by Peter Slevin
Popular talk radio and television hosts devoted endless airtime to the anti-Barack cause, stoking doubt that morphed into disdain. Forty-five percent of Republicans in 2011 believed the president was born in another country, and they did not mean Hawaii. This was snake oil, the height of ridiculousness. Hawaiian authorities and news organizations had delivered multiple forms of proof that he was, indeed, born in Honolulu. These included his standard birth certificate, the one his fellow Americans used to get a driver’s license or a passport, as well as the August 13, 1961, edition of The Honolulu Advertiser. On the list of recent births was “Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama, 6085 Kalanianaole Hwy., son, Aug. 4.” But the reality-deniers who became known as birthers refused to concede. Like southern state troopers in the Jim Crow era, they demanded to see Barack’s papers, in this case his long form Certificate of Live Birth, stored in state files and not ordinarily made public.
On April 27, 2011, Barack strode into the White House press room and announced the release of the long form document. All the information, of course, checked out. “I know that there’s going to be a segment of people for which, no matter what we put out, this issue will not be put to rest,” he said. “But I’m speaking to the vast majority of the American people, as well as to the press. We do not have time for this kind of silliness.” In character, the chairman of the Republican National Committee promptly blasted the president for wasting time on the birther question. “Unfortunately,” Reince Priebus said in the tone of mock dudgeon reserved for such occasions, “his campaign politics and talk about birth certificates is distracting him from our No. 1 priority—our economy.”
RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT, Barack said he sometimes felt like a Rorschach inkblot because so many voters saw what they chose to see. The same could be said of Michelle. Polls showed that she was quite popular despite the nation’s polarization. Her favorability numbers typically ranged from the mid sixties to the low seventies, significantly higher than Barack’s, which increasingly ducked into the low forties. She was not easily characterized and yet public reaction was often binary. Adore. Abhor. Respect. Reject. Warm, wise, and embracing. Haughty, petty, and disdainful. Criticism was expectable from anti-Obama partisans who could not bear a Democrat, especially these Democrats, in the White House. Some of the vitriol could be traced to racism and sexism or, at a charitable minimum, a lack of familiarity with a black woman as accomplished and outspoken as Michelle. “Just as an assertive woman is so frequently labeled aggressive, an audacious Black woman runs the risk of appearing, well, there is not another way to say it, uppity,” journalist Gwen Ifill wrote in 2007 after traveling with the future first lady.
Criticism also emerged from people who viewed Michelle positively but asked why, given her education, her experience, and her extraordinary platform, she did not speak or act more directly on a host of progressive issues, whether abortion rights, gender inequity, or the structural obstacles facing the urban poor. Where was Michelle the take-charge hospital executive? Where was Michelle the strong-minded advocate who had been so pointed and forceful, so comfortable speaking truth to power, on the campaign trail in 2007 and early 2008? The Michelle, for example, who said of women in April 2007 that “we do what we can, in spite of the fact that we’re not getting the kind of support we need from government and society as a whole.… We’ve essentially ignored the plight of women and told them to go figure it out.”
The East Wing registered the criticism early, said chief of staff, Jackie Norris. “We heard it from women’s groups. ‘You’re making her look like eye candy. She’s so great, why is it that all we’re ever hearing about is fashion?’ People wanted us to do more, be out there more, be more aggressive, be more in the community.” Through a feminist lens, which often meant white middle-class feminism, “mom-in-chief” sometimes seemed a synonym for copout. Writer Linda Hirshman said Michelle navigated the difficult waters of race and gender with “superbly canny, disciplined perfection,” but observed that doing so required Michelle to imitate “a warm and fuzzy, unthreatening, bucolic female from some imaginary era from the past.”
There was some truth to the idea that the politics of the job required Michelle to come across as warm and unthreatening, not just because she was the first lady, but because she was the first black first lady. A false step risked death by a thousand tweets. It was also significant, and readily apparent to people who knew her well, that Michelle cared deeply about her responsibilities as a mother. Part of what she meant by mom-in-chief was that Malia and Sasha really did come first. But managing her choices and accounting for the perceptions was like playing a game of three-dimensional chess. Rebecca Traister, author of Big Girls Don’t Cry, admired Michelle for shattering “all kinds of molds of innocuous, feminine first-ladyhood.” Yet she felt Michelle had been forced to surrender much of her identity to White House convention and her husband’s career. “The stuff that was hers has been erased. It’s not about, ‘Does she have a job?’ It’s about, ‘Does she have herself?’ It’s like somebody in a cage. You know that she knows it all, but what has to be presented to the world is this incredibly reduced version of who she is.”
As Traister appreciated, to suggest that Michelle was melting into the White House draperies was to understate what she was doing and saying, and why. It also failed to account for the multiple meanings that Michelle’s role tended to hold for African American women. Black women had been in the workforce since slavery, but their experiences were largely ignored in debates about how women should balance career and family. Part of the reason was economic. Until recently, few black women had the combination of financial security and family stability required to consider staying home. In mainstream popular culture, black women had more often been featured raising other people’s children—notably, white people’s children—than their own. “What’s frequently missing from the discussion of black women is their role as loving mothers, beloved wives, valued partners, cherished daughters, cousins, relatives,” said Columbia law professor Patricia J. Williams. She recalled long periods when black women were “relentlessly taxonimized as mammy rather than mom.” On the other hand, she said, Michelle “defies stereotypes” and “expands the force field of feminism in ecumenical and unsettling ways.”
Brittney Cooper, a scholar of black women’s history, took similar issue with a critique of Michelle as a “feminist nightmare,” in the words of a provocative Politico Magazine headline. “My message to white feminists is simple: Lean back. Way back. And take your paws off Michelle Obama,” Cooper wrote. “Black women have never been the model for mainstream American womanhood.” Michelle, in her view, should be left to decide for herself where to invest her energies. This also happened to be Michelle’s opinion. “Part of what we fought for is choice,” she said, “not just one definition of what it means to be a woman.”
The public debate was mirrored in social media and kitchen table conversations, where a racial divide was similarly evident. In a 2011 poll, nearly eight in ten black women said they personally identified with Michelle. Eighty-eight percent said she understood their problems, according to the survey by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation. Eighty-four percent of black men agreed, compared with just 51 percent of white women and 44 percent of white men. Only 2 percent of black women said she was not a good role model. One reason that African American women defended Michelle’s emphasis on her family, said National Public Radio host Michel Martin, was “a feeling of relief and sympathy that at least one of their community, broadly defined, has the opportunity to protect her children, to cherish her family life, and to even have some personal time to shop and exercise and look good.”
AS THE WHITE HOUSE GLARE intensified, friends were as important as ever, maybe more so. “We work hard to make them laugh. Their lives are so serious,” said Cheryl Whitaker, who visited from Chicago from time to time and joined Michelle on family vacations. Beyond the friends who visited and those who decamped to Washington, Michelle resumed h
er friendship with her Princeton roommate, now Angela Kennedy Acree, a senior attorney representing indigent clients in the D.C. public defender’s office. At a time when she felt she had few confidants in Washington, she also became close to Sharon Malone, who knew something about the challenge of balancing career, motherhood, and the ambitions of a famous spouse. Malone was a prominent obstetrician-gynecologist married to Eric H. Holder Jr., chosen by Barack as the first African American attorney general of the United States. Malone, who bore the primary responsibility for their household and the daily lives of their three children, did not opt out of her job as Holder moved from assignment to demanding assignment. “I have worked too hard to be where I wanted to be, not to pursue it to the fullest,” she said.
Malone was raised in Mobile, Alabama, the youngest of eight children. This was the Deep South during the final paroxysms of Jim Crow. Her father was a farmer, her mother a maid. Neither could vote. In 1963, her older sister Vivian tried to enroll in the all-white University of Alabama and became a central player in a scene that became famous as Governor George Wallace’s “stand in the schoolhouse door.” As the news media watched on a sweltering June day, deputy U.S. attorney general Nicholas Katzenbach, supported by a federal judge and a commitment from President Kennedy, escorted Malone and James Hood to the Tuscaloosa campus. Wallace yielded, but not before he complained that U.S. government measures to allow African Americans to attend the university were “illegal and unwarranted.”
The month that Malone took up her studies, she appeared on the cover of Newsweek. Two years later, she became the first black graduate in the university’s 134-year history. When Lyndon Johnson signed the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 to preserve “the decency of democracy,” he invited Malone to the ceremony and presented her with one of the signing pens. Later that year, in Chicago to receive an award from the local NAACP, one of her hosts was the Reverend Carl Fuqua, the organization’s executive director, who had presided over Fraser and Marian Robinson’s wedding. “Once your sister stands in the face of the governor … , it broadens your horizons,” Sharon Malone said. “I knew I was going somewhere and wouldn’t be sitting on a porch in Mobile, Alabama.”
Sharon Malone graduated with honors from Harvard in 1981 and, after a stint at IBM, attended Columbia University Medical School. She considered present-day African Americans to be “survivors of a 300-year legacy” and, like Michelle, gave much credit to her parents. “That’s the part that amazes me, that you can grow up where everything negates your humanity and yet you’re able to keep intact and impart that to your children. The confidence to be who we are.” Malone and Holder married after meeting at a 1989 fundraiser for the Concerned Black Men charity. Holder met Barack at a dinner party hosted by Ann Walker Marchant, a cousin of Valerie Jarrett’s, and when Barack decided to run for president, he offered to help. Malone approved, although she counted Barack’s chances of victory as zero. “I’m forever colored by my experiences growing up in the segregated South,” she said. “I grew up in an era where neither of my parents could vote. And the notion that we would elect an African-American, I honestly didn’t believe it.”
MICHELLE CAME TO personify vim and vigor. She jumped rope double Dutch and starred in a jumping jack contest with more than four hundred kids. She played flag football in New Orleans and she ran across the lawn while carrying water jugs, an effort to persuade children to drink up. She won a push-up contest on daytime television with Ellen DeGeneres and staged a sack race in the White House with late-night comedian Jimmy Fallon. She did a dance step with middle school kids in Northwest Washington, D.C., showing off the choreography of her friend Beyoncé Knowles. It was a marketing campaign, pure and simple. “As you can see, I’m pretty much willing to make a complete fool out of myself to get our kids moving,” Michelle said in late 2011, near the end of the second year of the Let’s Move! campaign. “But there is a method to my madness. There’s a reason why I’ve been out there jumping rope and hula hooping and dancing to Beyoncé, whatever it takes. It’s because I want kids to see that there are all kinds of ways to be active. And if I can do it, anybody can do it.” As she would say in the second term, offering insight into her philosophy of progress, “You have to change attitudes before you can change behavior.”
The response was not always cheerful. “MO is a complete imposter like her husband,” one Washington Post reader wrote during the Obamas’ trip to India in 2010. Others disparaged her clothes, her nutrition efforts, and her now infamous comments about being proud of her country. Sarah Palin mocked and misrepresented her on reality television in 2011 as the former Alaska governor shopped for cookie makings. “Where are the s’mores ingredients?” she asked as the camera rolled. “This is in honor of Michelle Obama, who said the other day we should not have dessert.” Palin was not finished. She said in a talk show appearance, “Instead of a government thinking that they need to take over and make decisions for us according to some politician or politician’s wife’s priorities, just leave us alone, get off our back, and allow us as individuals to exercise our own God-given rights to make our own decisions and then our country gets back on the right track.”
Representative James Sensenbrenner, a Republican from Wisconsin, was caught discussing Michelle’s body in unflattering ways not once, but twice. At a church event, he commented about her “big butt.” Soon afterward, he was overheard on his cell phone at an airport saying, “She lectures us on eating right while she has a large posterior herself.” He apologized. Meanwhile, one year after the launch of Let’s Move!, Rush Limbaugh told his listeners, “It doesn’t look like Michelle Obama follows her own nutritionary, dietary advice.… I’m trying to say that our first lady does not project the image of women that you might see on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.” This would be the portly radio host who sometimes called her “Michelle My Butt.”
The criticism got uglier. In the global village that was the Internet, where anyone could be a town crier, Michelle was likened to Dr. Zira, the chimpanzee physician from Planet of the Apes, and a Wookiee in the Star Wars series. A California rodeo clown joked over the loudspeakers in 2013 that Playboy had offered $250,000 to Mitt Romney’s wife, Ann, to pose in the magazine. He went on to say that the White House was upset about it because National Geographic only offered Michelle Obama $50 to pose for them. A Virginia school board member relayed an email that showed a group of bare-breasted African women doing a tribal dance. The text said it was Michelle’s high school reunion. A Republican former chairman of the South Carolina Election Commission posted a comment on Facebook, after a gorilla escaped from the zoo, “I’m sure it’s just one of Michelle’s ancestors—probably harmless.” The Republican speaker of the Kansas House of Representatives forwarded a Christmas email depicting Michelle as the Grinch and alluding to the taxpayer-borne costs of her travel: “I’m sure you’ll join me in wishing Mrs. YoMama a wonderful, long Hawaii Christmas vacation—at our expense, of course.”
Michelle listened. She heard. She bit her tongue.
FOURTEEN
Simple Gifts
There was no fanfare in Michelle’s address to the Women’s Conference in Long Beach, California, in October 2010. Hers was a solitary voice in a vast arena. The lights were dim and all eyes were trained on her as she quietly explained why American society had an obligation to military families. It was a new interest of hers, one she developed on the campaign trail when she met women whose stories “took my breath away.” Michelle considered herself wise about women’s concerns. “Reading about, thinking about, talking about and living these issues my entire life,” as she put it. But here was a group of women—wives of soldiers, sometimes soldiers themselves—whose experiences were new to her. These were women bearing the weight of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that would leave more than 6,600 Americans dead, upwards of 50,000 wounded, and an estimated 250,000 bearing the residual effects of traumatic brain injury, principally from roadside bombs. In all, well over two
million U.S. military personnel had cycled through the war zones in the decade since 9/11.
While they were away from home, typically for twelve months or more, their families were on their own. Michelle met women whose husbands were on their third, fourth, or fifth deployment. Women who were moving every couple of years, uprooting their children or interrupting their careers and education because of a transfer. Women who struggled to keep a toehold in the middle class. Women who worried that their husbands might die. “A good day,” one told her, “is when a military chaplain doesn’t knock on my door.” It was a revelation. “Many of these women were younger than I was,” Michelle said. “They had far less support and far fewer resources than I ever had. And every day, they were confronting challenges that I could barely even imagine.”
The speech introduced Joining Forces, an East Wing initiative in support of military families. The launch was still months away, but Michelle and her aides saw the conference, organized by Maria Shriver, wife of California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, as a chance to get the tone right. They were finding it difficult. “You don’t want to preach at people like you’re telling them what to do,” said Jocelyn Frye, her domestic policy adviser. “And particularly with military families, you want to make sure you’re not overdramatizing the issue or pandering.” Military families—and wounded soldiers, in particular—too often found themselves treated as victims when what they wanted was awareness and respect. Frye worried that the speech would not go well. The team discussed style as well as substance during the run-throughs. “We were going back and forth. And then she practiced it and virtually every concern I had went away. She just knew how to hit it—to make it lighter where it needed to be lighter, to make it less aggressive where it felt aggressive.” It was not the first time that Frye had seen Michelle elevate her game. She said the first lady would set a standard for herself, then exceed it. “Some of it has to do with a very good sense, an almost uncanny sense, of understanding the tone and mood for everything we do,” said Frye. She also credited clarity of purpose. “It’s an ongoing conversation, not only about the substantive issue, but what her role could be in that issue.”