Michelle Obama

  Most pointedly, in the context of rugged individualism run amok, Michelle uttered a single, charged line that simultaneously challenged Republican actions and reasserted the principles that had long animated her work: “When you’ve worked hard and done well and walked through that doorway of opportunity, you do not slam it shut behind you. No. You reach back, and you give other folks the same chances that helped you succeed.” By the end, the Democrats in Charlotte were on their feet, cheering and remembering and believing all over again. It was just one speech, but the stakes were high and Michelle was giving people a reason to think. Nielsen reported that 26 million people had watched. The next day, after the positive reviews were in, New Yorker humorist Andy Borowitz posted a mock convention schedule:

  DEMOCRATS REVISE CONVENTION SCHEDULE

  CHARLOTTE (The Borowitz Report)—The Democratic National Convention today released a dramatically revised schedule for the night of Wednesday, September 5th:

  8:00: Call to Order by First Lady Michelle Obama

  8:10: National Anthem, performed by Branford Marsalis (saxophone), Michelle Obama (vocals)

  8:15: Pledge of Allegiance to Michelle

  8:20: Former President Bill Clinton introduces video of Michelle Obama

  8:25: Video replay of last night’s speech by Michelle Obama (on loop until 10:58)

  10:58–10:59: Remarks by Vice-President Joe Biden

  10:59: Benediction by the Reverend Michelle Obama

  BEFORE THE POLLS OPENED on election day, Michelle and Barack were all but certain they would win. Reports of early votes matched or exceeded the campaign’s rigorous projections, and virtually every national poll showed Barack ahead of Romney, who had not been able to capitalize on an awful October 3 debate performance by the president that set Democratic nerves ajangle. The night before the final triumph, Barack and Michelle returned to Iowa one last time, a pilgrimage as much as a rally. By the time she introduced him, after a performance by Bruce Springsteen, twenty thousand people were standing in the cold night air to cheer them. This was where the road to the White House had begun nearly six years before, and they were on the verge of a new triumph. Michelle said it would be the last time they would be onstage together at a campaign rally and recalled the early days, “back when I wasn’t so sure about this whole process.” She revisited the greatest hits of the first term and introduced “my husband, the love of my life, the president of the United States, Barack Obama.”

  For Barack, who had poured enormous energy into the campaign, tears came to his tired eyes as he talked about the support Iowa had given him. He threw in a patented wisecrack, too. “You’ve seen a lot of me these last six years and, you know what? You may not agree with every decision I’ve made. Michelle doesn’t. There may have been times when you’ve been frustrated at the pace of change. I promise you, so have I.” But he said there were fights yet to be won and led the crowd in one last call and response, a refrain from the 2008 campaign: Fired up? Ready to go! Fired up? Ready to go! With that, he worked the rope line and headed to Chicago to await the results. The next day, Barack collected 332 electoral votes to Romney’s 206. He won the popular vote by five million, swamping his oblivious opponent, who was so sure of victory that he had not prepared a concession speech.

  FIFTEEN

  I Am No Different from You

  Nine days after she performed in the 2013 inaugural festivities in Washington, D.C., someone shot Hadiya Pendleton. She was fifteen years old, a cheerful girl sheltering against a Chicago winter rain with a dozen friends less than a mile from the Obamas’ house. The young South Side shooter was aiming at someone else, but it didn’t matter. A bullet caught Hadiya in the back and killed her, a heartbreakingly random act of violence in a city that had recorded 506 homicides in 2012. Such violence was only the most final of the obstacles that disproportionately afflicted black teenagers, and it revealed the stacked deck. Nearly fifty years after the Civil Rights Act, options for African American young people in Chicago were fewer, schools were worse, and their lives were more perilous than those of their white counterparts, whatever Barack’s reelection said about progress. Hadiya was an honor student, a volleyball player, a majorette, and a member of the praise dance ministry at her church. She had good-hearted friends, devoted parents, and a godmother who described her as the kind of kid who had to be told, “Slow down, you can’t do everything.” Michelle had never met Hadiya, but she flew to Chicago to attend her funeral. She met the slain teenager’s mourning friends and wondered what on earth she could say to them. The moment affected her deeply as she considered their future and her remaining years in the public eye. “Hadiya Pendleton was me and I was her,” the first lady said later. “Hadiya’s family did everything right, but she still didn’t have a chance.”

  Countless children lacked equal chances in the modern-day United States, especially black children. Michelle had always said so. Her views were reflected in her mentoring work, her approach to White House cultural events and the talks she gave in neighborhoods like Anacostia. She sometimes referred to society’s responsibility to help young people “fulfill their god-given potential.” As she told Valerie Jarrett at Hadiya’s funeral, she wanted to reach back and lift up and make a difference, not just an appearance. Entering the second term, with Barack’s final election behind them, the Obamas concentrated more directly on issues of fairness. Soon, Michelle would adopt a new mission, aiming to push disadvantaged teenagers like Hadiya’s friends toward college, an initiative she called Reach Higher.

  Michelle spoke out more in the second term and addressed a greater variety of topics important to her. In addition to the standard tools— a targeted interview or a newspaper column—she often did something short or catchy, perhaps a photograph to her 1.2 Instagram followers, a video, or a tweet to the million-plus followers of her @FLOTUS Twitter account. In November 2013, she tweeted her support to a group that pushed immigration reform with a public fast on the National Mall. “As families begin to gather for Thanksgiving, I’m thinking of the brave #Fast4Families immigration reform advocates. We’re with you.—mo.” (A tweet signed “—mo” signified that it came from her, not from her staff.) The day after Thanksgiving, Barack and Michelle visited the protesters and listened to their stories. One critic tweeted back at her, “Michelle Obama thinks she’s still occupying the deans office at Harvard.” Another typed, “@FLOTUS Politicizing Thanksgiving with your stupid immigration garbage? LMFAO. Pathetic.”

  In December 2013, Michelle defended the embattled Affordable Care Act and encouraged families, specifically black families, to sign up for health insurance. “We shouldn’t live in a country this rich, right, where people are choosing between their rent or their medicine, where kids aren’t getting the immunizations they need,” she said on the Reverend Al Sharpton’s radio show. She joked during an Oval Office publicity session that mothers should “make it a Christmas treat around the table to talk about a little health care. Ring in the New Year with new coverage!” A few months later, the Islamic extremist group Boko Haram—a phrase loosely translated as “Western education is a sin”—kidnapped more than two hundred girls from a school in northern Nigeria. Amid an unsuccessful international campaign to win the girls’ release, Michelle tweeted a photograph that showed her with a sad face holding up a hand-lettered sign that read #BringBackOurGirls.

  Abroad, on a 2014 trip to China benignly described by the East Wing as a goodwill tour focused on children and education, Michelle made assertive remarks about Internet freedom, minority rights, and the importance of questioning and criticizing a nation’s leaders. In a country where the government heavily censored the Internet and hounded the political opposition, she said at Peking University, “Time and again, we have seen that countries are stronger and more prosperous when the voices and opinions of all their citizens can be heard.” She called freedom of worship and open access to information “the birthright of every person on this planet.” And she used her own life, and Barack’s
, as an example of the power of the civil rights movement. She also endeared herself to her Chinese audience by doing tai chi, jumping rope, feeding pandas, and going sightseeing with Marian, Malia, and Sasha, to the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, and Xi’an, home of the terra-cotta warriors. On her last day, she pointedly dined at a Tibetan restaurant in Chengdu to show solidarity with a persecuted ethnic minority. Around her neck, her host draped a khata, a ceremonial white scarf. A White House photographer was on hand to ensure that the images went public.

  YET, WAS IT ENOUGH? Was Michelle doing all she could? It was a nagging question that came not from the Republican right, which had essentially written her off, but from reasoned voices in her own corner. After she presented the Academy Award for Best Picture to Argo by live feed from the White House, Courtland Milloy, a black Washington Post columnist, wrote that Michelle “ought to be under consideration for a seat on the Supreme Court, not recruited as a presenter in some Hollywood movie contest.” Noting that she often said she was standing on the shoulders of the greats who preceded her, including Sojourner Truth, he asked whether her own shoulders would be “broad enough for future generations of women and girls to stand on? Or just good to look at?” Milloy said she was frittering away an opportunity. “Enough with the broccoli and Brussels sprouts—to say nothing about all the attention paid to her arms, hair, derriere and designer clothes. Where is that intellectually gifted Princeton graduate, the Harvard-educated lawyer and mentor to the man who would become the first African American president of the United States?”

  “I HAVE NEVER FELT more confident in myself, more clear on who I am as a woman,” Michelle said a few months before she turned fifty. She had said she intended to live life “with some gusto,” and there was evidence she was doing so in public and private, even in the gilded cage of the White House. She pitched Let’s Move! by doing a spoof called “The Evolution of Mom Dancing” with Jimmy Fallon, a scene that would be viewed more than 20 million times on YouTube. She and the girls tagged along when Barack visited Ireland and Germany, ducking into a pub one day for lunch with Bono, the charismatic U2 singer and activist. She celebrated her fiftieth birthday in January 2014 with a girlfriends’ getaway at Oprah Winfrey’s Hawaiian estate and a White House party for hundreds of friends and acquaintances. Beyoncé and Stevie Wonder performed. John Legend sang “Happy Birthday.” Barack, who had tweeted on their twentieth anniversary that Michelle was “the love of my life and my best friend,” delivered a toast that left guests misty-eyed. Michelle, he said, had made him a better man.

  Despite the trappings of Washington and her star turns in designer dresses, Michelle managed to come across to most Americans as authentic. From the self-examination as she answered questions to the humor she showed with a look or an inflection, people felt they could relate to her. High school basketball star Jabari Parker said after volunteering at a Let’s Move! event in Chicago, “She’s almost like everyday people. She wasn’t trying to big-time anybody. She was really cool, down to earth.” More than two-thirds of Americans had a favorable impression of the first lady, although conservative Republicans disliked her by a margin of about two to one. Arne Duncan, the education secretary and a longtime friend from Hyde Park, spent family time at the White House and traveled with her to advance an ambitious and controversial schools agenda. After conceding that he was biased, he said, “What you see is what she is. There are no airs, there’s no fanciness. She can talk to policymakers, she can talk to parents, she can talk to children. She is absolutely comfortable in every environment.… And she just tells the truth.”

  Support from African American women remained sky-high. Robin Givhan, who graduated from Princeton one year after Michelle and covered her for the Washington Post, noted the first lady’s ability to win admiration and affection from black people at both ends of the socioeconomic spectrum. She earned working-class respect by paying homage to her forebears, taking pains not to put on airs, and encouraging black young people to excel. “She underscores that she is no different from so many other black folks,” said Givhan, who observed that Michelle also earned admiration from more successful African Americans who “know the microscope she’s under and admire that she’s done it so well. She has made them proud by showing the wider world that their ilk—educated, focused, ambitious, family-oriented—exists.”

  The reelection helped her confidence and her mission. Together, she and Barack had battled the opposition in a mean, messy, billion-dollar campaign and triumphed straight up. They were happy that the good guys had won, of course, but they also saw the victory as validation of their White House work and evidence that the November 2008 election was not a historical accident. Had they fallen short in 2012, “they thought people would be able to say it was a fluke,” said John Rogers, their longtime Chicago ally. Michelle’s friend Cheryl Whitaker said the win was something to savor: “He’s not the first black president anymore. He’s the president. She’s the first lady.”

  Yet in the second term, as in the first, Republican leaders on Capitol Hill practiced obstruction as a savage art, barely bothering to disguise their determination to run out the clock on the Obama presidency. Following the December 2012 rampage that killed twenty schoolchildren and six adults in Newtown, Connecticut, Barack pushed a package of gun measures in Congress that would expand background checks and ban high-capacity magazines. The proposals had overwhelming popular support, and posed no threat to the lawful owners of the roughly 300 million guns in circulation in the United States. Michelle backed them publicly, telling a Chicago audience after Hadiya Pendleton’s death, “Right now, my husband is fighting as hard as he can and engaging as many people as he can to pass common-sense reforms to protect our children from gun violence.” Despite majority support in the Senate, the rules fell short of the sixty votes needed to break a filibuster and the effort died. “A pretty shameful day for Washington,” Barack said in disgust. Not ninety days into the new term, the defeat foretold arduous years ahead. So much for his hope, expressed on the campaign trail, that a November 2012 victory would “break the fever” of the Republican opposition.

  NOT LONG AFTER the second term got under way, Michelle made a point of publicly praising the first NBA player to come out as gay: “So proud of you, Jason Collins! This is a huge step forward for our country. We’ve got your back!—mo.” In December 2013, when ABC news reporter Robin Roberts came out, Michelle tweeted, “I am so happy for you and Amber! You continue to make us all proud.—mo.” And when University of Missouri defensive end Michael Sam announced in February 2014 that he was gay, she tweeted, “You’re an inspiration to all of us, @MikeSamFootball. We couldn’t be prouder of your courage both on and off the field.—mo.”

  Gay rights resonated with the first lady. As Barack struggled to explain what he believed while calculating what he could afford to say, Michelle spoke up for equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. In 2007, at a California forum, she had spoken of the ways the country was segmented, leaving Americans isolated, “sometimes by fears, sometimes by ignorance, sometimes by resources.” She argued that values of decency and honesty united the nation, “I don’t care what race, what political party or sexual orientation.” Still earlier, in 2004, gay activists in Chicago had been surprised and pleased when she attended a fundraiser for the Lesbian Community Cancer Project. She did not simply greet people and move out the door. She stuck around. “It wasn’t like it was busting out with politicians,” said Jane Saks, a lesbian friend and occasional workout partner. “I don’t think it was, ‘Am I for being gay or not?’ It was, ‘These people are working for progress.’ I think she knew a lot of us.” In the mid-1990s, Michelle took aside eighteen-year-old Public Allies member Krsna Golden, who considered himself “very homophobic” at the time. When he was assigned a gay roommate at a Public Allies retreat, he chose to sleep on a colleague’s couch, instead. Michelle told him calmly that she understood his feelings but felt disappointed. “You have to be more open
-minded,” she said. “This is something you have to grow past.”

  Michelle had gay friends and colleagues and paid attention to issues that affected and afflicted the gay community, from parenting and workplace rights to HIV/AIDS. Starting as a teenager in the early 1980s, she spent hours with her Chicago hairdresser, Rahni Flowers, a gay man who was still doing her hair during the 2008 campaign, countless appointments later. He said he told her early about his sexuality because she gave him “that feeling of openness and a very sensible curiosity. She’s more concerned with me being a good, kind, giving human being.” During Michelle’s time at Trinity United Church of Christ, the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. endorsed the creation of an HIV ministry, a rare move for a black pastor at a time when many African American churches in Chicago were bitterly anti-gay. Michelle knew people who died of the disease, including a Public Allies colleague, and on a trip to Kenya, she and Barack made a public show of taking HIV tests to reduce the stigma of the test and the illness. In the White House, she considered the Obama administration a force for progress on LGBT rights. She hired as East Wing communications director Kristina Schake, a prominent defender of gay marriage who became an adviser on the issue.