s compassion came from my father and people came to him with their problems and he always managed to have people go away feeling better than they did when they came to talk to him. I’m certain that that’s where Michelle gets her compassion from.
MICHELLE: I think about him every day when I think about how I raise my kids, because I remember his compassion. I remember the words, his advice, the way he lived life. And I am trying each and every day to apply that to how I raise my kids. I want his legacy to live through them, and hopefully it will affect the kind of First Lady that I will become, because it’s his compassion and his view of the world that really inspires who I am, who I want my girls to be, and what I hope for the country.
Michelle’s speech, which followed the video and an introduction by Craig, featured references to Fraser early and late in the narrative. Three sentences in, she said, “I can feel my dad looking down on us, just as I’ve felt his presence in every grace-filled moment of my life.” She declared that she stood on the podium as a sister, a wife, a daughter, and a “mom.” She called her father “our rock” and ended by asking her audience to devote themselves to Barack’s election, “in honor of my father’s memory and my daughters’ future,” as well as everyone who labored to build the world as it should be. Beyond telling a story of their lives that emphasized uplift and hard work, she recognized the eighty-eighth anniversary of women winning the right to vote and the forty-fifth anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. “I stand here today,” she said, breaking through the applause, “at the crosscurrents of that history, knowing that my piece of the American dream is a blessing hard won by those who came before me, all of them driven by the same conviction that drove my dad to get up an hour early each day to painstakingly dress himself for work, the same conviction that drives the men and women I’ve met all across this country.” She folded into the speech a declaration that she loved her country. The crowd cheered.
The address was the opening success in what proved to be a happy week for Democrats, launching the Obamas toward November and the battle against John McCain, U.S. senator from Arizona, and Palin, the idiosyncratic governor of Alaska, who wowed the Republican base but left many others cold. Michelle’s poll numbers immediately shot skyward, rising eighteen points in the Obama campaign’s overnight tracking polls, and they stayed aloft. By October, she drew crowds of two thousand in Columbus, seven thousand in Pensacola, and eleven thousand in Gainesville. “Surreal is almost like an understatement,” her brother, Craig, said. “It’s magical is what it is. I mean, it’s like going to sleep and waking up and you’re Tinkerbell.”
In Akron, eleven days before election day, Michelle no longer mentioned in her stump speech her Ivy League education or Barack’s. She made no reference to his work as a professor of constitutional law, his eight years in the Illinois senate, or his three-plus years in Washington. Nor did she mention the stacked deck or the moving bar. What she said was “We’re just regular folks.” Before the rally, Michelle dropped by the local campaign office, where a dozen volunteers were dialing for voters. Taking a telephone from a supporter, she said cheerily, “How are you! You’re still undecided? That’s okay. What can I tell you about my husband?” In the next few minutes, she did some listening and some answering, offering a careful rationale for an Obama presidency. “We’ve been doing the same thing for the last eight years and it hasn’t worked,” she said, describing her husband as “a fighter for regular folks, and that’s our background.” She described her upbringing as the daughter of working-class parents who did not attend college. She mentioned Marian, who had retired and was living on a pension, and Barack’s sister Maya, a teacher. She also mentioned Barack’s ailing grandmother Toot, who had long been unable to travel and would die within a fortnight, two days before her grandson was elected president. “We’re living close to the issues,” said Michelle. She added as she hung up, “That’s my pitch. Thank you for letting me go on and on.”
ON ELECTION DAY, Barack and Michelle, joined by Malia and Sasha, voted early at Beulah Shoesmith Elementary in Hyde Park. Michelle went to have her hair done, taking the girls with her, and Barack made the quickest of campaign trips to neighboring Indiana, where a win would be icing and a loss forgettable. He returned in time for an afternoon game of pickup basketball with friends and relatives, then retreated to the house on Greenwood to await results. As polls began to close and votes were counted, Michelle, Barack, Marian, and the girls sat down to dinner with Craig and his family—his second wife, Kelly, and his two children, Avery and Leslie. Marian asked the kids about school, their teachers, their favorite subjects. The television was off, although Michelle and Barack each kept a BlackBerry on the table in front of them. Every so often, one phone or the other would buzz. They would read the message and make no comment. When the pace of buzzing picked up, Barack walked into the kitchen and turned on a small TV. “Well,” he said, “looks like we’re going to win this thing.” Soon after, Michelle answered a call, turned to Barack, and said, “Congratulations, Mr. President.”
Barack gave his victory speech in Grant Park, best known until that night as the place where Chicago police battered protesters outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention. As the motorcade headed north along Lake Shore Drive through an unseasonably warm November night, Malia said, “Hey, how come there are no other cars?” Police had stopped traffic in both directions. At that moment, Craig said, it regi
stered with him that voters had actually chosen Barack to be the next president of the United States. As he rode through the city toward the Hyatt hotel where they would await the official results, he told himself that an unfulfilled promise in the Declaration of Independence had finally been borne out, the line that said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
The crowd in Grant Park, more than 100,000 strong, was delirious with joy when the networks called the election for Barack at 10 p.m. Central Time as polls closed on the West Coast. MyKela Loury wept. A black woman, she stood alone on a sidewalk within earshot of the cheering throngs. She put her hand to her mouth, then both hands to her temples, her mouth open in a silent gasp. “I’m thinking justice, finally. Fairness, finally,” Loury said. “Oh, gosh.” The tears came again. “Oh, Jesus.” Car horns blared. Supporters shouted and laughed and screamed and hugged one another and laughed some more. So many of Barack’s followers had wanted this outcome so badly and yet had dared not believe it would happen. It seemed just possible, in that crystalline instant, that more good things would follow. “We’re finally free,” Tracy Boykin declared as she headed toward the park with her friend Caron Warnsby, a surgeon. “I’m a doctor, and I don’t have to walk in anymore and be a black doctor. She’s not the black surgeon, anymore. She’s the surgeon. Everything is different.” And for that one glorious moment, it was.
Michelle, Barack, and the girls strode onto the stage. As Barack spoke, his family and friends in the wings pinched themselves. Cameras caught Jesse Jackson with tears streaming down his face. He later said he was thinking of Emmett Till, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, and the march in Selma. Capers Funnye, one of Fraser’s cousins, found Marian and hugged her. “We cried together for her dad, we cried for her granddad, for my mom and all of her siblings who’ve gone on,” Funnye said. “It was a powerful, profound moment. It was an extraordinary moment. There were no words. What could you say?”
TWELVE
Nothing Would Have Predicted
Michelle never had any doubt that her ascendance to the White House as first lady of the United States—FLOTUS, in Secret Service parlance—was groundbreaking. This was the executive mansion that slaves had helped build and African Americans had helped run, but it had never sheltered a black president or first family. The symbolism alone was stunning. It was evident on the November day, six days after the election, when George and Laura Bush posed with the Obamas outside the White House. And at the inauguration eve concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, where Martin Luther King had delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. And in Barack’s inaugural address on January 20, 2009, in front of an estimated two million people on the National Mall, when he spoke of being the son of a father who, two generations earlier, “might not have been served in a local restaurant.” After the swearing-in, where Barack rested his left hand on the velvet-bound Bible used by Abraham Lincoln at his 1861 inaugural, crowds cheered and called out as Michelle and Barack stepped out of their bulletproof limousine to walk hand in hand in the winter sunshine down Pennsylvania Avenue.
Inside the White House, the largely black staff of butlers, housekeepers, and cooks gathered to meet the new first family. “They could not have been kinder to us and warmer to us,” Barack said. “And part of it, I suspect, is they look at Malia and Sasha and they say, ‘Well, this looks like my grandbaby or this looks like my daughter.’ And I think for them to have a sense that we’ve come this far was a powerful moment for them—and certainly a powerful moment for us.” The first night in the mansion, dozens of friends and relatives gathered for a party, no one quite believing what had come to pass. Barack, after asking how to get there, headed upstairs to the residence at 2:30 a.m., following Michelle, who had retired earlier. A signed copy of the Gettysburg Address lay under glass in the Lincoln Bedroom, once Lincoln’s office, where Craig and Kelly slept in an elegant eight-by-six-foot rosewood bed after receiving a house tour. One stop was the Truman Balcony and its view south toward the Washington Monument. “My wife and I were just shaking our heads,” Craig said.
Not two weeks later, Michelle was speaking at the White House about equal pay for women. Soon, she addressed cheering workers at the Department of Housing and Urban Development and urged them to find “a new level of passion and vigor.” A few days after that, she told teenagers at a Washington community health center that she and Barack were “kids like you who figured out one day that our fate was in our own hands.” In April, she made a trip to the Capitol to unveil a bust of Sojourner Truth, a freed slave who became a prominent abolitionist and activist for women’s suffrage. Born Isabella Baumfree in the late eighteenth century, Truth was sold several times before escaping with one of her children in 1826. She delivered her famous “Ain’t I a Woman” speech in 1851. Nearly a century and a half later, she was the first black woman to be honored with a bust in the Capitol. By her very presence at the ceremony, Michelle demonstrated the distance that African Americans had traveled since Martha Washington, accompanied by seven house slaves, took up residence in New York as the wife of the country’s first president. Noting that she herself was a descendant of slaves, she called Sojourner Truth “an outspoken, tell-it-like-it-is kind of woman. And we all know a little something about that, right?” She urged her audience, which included Nancy Pelosi, the first female speaker of the House, Hillary Clinton, the new secretary of state, and a bevy of Republican leaders, to reflect on the moment.
“Now,” she said, “many young boys and girls, like my own daughters, will come to Emancipation Hall and see the face of a woman who looks like them.” Just as no one who looked like the Obamas had graced Emancipation Hall, no one who looked like them had occupied the White House, either, a fact that would influence what Barack and Michelle would do and say, even as they set out unambiguously to be the president and first lady of all Americans.
VIRTUALLY OVERNIGHT, Michelle had become one of the most prominent women in America. Hopes soared among some of her most ardent fans that she would become a White House force in her own right. Her new staff was deluged with invitations to lunches and launches and an endless skein of worthy and not-so-worthy events. The screen was blank and she was free, if one could call it that, to define a role for herself. Yet she soon discovered that her freedom was defined by a tangle of often conflicting expectations and options. What was true for any first lady was doubly so for the first African American first lady, one who carried a significant résumé into the position. She had told delegates to the Democratic National Convention that she stood “at the crosscurrents” of the history of race and gender. Her friend Verna Williams said “in the crosshairs” was more like it. “People are going to be watching every move you make. They’re watching you—it’s like the Police song.”
That first year in the White House, Michelle said later, was about “figuring out the job.” There were aides to hire, a household staff to manage, a web of rules—written and otherwise—about how to conduct her affairs. She no longer drove, she no longer went anywhere alone, and even her home was not her own. Meanwhile, she was determined to settle Malia and Sasha into their new lives and support Barack as he confronted two wars and the most serious economic crisis since the Great Depression. Accustomed to control, at times she felt at sea. “It wasn’t smooth,” said Jackie Norris, her first chief of staff. “It’s not smooth for any first lady. It’s a hard process.”
Michelle had made time, during a campaign that had lasted the better part of two years, to think about the role she might play as first lady. Before reaching Washington, she convened small groups to consider what the job could mean, but she intentionally left the contours vague. When asked in 2007 whether she saw herself more as Laura Bush or as Hillary Clinton, she ducked the comparison. “It is so hard to project out realistically what life will be like for me as a woman, for me as a mother, when Barack becomes president. It’s hard to know. What I do know is that given the many skills that I have on so many differen
t levels, I will be what I have to be at the time.” The answer was an honest one. It made clear her strong sense of obligation to Malia, Sasha, and Barack. It conveyed flexibility and it also bought her some time. Once she moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Michelle’s prominent place in the history books was assured by the color of her skin. Surely there was more, much more. But what?
Michelle started out as “risk-averse,” in one staffer’s words, wrestling with unfamiliar conditions and wary of a misstep. As self-described “mom-in-chief,” a term that set some supporters’ teeth on edge when they considered her education and skills, Michelle telegraphed that she would leap into no issue or cause before she was ready. She instructed her staff to confine her official working schedule to two days a week at first, later raising it to three. She labored informally on other days while focusing on her family. She operated from the East Wing, the president from the West Wing. Privately, she made clear to her staff that once she chose her course, she would be disciplined about it, conserving political capital while protecting her family time. She said from the outset that her role would be collaborative and measured, always in service to the member of the couple who had been elected—in other words, Barack, who had official duties, constitutional powers, a $400,000 salary, and his sights set on winning a second term. Michelle’s first goal, as she had learned the hard way during the campaign, was to do no harm.