Michelle Obama

by Peter Slevin

  Not quite three years later, in September 2014, an Iraq War veteran named Omar Gonzalez jumped a White House fence on Pennsylvania Avenue and raced past the North Portico into the building, carrying a knife. He could have run up the stairs to the residence, but darted instead toward the East Room and then the Green Room before he was tackled. An investigation showed that the Secret Service did not release a guard dog and had no swift way to lock the White House doors. A loud warning alarm had been disconnected at the request of White House ushers, who protested that it often malfunctioned.

  PLAYERS FROM THE FOOD, retail, and restaurant industries trekked to the White House to ask what they could do for their overweight country. They heard the same message Michelle delivered to a Grocery Manufacturers Association conference, when she had said, “Step it up.” “We need you not just to tweak around the edges, but to entirely rethink the products that you’re offering, the information that you provide about these products and how you market those products to our children,” Michelle told the conference. The companies needed to reformulate their recipes, she said, and reshape their marketing to tout the benefits. “What it doesn’t mean is taking out one problematic ingredient, only to replace it with another. While decreasing fat is certainly a good thing, replacing it with sugar and salt isn’t. And it doesn’t mean compensating for high amounts of problematic ingredients with small amounts of beneficial ones. For example, adding a little bit of Vitamin C to a product with lots of sugar, or a gram of fiber to a product with tons of fat, doesn’t suddenly make those products good for our kids.”

  Michelle’s work led to commitments by the likes of Olive Garden and Red Lobster, restaurant chains that catered to the middle class, to make their meals less salty and more healthy. General Mills and Kraft were among the many companies that promised to reduce calories in their foods. Subway would join the mix, promising to provide healthier options for kids—fruit instead of cookies, skim milk and water instead of soda—while spending $41 million over three years to market the new selections. Walmart, the retailing behemoth working assiduously to reform its image, announced that it would sell more fresh fruit and vegetables, remove trans fats from packaged food, and cut the sodium content of processed foods by 25 percent. The East Wing calculated that Walmart’s decision would shape the behavior of its suppliers and spark changes throughout the industry.

  Implicit in Michelle’s call for better behavior was the fact, welcomed by the industry, that the government would not be imposing new regulations. Her efforts relied on calculations of mutual self-interest, specifically an East Wing bet that voluntary corporate efforts would produce better results than any attempt to mandate rules on, say, nutritional content or marketing to children. The corporate side of the program was coordinated through a new nonprofit, Partnership for a Healthier America (PHA), established alongside Let’s Move!, although technically independent. Members of the partnership, including Walgreens, Hyatt, and a bevy of hospitals and health care providers, found it useful to be associated with nutrition and good health—an issue that the first lady described as one of her passions. When announcements were made, Michelle was often on hand with a smile and plenty of praise. The White House saw it as a win-win. “PHA works with the private sector to create meaningful commitments, and ensures that when those commitments are made that credit is given where credit is due,” the partnership’s website said of its strategy. PHA has no interest in forcing industry to meet unrealistic benchmarks. The goal is to maximize the potential of the private sector to achieve success. We want the private sector with us because, quite simply, we will not succeed without it.”

  Nutrition advocates doubted that business conglomerates would move far enough and fast enough without public prodding—in other words, without formal rules and regulations. Research had shown that advertising influenced children’s desire for foods high in sugar, salt, and fat. But when Congress developed guidelines designed to limit marketing that targeted children, lobbyists from the food and media industry—some working for companies that publicly backed Let’s Move!—killed them. The lobbyists complained that the provisions, although voluntary, were sweeping and unscientific, despite the endorsement of the American Academy of Pediatrics, among others. The White House blamed Congress for backing down. Senator Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, pointed a finger at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, although not directly at the East Wing. “The White House got cold feet,” Harkin said. “It sort of undermines everything that the first lady was doing.”

  Popular interest in healthier food was already growing when the Obamas arrived in Washington. Companies had been changing tack for good business reasons. As far back as 2005, McDonald’s added salads to its menu. But the first lady’s efforts gave the national dialogue a boost. From the White House garden to Let’s Move!, from the new nutrition standards to the inspiration for countless school gardens, and even the cajoling of American businesses, the needle was beginning to move.

  MICHELLE RECEIVED almost unfailingly positive attention in the mainstream media. One exception was a private trip she took with Sasha to Spain in August 2010—private to the extent that anything could be private, when an air force jet and a Secret Service detail were required. “A Modern-Day Marie Antoinette” blared a headline in the New York Daily News. (That would be the Marie Antoinette ever known as having said of starving French peasants, “Let them eat cake,” although historians doubt she actually said it.) For Michelle, the trip was a getaway in support of Anita Blanchard, one of her close Chicago friends, whose father had recently died. The genesis of the trip was a birthday promise that Blanchard and her husband, Marty Nesbitt, had made to their children. Each child, upon turning ten, could choose a trip to take. It was Roxanne Nesbitt’s turn to celebrate and she picked Spain, where Michelle and her friends would stay in an opulent hotel on the Costa del Sol.

  Members of the White House staff spotted trouble. They knew the optics would be bad on a fancy foreign trip in the middle of an economic slump and the tough 2010 election season. Michelle listened, but she said the trip was important to her. She was going. Sure enough, Spanish media were all over the story, and quickly. Photographs appeared of Michelle strolling through Marbella, Ronda, and the Alhambra, later paying a courtesy call with Sasha on King Juan Carlos I and Queen Sofia in Majorca, where she shared an elegant lunch of turbot and gazpacho. The visuals and accompanying stories were instantly troublesome. The Obamas paid hotel expenses and the equivalent of first-class airfare for Michelle and Sasha, an arrangement that predated this presidency, but those costs were minimal next to the share footed by taxpayers, who paid for her traveling staff and the large Secret Service contingent dictated by security concerns. A conservative watchdog group filed a Freedom of Information Act request and estimated later that the four-day vacation cost the federal treasury more than $467,000. Asked about the expense in a time of austerity, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs replied, “The first lady is on a private trip. She is a private citizen and is the mother of a daughter on a private trip. And I think I’d leave it at that.”

  It was the New York date night all over again, but this time with a considerably higher price tag. There were other trips as well. Skiing with the girls in Colorado, sightseeing and theater with them in New York, a vacation in France, a safari in South Africa. Each time, a scribe or a critic would calculate the cost of operating an air force Boeing 757, which ran to $11,351 an hour, plus other expenses. Traveling with security and being ferried by a U.S. government plane was a fact of first family life, and it had been for many years. George Bush made 77 visits to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, during the eight years of his presidency, spending at least part of 490 days there; he went 187 times to Camp David, where the corresponding number of days was 487. What should a first lady do?

  Anita McBride, who wrestled with such questions as Laura Bush’s chief of staff, said foreign vacations with hefty price tags might best be left for later in life. When Laura Bush went out of town with her
friends, the destination was likely to be a national park. “You have temporary custody of the job,” McBride said. “It’s probably best to find the least controversial ways to get your down time.… It’s just not worth it.” Michelle’s staff, whose job was to deflect the flak, was painfully alert to the dilemma. “She would fly United if she could, but she can’t,” Lelyveld said. “At a certain point, she just wants to go on an educational trip with her girlfriends and her kids. The question is, should she not make this trip because of the financial and personnel footprint? Where do you draw the line?”

  THE SEAS MAY HAVE PARTED to allow Barack to win the first time, but when the reelection campaign got under way in 2011, the tide was high and the waters were rough. Economic growth was barely above flat and the budget deficit seemed stuck on a number with too many zeroes to count. During the summer of 2011, unemployment was running at 9 percent, higher than any incumbent president had faced on election day since before World War II. Six million people had been out of work for twenty-seven weeks or more, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The national unemployment rate was 9.1 percent; for African Americans, it was 16.7 percent. A survey by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal fifteen months before the 2012 election concluded that 73 percent of Americans thought the country was on the wrong track. For the first time, a slight majority disapproved of the job Barack was doing overall, while 59 percent disapproved of his handling of the economy. He received higher marks—50 percent approval—on foreign policy. If there were any source of solace, it was that only 13 percent of Americans approved of the performance of Congress, where the House was run by Republicans.

  Barack turned fifty on August 4, 2011, dancing with Michelle as Stevie Wonder performed in the East Room. The very next day, credit agencies downgraded U.S. debt for the first time in history, citing political gridlock in Washington. The deficit would drop, of course, when economic activity picked up. Yet Barack and the economists who contended that higher federal spending would speed the recovery—and that austerity would delay it—were stymied by Republicans who insisted that the deficit was too high to justify the outlay. The GOP also had political reasons for thwarting jobs bills and stimulus packages: If the economy improved and more Americans thought the country was moving in the right direction, Barack would get credit. And that would threaten the Republicans’ cherished goal of defeating him in November 2012.

  The brickbats came from all sides. Barack was rebuffed in his effort to reach a grand bargain on spending and taxes with House Speaker John Boehner, an Ohio Republican saddled with limited vision and an unruly caucus. When word emerged that Barack had offered major concessions and still come up short, growing numbers of Democratic supporters saw the president as callow, particularly after he agreed to extend the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. Meanwhile, to their consternation, immigration reform had gone nowhere; the cap-and-trade program to slow climate change was doomed; the Guantánamo prison was still open; and the fate of Barack’s signature achievement, the Affordable Care Act, remained in the hands of the Supreme Court and its 5-to-4 conservative majority. The stock market was a bright spot, at least for the 50 percent of Americans with investments, climbing far above its recession lows. But even there, August 2011 provided bad news. The S&P 500 index was down 5.7 percent for the month, its fourth straight decline. The economy added no new jobs in August, raising fears of a double-dip recession.

  On the plus side, Barack’s unpopular bet on the Detroit auto industry was paying off. He helped bring an end to Muammar Qadhafi’s mercurial tenure in Libya without risking American troops. He won the biggest gamble of his presidency when the navy’s SEAL Team Six dropped into a compound in Pakistan and killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, architect of the 9/11 attacks and the most hunted man in the world. As Vice President Joe Biden would say on the campaign trail, arguing for a second Obama term, “Bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.” And yet August 2011 would also prove to be the deadliest month of the Afghan war, now in its tenth year. Sixty-six American service members died, including thirty aboard a Chinook helicopter shot down by Afghan fighters.

  This was not the record that Barack had expected to carry into the 2012 election, when he aimed to become only the second Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt to be elected to two full terms. Bill Clinton was the other. When they returned to Martha’s Vineyard for their summer vacation in August, Michelle and Barack discussed the possibility of losing. Barack was determined to persevere. “He felt strongly that he had done a lot of hard work trying to get the economy on track,” strategist David Axelrod said. “The notion of surrendering that to the next guy to come in and be the hero, that was not a scenario he was excited about.”

  Nor did it take an advanced degree to guess whose company Barack would keep in the history books if he lost or quit. It would not be Lincoln or Roosevelt or even Reagan, but the one-termers, Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush. A 2012 triumph by a Republican would feel an awful lot like repudiation. What’s more, it would threaten Barack’s fragile accomplishments, most clearly health care reform. Yes, he was frustrated and worn down, but defeat would not do. Barack and Michelle were nothing if not competitive. Scrabble or the presidency, they hated to lose.

  MICHELLE WAS READY again to do her part, maybe more ready than ever. The girls were settled, the household was humming, and her initiatives were gathering speed. As she told a group of reporters in early 2011, “I have better clarity about what my role is going to be. Our agenda is clearer. We know who we are, we know where we’re going.” She had learned what to expect from the political fray, as well. She was a target, but she was considerably more popular than Barack. In August, as his numbers were drifting toward new lows, an Associated Press poll found that 70 percent of Americans had a favorable impression of Michelle. Even Republican-minded Fox News put her favorability at 62 percent in October, with just 28 percent of respondents viewing her unfavorably. Among Democrats, women, and African Americans, the positives were higher.

  One of Michelle’s essential political tasks was to energize voters who had backed Barack before. He needed their money, their energy, and their votes. The campaign was positioning him as a defender of the middle class at a time of rising and increasingly visible economic inequality. A new Gilded Age, it sometimes seemed. “A nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous,” Barack had said in his inaugural address. Using every news medium short of smoke signals, Michelle sought to reassure voters that he was worthy and remind them why they should care. Her message echoed her speeches from early in the 2008 campaign and her conversations with Barack about fairness and purpose twenty years earlier in Chicago.

  On September 30, 2011, the final day of the fundraising quarter, a lovely autumn day, Michelle spoke to donors dining on lobster in Port Elizabeth, Maine. On the eve of her visit, the state Republican Party chairman predicted that Barack would lose Maine’s four electoral votes. “People who work with their hands are going to vote Republican. They understand the grand experiment didn’t work,” Charlie Webster told the Portland Press Herald. Michelle, who had been raising millions for Obama 2012 and the Democratic Party, recognized the campaign as a political battle. Despite her feelings about the profession, and her less than intensive effort in the 2010 midterm elections, she was all in. She wasted no time before telling her well-heeled audience how the other half lived, and not just people who worked with their hands. She cited stories of “businesses that folks are trying to keep afloat” and “doctor’s bills that they cannot pay” and the “mortgage that they can no longer afford.” She said, “These struggles aren’t new. For decades now, middle-class folks have been squeezed from all sides. The cost of things like gas and groceries and tuition have been rising continuously, but people’s paychecks just haven’t kept up. And when this economic crisis hit, for so many families the bottom just fell out.”

  Fairness, a quality she had consistently considered since her youth, lay at the center of th
e debate and the president’s agenda, she said. It was the idea that “everyone, everyone, gets a fair shake and does their fair share.” Voters choosing between Barack and a Republican would be making a decision between “two very different visions.” There was the helping hand from Barack, who she said had a knack for remembering personal stories. And there were the other guys, the GOP candidates, whom she never identified by name or party. “It’s about whether we as a country will honor that fundamental promise that we made generations ago, that when times are hard, we don’t abandon our fellow citizens. We don’t let everything fall apart for struggling families. Instead, we say, ‘There but for the grace of God goes my family.’ Instead, we remember that we’re all in this together.”

  The language, the tone, the themes; it was vintage Michelle. She offered a pointed defense of Barack’s priorities, from the benefits of a jobs bill to the misery that would follow if “folks”—meaning congressional Republicans—repealed the Affordable Care Act. “Today we need to ask ourselves, will we let them succeed? Will we let insurance companies deny us coverage because we have preexisting conditions like breast cancer or diabetes? Or will we stand up and say that in this country, we will not allow folks to go bankrupt because they get sick? Who are we? Will we let insurance companies refuse to cover basic preventative care, things like cancer screenings and prenatal care, that saves money and saves lives?”

  Seven times in the speech, she asked who Americans are as a people. “Will we be a country that tells folks who’ve done everything right but are struggling, ‘Tough luck, you’re on your own?’ … Will we be a country where opportunity is limited to a few at the top? Or will we give every child a chance to succeed, no matter where she’s from or what she looks like or how much money her parents have? Who are we?” She ended her speech with a patented call and response. “So, let me ask you one final question: Are you in?” she asked. “Yes!” the audience shouted. “Really, I need to hear this. Are you in?” “Yes!”;