Michelle Obama

by Peter Slevin

  MICHELLE ARRIVED in London on April 1, 2009, for her first overseas trip as first lady. While Barack held working meetings, she embraced cancer patients at Charing Cross Hospital and took in a ballet at the Royal Opera. Wearing a simple black cardigan and two strands of pearls, she met Queen Elizabeth and promptly broke protocol. Towering above the white-haired monarch, she placed her manicured left hand warmly on Her Majesty’s back. It was a natural gesture, but apparently one does not touch the eighty-two-year-old queen, apart from mildly shaking an outstretched hand. The queen did not seem to mind, although gadflies did buzz. It was on a side trip the next day, however, that Michelle unexpectedly found her groove. It happened at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School, named for Britain’s first female doctor, an advocate of women’s suffrage. Ninety percent of the girls came from racial or ethnic minority groups, representing fifty-five languages and countless challenges overcome. In arranging the event in Islington, Michelle’s advisers were looking for a place “the first lady wasn’t expected to go,” said Trooper Sanders. The team considered what would add value to the president’s trip and what would be authentic to Michelle. What they saw at the school was how strongly her own story, anchored in an urban corner of the American Midwest, resonated with teenagers a world away. Michelle saw it, too.

  “Nothing in my life ever would have predicted that I would be standing here as the first African-American first lady. I was not raised with wealth or resources or any social standing to speak of. I was raised on the South Side of Chicago. That’s the real part of Chicago,” she told the girls. “I want you to know that we have very much in common.” Echoing her remarks at Anacostia High two weeks earlier, she declared that “confidence and fortitude” would win out. “You too, can control your own destiny, please remember that.” As she spoke, the girls cheered and Michelle choked up. When she ended her remarks, she surprised them by announcing, “I do hugs.” The girls flocked around her and she delivered one embrace after another. Afterward, feeling invigorated, she climbed into her car and said, “I could do that all day.”

  It was not much of a stretch to say that Michelle had found her métier, in words and gestures. Her story connected with the girls and so did her familiar, affirming embrace. In the White House, a hug would become her signature, natural and abiding, a sign of faith and support. She was not yet certain about the contours of the bully pulpit, nor had she decided which issues to pursue, but a hug was one concrete thing that she could make happen. With a smile, a few words, and an embrace, she would try to convey to thousands of girls and boys that the first lady of the United States believed in them. As for the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School, she stayed in touch, arranging to meet thirty-five students at Oxford two years later and hosting twelve students at the White House in 2012. On her desk, she kept a photograph of her visit to the school.

  Michelle made a point of speaking to young audiences when she visited India, Africa, and Latin America during her first two years in office. East Wing staffers, who asked State Department and National Security Council colleagues how the first lady could be useful, hoped her ability to connect with diverse young people overseas might even deliver a small foreign-policy benefit. At a time when the United States was waging a global competition for hearts and minds, she told university students in Mexico City in April 2010 that the “immense promise” of an Internet-connected generation had persuaded her to make young people the focus of her international efforts. Nearly half of Mexico’s population was younger than twenty-five, she noted, while in the Middle East, the figure was 60 percent. She called it a youth bulge and made clear that the status quo would not suffice. “You have an unprecedented ability to organize and to mobilize, and to challenge old assumptions, and to bridge old divides and to find new solutions to our toughest problems,” she said. Organize. Mobilize. Challenge. Bridge. Through the prism of assets, not deficits. She told her staff, “Don’t just put me on a plane, send me someplace and have me smile.” She was finding her voice. The challenge was to make it matter.

  THIRTEEN

  Between Politics and Sanity

  For all of the glorious trees and flowers on the eighteen acres of the White House grounds, from Andrew Jackson’s southern magnolias to roses of more recent vintage, no one had planted a vegetable garden since Eleanor Roosevelt’s time. The idea for a garden and a larger project on children’s health came to Michelle in 2007. She was in her kitchen in Hyde Park, starting to imagine ways she might make a difference if Barack actually won the presidency. A garden—simple, satisfying, illustrative. Although she arrived in Washington with little experience with seeds and soil, she intended the garden to be more than a garden. She wanted it to be a national conversation starter “about the food we eat, the lives we lead, and how all of that affects our children.” Public elementary school children helped with the planting. The raised beds were visible to passersby beyond the White House fence, she said, “because I wanted this to be the ‘people’s garden,’ just as the White House is the ‘people’s house.’ ”

  The medium was the message. The new garden became a billboard for Michelle’s back-to-basics views on nutrition and fitness, a focus of her White House years. Aides invited the media to cover the planting and advertised the use of the garden’s harvest, including honey from a swarm of bees, at White House dinners. White House chefs brewed their own Honey Brown Ale and cooked up a veggie pizza for Tonight Show host Jay Leno. The garden became the heart of a glossy book, American Grown: The Story of the White House Kitchen Garden and Gardens Across America. Written by Michelle and a ghostwriter, the 2012 volume contained dozens of photographs of the first lady, along with suggestions for helping the needy and tips on establishing a community garden. One of the featured gardens, in fact, was at Chicago’s Rainbow Beach, the park on Lake Michigan where Michelle rode her bike and attended summer camp. If all went well, she wrote, schools and communities would follow her example and children who had never grown anything would sow, reap, and learn. “For little kids,” she said, “the best part is the compost, where they can dig for worms with their hands. They love the idea that a lot of soil is worm poop.”

  THE GARDEN CREATED an entry point to Michelle’s most ambitious and, it turned out, controversial White House initiative, a nutrition and fitness project launched in February 2010. With nearly one in three American children considered overweight and adult obesity rates rising, her goal was to change children’s eating and exercise habits nationwide. Her targets ranged from unhealthy school nutrition standards and urban food deserts to restaurant menus and sweet-toothed marketing messages. Amid energetic photo ops that featured her dancing with students and exercising with sports stars, Michelle picked up a telephone in the White House to urge Congress to pass a $4.5 billion child nutrition bill. She also collaborated with pediatricians and corporate food purveyors, as well as media companies that produced programming for children. She called the project “Let’s Move!”

  The public health implications of fatness were apparent in the nation’s expanding waistlines. In one indication of trouble, excessive weight was by far the biggest medical disqualifier in the U.S. armed forces. Between 1995 and 2008, the military counted 140,000 people who failed their entrance physicals because they were overweight. By 2010, half of all volunteers—46.7 percent of men and 54.6 percent of women—were failing a fitness test that required only sixty seconds of push-ups, sixty seconds of sit-ups, and a one-mile run. Further, many recruits had brittle bones because of a diet containing too many fizzy drinks and sugary foods and too little milk and calcium. Obesity and its effects added an estimated $147 billion to the country’s annual health costs, according to the Obama administration, and the problems started young. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control calculated that 16 percent of children in 2010 were obese, with many of them developing habits and ailments that would become costly and debilitating in adulthood. A disproportionate number of overweight children were black or Hispanic. It escaped no one’s notice that
recess and physical education were increasingly rare in U.S. schools, as a result of budget cuts and changed priorities. The CDC reported that only one in twenty-five elementary schools, one in twelve middle schools, and one in fifty high schools offered daily physical education.

  On February 9, 2010, in front of a half-dozen cabinet secretaries and a media contingent, Michelle laid out the problem, suggested solutions, and announced a series of partnerships. The American Academy of Pediatrics would develop procedures for measuring body mass index, or BMI, and devise prescriptions for more healthful living. Suppliers pledged to decrease sugar, fat, and salt in food sold to schools and, over the next ten years, double the amount of fruits and vegetables in school meals. The Food and Drug Administration would work with manufacturers and retailers to make food labels more clear, “so people don’t have to spend hours squinting at words they can’t pronounce to figure out whether the food they’re buying is healthy or not,” Michelle said. Media companies, including Disney, Scholastic, Viacom, and Warner Bros., would improve public awareness. In a public signal that the project dovetailed with his agenda, Barack that morning signed an order creating a Task Force on Childhood Obesity to review federal policy on nutrition and physical activity. After the Oval Office signing, he turned to Michelle and said, “It’s done, honey.”

  MICHELLE’S REMARKS at the launch were not glib and glossy. Nor were they brief. In a speech that stretched to 5,800 words, she laid out her reasoning. She made plain that she was not blaming kids for eating too many calories or failing to burn them off. It was the role of adults to decide what schools served for lunch, what was available for dinner, and whether time would be set aside for gym and recess. “Our kids don’t choose to make food products with tons of sugar and sodium in super-sized portions and then to have those products marketed to them everywhere they turn,” she said. “And no matter how much they beg for pizza, fries and candy, ultimately they are not, and should not, be the ones calling the shots at dinnertime.” Standing in the ornate State Dining Room, Michelle recalled mealtime in the cramped kitchen on Euclid Avenue. “There was one simple rule: You ate what was on your plate, good, bad or ugly. Kids had absolutely no say in what they felt like eating. If you didn’t like it, you were welcome to go to bed hungry.”

  Michelle drew on her own experience as a working mother, recalling an alarming visit to a Chicago pediatrician who reported that Malia’s and Sasha’s weight, measured by body mass index, was too high. (Or, as Barack put it when telling the story, Malia was “a little chubby.”) The doctor asked what the family ate, prompting Michelle to consider the way they lived their lives, particularly the pace. They always seemed to be racing from work to school to soccer, from ballet to piano to play dates. The parents had deadlines, the kids had homework, each task dueling with other demands, from maintaining friendships and looking after elders to keeping the house in a semblance of order. Comfortably upper middle class, the Obamas had the money to eat well, but too rarely took the time: “There were some nights when you got home so tired and hungry, and you just wanted to get through the drive-thru because it was quick and it was cheap. Or there were the times when you threw in that less healthy microwave option because it was easy.” Her family started eating at home more often. They ate more vegetables and fresh fruit and drank more water and skim milk. They stopped keeping unhealthy food in the pantry and declared, as her parents had done, that desserts would largely be a weekend treat.

  To emphasize the difficulties of families at varying economic levels, she spoke of “parents working so hard, longer hours, some cases two jobs” and the cost of fruit and vegetables rising 50 percent more than overall food costs since the 1980s. It did not help, she said, that the nation’s cities were dotted with food deserts. These were neighborhoods that lacked a decent grocery store, making it harder for shoppers, especially the unemployed and the working poor, to find fresh food. “So this is where we are. Many parents desperately want to do the right thing, but they feel like the deck is stacked against them.”

  It may have seemed innocuous for a first lady to advocate fitness and healthy eating, but Michelle anticipated criticism. Hoping to inoculate the effort against allegations of government overreach and the inevitable portrayals of her as nanny-in-chief, she said experts did not think the problem would be solved by the government “telling people what to do.” Nor was this about “preparing five-course meals from scratch every night. And it is not about being 100 percent perfect 100 percent of the time because, lord knows, I’m not. There is a place in this life for cookies and ice cream and burgers and fries.” Money for fruit and vegetables when the country was on the economic skids and teachers and schoolbooks were in short supply? Funding for parks and sidewalks when the nation could not afford health care for its citizens? “These are false choices,” Michelle said, “because if kids aren’t given adequate nutrition, even the best books and teachers in the world won’t help them get where they want them to be. And if they don’t have safe places to run and play and they wind up with obesity-related conditions, those health care costs will just keep rising.”

  She was right to brace herself. For years to come, critics would call her a hypocrite, and worse.

  FASHION BECAME a defining element of Michelle’s public profile. She delighted in clothes and developed an admiring and covetous following that crossed lines of class and race. She lit up magazine covers, yet nowhere was the phenomenon more pronounced than in the blogosphere. Bloggers raced to identify every designer and off-the-rack selection, often noting the last time she had worn an outfit or which shoes and accessories accompanied it. For five years on Mrs.-O.com, Mary Tomer offered commentary down to the smallest detail, writing in 2009, “For the event, Mrs. O remixed several familiar pieces from her wardrobe. The black and white stripe blouse, last seen at the President and First Lady’s visit to the Capitol City Charter School. As well as the teal cardigan and royal blue patent leather belt, last seen in combination for the National Day of Service. A gray wool blazer and trousers rounded out the multi-layered ensemble (perhaps a cold weather tactic?).” Michelle’s range was striking, from bare feet on the South Lawn to a cardigan at Buckingham Palace to kitten heels everywhere, in part to avoid putting Barack, lean and barely two inches taller, in her shadow.

  It had been nearly fifty years since a first lady so captured imaginations with her fashion choices. “She has perhaps even surpassed Jackie O. because the world is bigger now than it was then,” said designer Thakoon Panichgul. He admired how Michelle dressed “with such confidence,” and conceded that it was refreshing to design clothes for someone with “the body of a modern woman today.” A body, in other words, that could not be squeezed into a size 2. Talk of Michelle’s body, and there was much talk, usually started with her sculpted arms. She earned them in the gym and bore them with pride, opting for sleeveless looks that caused fans to coo and pundits to bark. “She’s made her point. Now she should put away Thunder and Lightning,” cracked New York Times columnist David Brooks to a colleague. Spotting a trend, magazines ran how- to guides and trainers marketed exercise programs, such as Totally Toned Arms: Get Michelle Obama Arms in 21 Days.

  Michelle went bare-shouldered at Barack’s first State of the Union address. She did the same on the cover of Vogue. Perhaps most tellingly, she decided to show off her arms in her first official White House portrait, shot in the Blue Room beneath the watchful eye of Thomas Jefferson. She dressed in a black Michael Kors sheath with a double strand of white pearls, her smile broad, her face and hair impeccably styled, her left fingertips resting on a marble table adorned with flowers. She had just turned forty-five when the photo was taken, in the early days of the first term. The image spoke of youth and fitness, the antithesis of many past first ladies. Her blackness was all the more striking in juxtaposition with the painting of the nation’s third president, who owned slaves and fathered as many as six children with one of them, Sally Hemings. In 1781, while professing that all men were crea
ted equal, Jefferson wrote that black people had a “much inferior” capacity to reason and were “dull, tasteless, and anomalous” when it came to imagination. “Never yet,” wrote one of the most erudite of American presidents, “could I find that a black uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture.” The contrast in the photograph was unintentional, said her press secretary, Katie McCormick Lelyveld, who staffed Michelle that day. “We tried outside, we tried the Red Room, we tried the Green Room, we tried the Blue Room. We tried sitting, we tried standing. We liked this smile the best. We liked this backdrop the best.”

  IN HER SARTORIAL CHOICES, Michelle was mindful not only of how she would look, but how the fashions would play. Designers learned they could take risks in color, texture, and style when designing for the first lady. Isabel Toledo, born in Cuba, created the shimmering wool lace dress Michelle wore to the inauguration. She called the color lemongrass. “Fashion is what history looks like. For me, that moment in history was a moment of optimism,” explained Toledo, who said admiringly that the first lady is “not just covering herself. She cares about what she looks like. She cares about how people perceive her.” Twenty-six-year-old Jason Wu, born in Taiwan, designed the ivory chiffon gown that Michelle wore to the inaugural balls. When she donated it to the Smithsonian, she declared it a “masterpiece.” Creations by Panichgul, born in Thailand, and Naeem Khan, born in India, found their way into her closet, along with dresses by Peter Soronen and Narciso Rodriguez.

  Michelle had aides who helped shop for her couture, while White House lawyers monitored rules governing gifts and favors. Toledo said Michelle paid “several thousand” dollars for the lemongrass creation, a purchase coordinated by high-end Chicago boutique owner Ikram Goldman. Into a lineup rich with costly designer-made duds, some stitched just for her, she folded off-the-rack choices from the likes of J.Crew, Talbot’s, and the Gap. More than once, an outfit sold out swiftly when Michelle wore it on television. The same happened with a unicorn sweater worn by Sasha when she was still in middle school. The populist elements to Michelle’s selections multiplied when she added an affordable brooch or a wide belt to enliven a workaday ensemble. Telling Ebony, “what you wear is a reflection of who you are,” she shunned pantyhose as uncomfortable and urged women to choose clothes that made them feel good. She was neither a fashion model nor a performer, but a woman who had been in the workforce for twenty years, half of that as a working mother. Through her choices—the colors, the combinations, the risks—Michelle “gave women the permission, the liberty, to participate” in fashion, said Isabel Toledo’s husband, Ruben, an artist and collaborator. Her fans could relate. New York fashion writer Kate Betts titled her book about Michelle’s approach to fashion Everyday Icon, crediting her with “helping to liberate a generation of women from the false idea that style and substance are mutually exclusive.” Betts connected the first lady’s style with a gospel of empowerment “that defines style as knowing who you are and being unafraid to show it to the world.”