Michelle Obama

by Peter Slevin

  Together, Michelle and Barack delivered “romantic glamor” said Patricia L. Williams, who wrote about race and society for The Nation. “She brings a dignity to it. It’s not dressing like Rihanna. It’s not the entertainment industry, it’s not sports. It underscores lady.” The attention paid to her clothes demonstrated the array of expectations—gendered and otherwise—still attached to the role of first lady. Everywhere she went, even if only to walk Bo on the White House grounds, Michelle knew she might be photographed and examined for fashion flaws. One summer day, she stepped down the stairs of Air Force One to join her family on a walk at the Grand Canyon. It was 106 degrees and she wore shorts—ordinary shorts that came to mid-thigh. The reaction was swift. The first lady wore shorts? In public? After NBC’s Today show discussed the moment on television, 300,000 viewers offered an opinion. At the Huffington Post, nearly 13,000 did the same, with 58.6 percent saying she had “the right to bare legs,” 16.8 percent saying no, and 24.6 percent answering, “It’s not the end of the world, but maybe she should wear longer shorts next time.”

  Michelle never forgot. Four years later, she called it her biggest fashion regret. Far more considered was her decision to appear on the cover of the March 2009 issue of Vogue. Despite the collective misery of the economic recession, she believed it would send a message to African American girls of many shapes and sizes about who they could be when they grew up. Although Michelle sometimes drew criticism when she veered away from American designers, her choices often drew an excited shiver in the commercial fashion world. “Have you seen someone with his hands down and eyes popped out? That was me for a few seconds. Yesterday, I was the third-most Googled person in America. It is unbelievable,” said Naeem Khan after seeing Michelle on television in November 2009, wearing one of his lush creations. Steven Kolb, head of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, called Michelle “an incredible booster. Once Mrs. Obama wears a designer, the pride, the enthusiasm, the boasting is a big moment for a designer, particularly a young designer. You can’t build a business based on somebody wearing your clothes, but you can capitalize on it.”

  Disciplined as she was, Michelle suffered a few self-inflicted wounds. One was the day she wore a $540 pair of Lanvin sneakers to volunteer at a Washington food bank. Fashionistas recognized the brand and located the price tag in an Internet minute. Another was the day she donned a $495 pair of Tory Burch boots to pick pumpkins in the White House garden. When Burch’s Facebook page crowed that Michelle was wearing his boots, the response reflected the reigning dichotomy. “Wearing them as she walks through dirt to pick a pumpkin. Yeah, she really understands the plight of the common man,” someone posted. Others came to her defense, pointing out that taxpayers were not paying for her footwear and, anyway, she was damned if she did, damned if she didn’t. “If she went with her head tied in rags and wearing sweat pants, then folks would say she was not representing her position well,” a supporter posted. “Some people will complain about heaven being too sunny!”

  FIRST LADIES HAD STAGED concerts in the White House since time immemorial. Jackie Kennedy, in the early 1960s, built a portable stage in the East Room and hosted musical evenings and readings, including events for young people. Yet no previous first lady possessed more eclectic tastes than Michelle, who was determined to showcase a wide range of voices. One emblematic night in May 2009 highlighted jazz, the spoken word, and social justice. James Earl Jones recited a passage from Othello, while Chicago poet Mayda del Valle delivered a homage to her late Puerto Rican grandmother: “My tongues are broken needles,” she said, “scratching through the grooves of a lost wisdom trying to find a faith that beats like yours. What secrets do your bones hold?” Singer and acoustic bass player Esperanza Spalding took the stage, as did Eric Lewis, a rock-jazz pianist who liked to reach into a piano to pluck the wires. For Lewis, it was sweet validation to play in the East Room as the Obamas and Spike Lee looked on. “I was totally surprised she had that kind of candor and sheer taste for something edgy, fast and hip,” said Lewis, whose stage name is ELEW. The audience was similarly varied, by Michelle’s design. “I love the notion of having members of Congress sitting in the East Room listening to the spoken word,” she said. “It’s just those incongruencies, making sure the socialites from D.C. are sitting next to the teachers from Anacostia listening to opera. It’s that whole mix. You can get so much done and say so much—without saying anything.”

  Michelle’s broader goal, and one particularly connected to the South Side of her upbringing, was to open the White House to children unlikely to drive past the grounds, much less be invited inside. “If I’m giving those experiences to Malia and Sasha, and I think it’s important to them, then I can’t pretend it’s not important for everyone. If they weren’t important, the best high schools and grammar schools in the country wouldn’t be fighting to make sure they had music,” she told Washington Post reporter Robin Givhan in 2010. “The more experiences kids have, the more things that they see, the more things that they know to want.” In a twist on the traditional White House concert series, Michelle urged stars scheduled to perform for adults at night to conduct workshops for children during the day. “We want to lift young people up. The country needs to be mindful that we have all these diamonds out there, and it would be a shame not to invest in those talents,” she said. What united her projects was her determination to support less fortunate people who did not have access to the polished corridors she now walked. These were people whose lives she understood because they were so familiar to her, the ones living in the world as it was, not as it should be.

  On the walls of the White House, too, Michelle made clear her tastes in color, design, and social commentary. The first couple’s museum borrowings stretched from Degas and Jasper Johns to Mark Rothko and Josef Albers. A colorful 1940s-era oil-on-plywood painting by William H. Johnson called Booker T. Washington Legend showed the educator and author of Up from Slavery teaching black students. Also among the borrowings were two canvases by Alma Thomas, a black expressionist painter who taught art in Washington public schools and recalled being turned away from museums because of her race. In the White House residence, Michelle hung a painting by Glenn Ligon titled Black Like Me #2. It featured a single phrase repeated over and over as if in typeface, the letters gradually becoming blacker toward the bottom of the piece. The phrase came from Black Like Me, John Howard Griffin’s memoir of darkening his white skin to experience life as a Negro in the Deep South in 1959. The words in the painting read, “All traces of the Griffin I had been were wiped from existence.”

  FOR THE FIRST TIME in a dozen years, since before Malia and Sasha were born, Michelle and Barack were consistently at home together under one roof. There were no commutes from Chicago to Springfield or to Washington, D.C. They did not even have to leave the building to get to their offices. From a dressing room window in the residence, Michelle could peer across the Rose Garden into the West Wing and see Barack at work. Laura Bush had showed her the window when Michelle visited the White House in November 2008. Barack’s office was not far from the girls’ new swing set, the pool, and the tennis court. He was routinely home for dinner at 6:30 p.m. and no one had to cook. Many nights, the president stuck around for bedtime before turning back to his work. The family took turns saying grace, always ending with “We hope we live long and strong.” Dinner table conversation tended not to focus on the troubles buffeting the republic, but on Malia and Sasha, “what’s going on in their lives, and in ours. Some nights, we discuss issues they’ve heard about in the news,” Michelle said. Asked once whether Barack was helpful around the house, she replied, “Even the president of the United States can handle figuring out whether somebody put their writing assignment in their book bag.”

  There was plenty of space in the residence for childrens’ sleepovers on the third floor, and the family could escape to Camp David, where friends would often join them. On weekends in good weather, Barack played golf, most often with lower-lev
el White House aides, and he sometimes coached Sasha’s basketball team, the Vipers. The young players thought of him not as the commander in chief, but as Sasha’s dad. “This is what dads are supposed to do,” he said. “So they take it for granted.” He conceded that he had to discourage Sasha from spending so much time on her three-point shot, rather than perfecting skills closer to the basket. One day, the team’s head coach was out of commission, so Barack called for his motorcade and headed up Connecticut Avenue to fill in, even though Sasha was on a Colorado ski trip with Michelle and Malia.

  Sports mattered in the family, and not only because Barack loved hoops, watched ESPN, and savored those golf outings. Michelle, who lifted weights, jumped rope, did some kickboxing, and played tennis to keep fit, decreed that the girls would each play two sports. “Because it’s good for them,” she explained. “It’s good to practice teamwork, to understand what it means to suffer a loss, to win with grace.” Each girl would choose one sport and Michelle would choose the second one. “I want them to understand what it feels like to do something you don’t like and to improve, because in life you don’t always get to do the things you want.” Her choice for them was tennis, as an activity that could sustain them for a lifetime. “When they started, the racket was bigger than Sasha,” Michelle related. “She was frustrated because she couldn’t hit the ball. Malia didn’t understand why I was making them play. But now they’re starting to get better and they actually like it. And I’m like, ‘Mom was right!’ ”

  The Obama kids would grow up with their feet on the ground, if their parents had their way. Michelle forbade the housekeepers from making the girls’ beds. She expected Malia and Sasha, three years apart in age, to learn how to do laundry and honor limits on screen time. Also, no cell phones before they turned twelve. They attended Sidwell Friends, the celebrated private school in Northwest Washington that Chelsea Clinton attended. “They don’t have any excuse not to be outstanding students. We’re counting on them to do that,” Michelle said. Malia and Sasha were also expected to appreciate lives less privileged than their own. In their teenage years, Barack said, the girls needed to learn about working for minimum wage, “to feel as if going to work and getting a paycheck is not always fun, not always stimulating, not always fair.” When Malia lamented one aspect or another of her curious life, Michelle responded, “You want to see hardship? You want to see struggle? You don’t have it, kid. Having the president as your father is way down on the list of tough.”

  The technology had changed and the family lived at a fancier address, but the messages recalled the lessons of Michelle’s childhood, even if Marian felt sure that her daughter was a tougher taskmaster than she had been. Michelle, in mom-in-chief mode, instructed the nation’s children and her own children alike. “You can’t think you can be a jerk and lazy and trifling now and that one day you’re going to wake up and just be great, right? … I tell my girls this now. ‘Make up your bed today so that you know how to make up your bed when you’re twenty. Clean up your room now so that when you go to college, you don’t live like a pig. Do your homework now, not because you have to, but because you need to be in the practice of sitting down and finishing what you start.’ ”

  By the same token, Michelle worked to preserve kid-friendly routines. The girls often escaped the White House to spend time at their friends’ houses, especially as they grew older. They snapped selfies. They went to sleepaway camp. They went on family vacations to Martha’s Vineyard in the summer and Hawaii at Christmas. Malia learned to drive. When they had to ride somewhere with their father, they found the presidential motorcade “a complete embarrassment.” What they craved was normality, or as much normality as the first family’s impossibly rarefied life could deliver. What was true for the children was true for the parents. “I think in our house we don’t take ourselves too seriously, and laughter is the best form of unity, I think, in a marriage,” Michelle said. “So we still find ways to have fun together, and a lot of it is private and personal. But we keep each other smiling, and that’s good.” Barack agreed. He spoke of the stress-relieving pleasure of conversations with his daughters. He once said, “What I value most about my marriage is that it is separate and apart from a lot of the silliness of Washington, and Michelle is not a part of that silliness.”

  In 2010, Barack published a children’s book, Of Thee I Sing, in the form of a letter to his daughters. It started, “Have I told you lately how wonderful you are?” He interwove their potential with the story of the United States, delivering a notably multicultural portrait of America. He chose thirteen distinctive individuals as models of particular traits. Jane Addams for kindness, Jackie Robinson for bravery, Georgia O’Keeffe for creativity, Martin Luther King for perseverance. He invoked Vietnam memorial designer Maya Lin and farmworkers’ organizer Cesar Chavez, as well as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. To honor differences, he quoted Sitting Bull: “For peace, it is not necessary for eagles to be crows.”

  BARACK HAD ANOTHER brutal year in 2010. The economy was lagging, job creation was not nearly catching up with the losses of the recession, and unemployment stood at 9.6 percent. On January 19, the eve of his first anniversary as president, Democrats lost the Senate seat that had been occupied by Ted Kennedy for forty-six years before his death in August 2009. With it went the sixtieth vote needed by Democrats to overcome a filibuster. Against the odds, and against the counsel of some of his closest advisers, including chief of staff and future Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, Barack pressed ahead with his bid to reform the jury-rigged U.S. health insurance system and expand coverage to millions of Americans who could not afford a quality plan. It was a monumental undertaking and it was messy. Tens of millions of Americans younger than sixty-five, the age when Medicare took effect, had no health coverage. Millions more had coverage that paid for little actual care. Still others, afflicted with illnesses and ailments known in insurance-speak as “preexisting conditions,” were unable to change jobs for fear of losing coverage that would be difficult to regain. A single-payer system was not in the cards, not with Republicans in revolt, not with rampant skepticism about the federal government’s abilities, not with the private-sector oxen certain to be gored. The House and the Senate found a way forward. The result, which Barack signed with twenty-two pens on March 23, 2010, was sausage. But it was easily the most ambitious expansion of the safety net since the creation of Medicare in 1965. Barack said that day in a raucous East Room ceremony that the law enshrined the principle that everyone should have “some basic security” in tending to their health. If it could survive the Supreme Court and the Republicans—no sure thing—it might just be a step toward the more level playing field that Barack and Michelle were determined to help create.

  White House jubilation had barely ebbed when an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil platform killed eleven workers and sent oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico. The calamity showed just how unpredictable the president’s job could be. For twelve weeks, the public watched on live video as the underwater well defied public and private efforts to cap it. Barack could do little but watch impotently as an estimated 210 million gallons of oil spilled into the gulf and damaged communities still recovering from Hurricane Katrina. Nationally, the president’s approval ratings had dropped to 45 percent, down from 62 percent when he took office less than two years earlier. “The left thinks he did too little; the right too much,” wrote The New York Times shortly before the November 2010 midterm elections, which could hardly have gone worse for the president. Democrats lost control of the House and surrendered six seats in the Senate, making Barack’s legislative ambitions immeasurably harder to achieve. “A shellacking,” he conceded at a press conference the next day. He acknowledged that his relationship with the American people had become “rockier and tougher.”

  It was true that Barack had stirred much of the country when he stood on the Capitol steps as the first African American taking the oath of office. But for many others, the honeymoon was over
before it began. A passel of Republicans saw obstructionism as their ticket to Valhalla. Mitch McConnell, a dour Kentucky Republican, said on becoming Senate minority leader in 2011, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” In rhetorical flights of fancy, opponents painted Barack variously as a socialist, a tyrant, a tribal African, a Muslim. Bugbears all. Most definitely other. That was the point. Nor did the disparagement come only from the fledgling Tea Party or the political fringe. Newt Gingrich, former Republican Speaker of the House and future presidential candidate, said Barack suffered from a “Kenyan anti-colonialist mentality.” Mike Huckabee, a repeat presidential candidate and Fox News host, said the president’s views were shaped by his childhood in Kenya, a country Barack did not visit until after college. John Sununu, a former New Hampshire governor and White House chief of staff to George H. W. Bush, was most succinct of all: “I wish this president would learn how to be an American.”