by Peter Slevin
Ten days later, far from Maine, feminist pioneer Gloria Steinem watched Michelle work an audience of progressive women in Manhattan. Many of them, she said, arrived none too happy. They wished Barack were driving a harder bargain with Republicans. “You can imagine the feeling in a New York room,” Steinem said. “Well, by the end of her speech, people were standing and cheering and ready to go to work. It was a transformation.” In fact, Michelle became accustomed to pushing back against progressive critics, sometimes in Barack’s presence, sometimes not. At a small New York fundraiser in 2012, she told a group of women donors who had paid $20,000 a ticket, “I’m tired of all the complaining. My husband has worked his heart out to get a lot of things done for this country, up against a bunch of folks on the other side who will do anything to get in the way. So just stop it! He needs your help, not your complaints!” After Michelle departed, Axelrod stayed behind to reassure the donors and “make sure everything was okay.”
AN ALTOGETHER DIFFERENT CROWD gathered to hear Michelle that year in Woodlawn, on Chicago’s South Side, a few blocks from the apartment where she had lived as a baby. The setting was a community room connected to a beauty salon. The neighborhood was dicey—there had been shootings—and it was nighttime. Each time a woman entered, someone made sure the door to the street locked behind her. Michelle’s voice emerged from a speakerphone, rallying women across the country to work for Barack’s reelection. The Woodlawn women, all of them African American, were thrilled. “So happy for her and her mother and her children because they are women, black women, in the White House. Living it, eating it, feeling it,” said Hope Hundley, an ophthalmic technician. “I never felt that much about a first lady.”
Hundley reveled in Michelle’s remarks that February night and her big-time role in Washington. “I love him,” she said of Barack, “but that’s my sister girl.” She explained: “We have that fellowship with all the girlfriends we jump rope with, but there’s always one sister girl.… It’s the sister girl connection where they feel you, you feel her.… You can pick up the phone and they’re already on the phone.” Hundley had never met Michelle, yet she loved her confidence, the example she was setting, the mold she was breaking. A few days earlier, Michelle had drawn criticism for taking an expensive ski trip to Aspen, Colorado, something most Americans could not afford. “I was like, ‘Girl, go ski. Girl, wear your arms out. Put your stilettos on, on a good day; put your gym shoes on, on a better day. Let your hair down. ‘How can you touch Queen Elizabeth?’ Guess what? She’s gonna do it again.” Hundley said Michelle was facing “that hatin’ racism” as a black first lady. But she felt sure that she remained a steady force “even in the midnight hours” when Barack was facing obstacles and opponents and demons galore. “I can see her saying, ‘Come on, baby, you can do it. Come on. Come on, baby. Just do it one more time. Go back in there tomorrow and get ’em.’ ”
MICHELLE LIKED CONTROL. She put herself in positions where the chances of mistake or surprise were minimal. When speaking in public, she rehearsed and often used a teleprompter, as Barack did. Her staff was extremely cautious about material dispatched in her name, even though her campaign email appeals brought in more money than Barack’s. When two society wannabes crashed the first state dinner, a startling breach of security and protocol, the blame fell partly on the East Wing and social secretary Desiree Rogers, a Chicagoan who was not long for the job. Michelle was upset because the incident embarrassed the White House and drew a spotlight to an avoidable miscue. She made her expectations clear to her aides, who worked fiercely and creatively to avoid unforced errors, target her message, and protect her brand. For media access, White House aides most often chose outlets where the audience was desirable, the questions predictable, and the tone forgiving. They also became expert at winning slots on comedy shows, talk shows, and kids’ programs, all the while posting cheerful photographs and videos on White House and campaign social media accounts.
Through the years, the strategy meant granting precious few audiences to the correspondents who covered her for the daily print media, the ones who followed her most closely and knew her work best. Among the group were Robin Givhan, a Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post culture critic; Krissah Thompson from the Post; Darlene Superville from the Associated Press; and New York Times correspondent Rachel Swarns, who wrote a serious book about Michelle’s ancestry. Beyond limiting interviews and unscripted media sessions with the first lady herself, the East Wing worked hard to limit access to staff members, friends, and former colleagues. This was true even when the prospective sources had positive things to say, which they almost always did. Michelle “frowns on people who speak out of school,” said Jackie Norris. “She expects of her friends that they will check in and have conversations and make sure that it’s good for her.” The people in Michelle’s extensive orbit tended toward loyalty, and they toed the line.
Above all, the goal was to promote Michelle’s agenda and Barack’s reelection. “I’m not a big fan of the press about myself, period, so I can’t say there’s a huge upside,” Michelle said early in her political life. Despite the straight-ahead press she got from reporters who took her seriously—and the professionals did—she often felt that the Michelle Obama portrayed in print bore little resemblance to her actual self. In 2009, she offered praise to a group of African American publishers who visited the White House. “You know our story, our images, our journey,” Michelle said as she and Barack welcomed them. “Our paths are not foreign to you and we are reminded of that when we read our story in your stories. It feels different. I often say I finally recognize myself when I read your papers.” Not that the experience made her any more willing to talk with Givhan, Thompson, Superville, or Swarns, all of whom were African American.
Michelle’s prominence, and the popular fascination with her story, led to news coverage that told her things about her lineage that she had not known. Swarns and colleague Jodi Kantor, working with a genealogist, traced a branch of Michelle’s family back to slavery. They reported that she had a white ancestor, a slave owner’s son named Charles Marion Shields, who had a child with the family’s young slave, Melvinia Shields. The Obamas, who had been hosting a large family Thanksgiving dinner each year at their home in Hyde Park, moved the gathering to the White House in 2009. That year, Michelle handed out copies of the family tree sketched by The New York Times. Later, in a rare session with reporters, she reflected on the course of history and her position as the first African American first lady. “My great-great-great-grandmother was actually a slave,” she said. “We’re still very connected to slavery in a way that’s very powerful.… That’s not very far away. I could have known that woman.”
THE OPENING WORDS of a front-page New York Times story in January 2012 represented the kind of story Michelle hated. It began, “Michelle Obama was privately fuming, not only at the president’s team, but also at her husband.” Written by Jodi Kantor, the piece offered an advance look at the reporter’s new book, The Obamas, billed rather extravagantly as the inside story of a White House marriage. Kantor said in the article that Michelle was “mastering and subtly redefining the role.” But the piece also suggested an edgier tale about “strains” and “tensions” between the first lady and the president’s advisers. Not necessarily news for the ages, but catnip to a certain Washington audience. By coincidence, Michelle had scheduled a broadcast interview to help Gayle King, a Chicago friend, in her first week as a host of CBS This Morning. The CBS show aired the day after Kantor’s book appeared. “I never read these books,” Michelle told King. But she said she had learned some details and signaled that she thought Kantor had overplayed her material. Her own sensitivities were clear. “I guess it is more interesting to imagine this conflicted situation here, and a strong woman, you know,” Michelle said. “But that’s been an image that people have tried to paint of me since, you know, the day Barack announced. That I’m some angry black woman.” Visibly irritated, she continued, “Who can write ab
out how I feel? Who? What third person can tell me how I feel?”
The East Wing had long known that Kantor’s book was coming. She had been granted access to a number of key players, although Michelle declined to be interviewed for the book. Weeks before publication, the White House asked former communications director and Democratic strategist Anita Dunn to evaluate what Kantor was reporting and consider how to respond. Staff members lined up people to defend the first lady. When the book emerged, the West Wing press office pointedly labeled Kantor’s work “an overdramatization of old news.” Aides worked their phones and keyboards aggressively, telling reporters and producers where they thought the writer had gone wrong. More than a few people in the Obama camp, present and former staff members alike, noted that the generally upbeat book contained neither bombshells nor biting critique and questioned the wisdom of the public relations strategy. If anything, the staff’s fusillade drew extra attention to a book that the East Wing would have preferred no one read.
CRITICS ON THE RIGHT were all too eager to add stories, real and invented, to their own Michelle narrative, which bounded wildly down media lane. She was elitist! She was socialist! She was a militant! She was a hypocrite! “We have a name for Michelle: Moochelle,” Rush Limbaugh crowed after Michelle returned from Spain. “Mooch, mooch, Moochelle Obama. That will tick ’em off, won’t it, Snerdly?” Limbaugh’s shtick had earned him a fortune and he was quick to recognize a crowd-pleasing label when he saw it. As used by denizens of the right, “Moochelle” suggested many things. A fat cow, perhaps, or a leech. It encompassed big government, the welfare state, big-spending Democrats, and black people living on the dole. The term harked to the market-worshipping Ayn Rand, whose Atlas Shrugged was something of field guide for the anti-government Tea Party and its mainstream Republican courtiers. Rand disparaged the “moochers,” who supposedly lived off the hard work of the producers. Paul Ryan, a Republican congressman from Wisconsin who used to give Atlas Shrugged as a Christmas gift, said in 2010 that the United States was developing “a majority of makers versus takers.” By 2012, Ryan was the nominee for vice president, and “makers against takers” was a Republican talking point. The man who selected Ryan was Mitt Romney, who reaped great riches largely by putting capital to work for him. Romney finished off his own wounded duck candidacy with comments about “the 47 percent,” Americans who, in his view, believed that “government has a responsibility to care for them” and would undoubtedly vote for Barack. Michelle would have pointed things to say about the Romney-Ryan worldview when she addressed the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte in September.
BEFORE MICHELLE REACHED Charlotte, she paid a visit in June to Nashville and the annual African Methodist Episcopal Church national conference to do some tending of black voters. It was Orangeburg 2007 revisited, except this time she was not introducing Barack, but asking her audience not to give up on him. The slaves were not freed nor the vote granted in a day, she said, as she reached into the pantheon to speak of Rosa Parks on a Montgomery bus, Ernest Green at Little Rock’s Central High, and Oliver Brown in Topeka, where he gave his name to Brown v. Board of Education, the case that ended, as she put it, “the lie of ‘separate but equal.’ ” It was easy to feel “helpless and hopeless,” she said, but “history has shown us that there is nothing, nothing, more powerful than ordinary citizens coming together for a just cause.” Her speech reflected years of conversations with Barack and her friends about the questions she had been asking herself for much of her life. “I mean, what exactly do you do about children who are languishing in crumbling schools, graduating from high schools unprepared for college or a job? And what about the 40 percent of black children who are overweight or obese? … What about all those kids growing up in neighborhoods where they don’t feel safe, kids who never have opportunities worthy of their promise? What court case do we bring on their behalf? What laws do we pass for them?”
Michelle asked her audience, thousands strong, to start by voting and getting friends and relatives to vote, and then to do more. Follow the news, she said. Start an email list and send people articles about important issues—“and then call them to make sure they’ve read them.” Talk to people in barber shops and church parking lots about political doings in City Hall and Washington. Go to City Hall and “ask what they’re doing to fight hunger in their community.” Show up at school board meetings. Run for office. It is entirely okay, she assured her listeners, to discuss policy and politics in church: “To anyone who says that church is no place to talk about these issues, you tell them there is no place better. No place better. Because ultimately, these are not just political issues, they are moral issues.”
Michelle had always told audiences that she and Barack felt an obligation to reach back, counting themselves among “those to whom much is given,” a reference to Luke 12:48, the parable of the faithful servant. In Nashville, she offered a rare look into her religious thinking, drawing connections among faith, politics, and racial uplift. The legacy of Jesus Christ, she said, summons people to do as he did, “fighting injustice and speaking truth to power every single day. He was out there spreading a message of grace and redemption to the least, the last and the lost. And our charge is to find Him everywhere, every day, by how we live our lives.”
Creating the world as it should be was not a sporadic thing, she said: “Living out our eternal salvation is not a once a week kind of deal. And in a more literal sense, neither is citizenship. Democracy is also an everyday activity.” It is hard to climb the mountain, she continued, when “the problems we face seem so entrenched, so overwhelming that solving them seems nearly impossible. But during those dark moments, I want you to remember that doing the impossible is the root of our faith. It is the history of our people and the lifeblood of this nation.”
When Michelle finished, to thunderous applause, churchgoers thronged to the rope line, hoping to clasp her hand, take a photo, grab a few seconds to wish her God’s grace. Once she had retreated to her motorcade and her flight home, a church bishop stepped onstage and announced that the Supreme Court, that very morning, had voted to uphold the Affordable Care Act. He asked for a hallelujah and an amen. The crowd erupted in cheers. Microphone in hand, he called for an organist and started singing a gospel song, “Victory Shall Be Mine.”
THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION opened on September 4, five days after Mitt Romney accepted the Republican nomination in Tampa. In the months before the Democrats met, Barack’s position among voters had strengthened. Even with the economy struggling and unemployment at 8.3 percent, he was running even or better with the enigmatic Romney, who ditched his moderate Massachusetts record in hopes of attracting conservative Republicans, then found himself in an awkward straddle as he tried to move toward the middle. The GOP convention was a muddle, epitomized by the odd sight of eighty-two-year-old actor Clint Eastwood spending eleven excruciating prime-time minutes having a conversation onstage with an empty chair. He said he was talking to an invisible Barack Obama. In the most scripted of events, it was improv and it bombed. More important, the convention failed to dispel the image of Romney as a sheltered son of privilege and the Republican Party as an exceedingly white, overly male bastion, all noblesse and no oblige. As the curtain fell in Tampa and attention turned to Charlotte, the Democrats could hardly have asked for a better foil. Barack’s political luck—“my almost spooky good fortune,” he once called it—was holding.
“The way we thought about the convention, the first night was going to be about connecting Obama to the middle-class experience,” David Axelrod explained later. The lineup included Deval Patrick, the Massachusetts governor who had spent his boyhood on Chicago’s South Side, and keynote speaker Julian Castro, a thirty-seven-year-old San Antonio mayor who said his grandmother “cleaned other people’s houses so she could afford to rent her own.” There was Tammy Duckworth, a former army helicopter pilot who had been shot out of the sky and grievously wounded in Iraq; and Lilly Ledbetter, whos
e fight for equal pay made her a progressive symbol. But all were essentially warm-up acts for Michelle, who was tasked with telling Barack’s story and making people feel it. “I wanted her to dominate that first night because I knew she would do well. But even I was shocked at how well she did,” Axelrod said. “Meryl Streep could not have done it better.” He was not alone. On Fox News, Chris Wallace called her delivery “masterful,” while Chuck Todd said on NBC that Michelle “owned this convention in a way that no speaker owned the convention in Tampa.”
Introduced by Elaine Brye, a science teacher, Air Force ROTC member, and mother of four military children, Michelle touched the stations of the family cross. Her father, climbing the stairs slowly and borrowing money to pay his share of her Princeton bills. Barack’s white grandmother, riding the bus to her bank job and training male colleagues who were promoted while she hit the glass ceiling; the men earned “more and more money while Barack’s family continued to scrape by.” Barack and Michelle in Chicago as young marrieds, paying more toward their student loans than toward their mortgage, “so young, so in love, and so in debt.” Barack as father, “strategizing about middle school friendships,” and as president, reading letters about hardship. He had been tested “in ways I never could have imagined. I have seen first hand that being president doesn’t change who you are. It reveals who you are.” For good measure, nearing their twentieth wedding anniversary, she said she loved him more than when they married and more than she had four years earlier.
Threaded through stories designed to make the first family seem modest and recognizable was the idea that Barack, as Michelle liked to say during the 2008 campaign, “gets it.” This time, the contrast was with Romney, who once tried to connect with Detroit voters by saying that his wife, Ann, “drives a couple of Cadillacs.” Ann had once expressed their sense of economic distress by reporting that they made it through Mitt’s college and graduate school years only by selling stocks his auto executive father had given him. The policy contrast was just as stark. “Women,” Michelle said, “are more than capable of making our own choices about our bodies and our health care.” Helping others is more important than getting ahead yourself and “success doesn’t count unless you earn it fair and square.” Everyone in the country should have an equal opportunity, she declared, “no matter who we are or where we’re from or what we look like or who we love.”