by Peter Slevin
For his part, Barack did an awkward dance, particularly on same-sex marriage. His support could not have been more clear in 1996 when he answered a questionnaire from Outlines, an LGBT newspaper in Chicago. On a one-page, typewritten letter that bore his signature, he said, “I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages.” He also said, “I would support and co-sponsor a state civil rights bill for gays and lesbians.” Lest there be any doubt, he voiced firm support that year in a separate survey from IMPACT Illinois, a Chicago political action committee. The survey quoted from a proposed resolution that called marriage “a basic human right” and declared that “the state should not interfere with same-gender couples who chose to marry and share fully and equally in the rights, responsibilities and commitment of civil marriage.” Barack’s handwritten response: “I would support such a resolution.”
Those were the most positive public statements Barack would make for sixteen years. In the interim, even as he worked in the Illinois state senate to fight discrimination against the LGBT community, his answers on civil marriage ranged from “undecided” in 1998 to “I am not in favor of gay marriage” in 2007. He said his opinions were “evolving.” More than a few aides thought the principal factor in his evolution was the increasingly forgiving political landscape. Finally, in May 2012, pushed by events and reassured by public opinion, Barack told Robin Roberts in a nationally broadcast interview—before she came out publicly as gay—that same-sex couples should be allowed to marry. Recalling dinner table conversations, he said it “doesn’t make sense” to Malia and Sasha that the same-sex parents of their friends should be treated differently from other couples. The television moment was “cathartic” for the president, said political adviser David Axelrod. “For as long as I’ve known him, he has never been comfortable with his position on this.” Michelle had always urged Barack’s gay supporters to be patient, telling them the moment would come, if more slowly than they wanted. When Barack left the residence for the Roberts interview, Michelle told him, “Enjoy this day. You are free.”
Greeting guests in June 2014 at the annual White House Pride celebration, Barack enthusiastically listed his administration’s LGBT achievements, including the appointment of eleven openly gay federal judges. He talked about changing attitudes and joked that the marriage of Modern Family characters Mitch and Cam in an episode that drew 10 million viewers “caused Michelle and the girls to cry. That was big.” Michelle, standing beside him, agreed.
MICHELLE’S STAFF SCHEDULED her for three workdays a week, a practice that dated to 2009, and they tried not to schedule events after roughly 5 p.m. She worked informally on other days, plus times when the demands of her role intervened. On Fridays, at her request, she received her briefing book for the following week and studied it assiduously. She asked for bios and photos of the people she would meet, including notations about their families and interests and whether she had met them before. One of her central goals was to put people at ease. For formal events, she always reviewed her written remarks in advance and often made changes. Unlike Barack, she was not comfortable being handed a speech a few minutes before the lights went up. Her tendency, as ever, was to overprepare. She was an early riser and her predawn emails to her aides, if she felt they had fallen short, could be blistering. She set a high bar for herself and she expected excellence from her staff—and Barack’s. “When she thought he was being ill served, that would be communicated. Sometimes through him, sometimes through Valerie Jarrett, and in those unlucky moments when she summoned you to a meeting to explain things,” said Axelrod. “When she was unhappy, that pall hung over the West Wing.”
Escaping the media pool that followed her husband, Michelle came and went quietly from the White House to see friends and visit restaurants and the gym. Malia and Sasha were teenagers now, and they increasingly had their own plans. They also had Secret Service agents to escort them and Michelle’s assistants to help coordinate their schedules. Their parents talked wistfully about how the girls were growing up fast. At home, Michelle and Barack often walked the dogs together—Bo had a new playmate, Sunny—and, in warm weather, the Obamas spent casual time together on the Truman Balcony. “Just kind of hanging out and reading the paper and catching up on the news and all that good stuff,” she said. Michelle continued to pay attention to fitness. She was often spotted at a gym outside the White House grounds: “I want to be this really fly 80-, 90-year-old.”
Michelle and Barack, who rarely went out to dinner in Washington, started holding private dinners in the White House residence. No motorcade, no hassle, and a limitless pool of prospective guests happy to spend an evening in the residence, with drinks, creative food, lively conversation—and music from Barack’s jazz playlists in the background. The unpublicized gatherings included notables from the worlds of art, letters, business, media, and, less often, politics. Not sure what to expect, one couple passed through White House security at 6 p.m., figuring they would be out the gate and on their way home by nine o’clock. It was well after midnight when the gathering ended. A guest who went to dinner on a different night did not make it back to his hotel until 2:30 a.m.
Marian remained a steady and steadying presence. “Not long on pretense,” as Michelle put it. “The first one to remind us who we are.” Michelle said her mother gave her “endless amounts of time just to talk and talk and talk and talk.” Or, as she explained when she hosted the annual White House Mother’s Day tea five years into Barack’s presidency, “There is no way I would be standing up straight on my feet if it weren’t for my mom, who is always there to look after our girls, to love them and be mad at me when I’m disciplining them, which I still don’t get.… She’s like ‘Why are you so mean?’ But that’s what grandmas are for. But, especially, she’s been that shoulder for me to lean on. I can always go up to her room and cry, complain, argue. And she just says, ‘Go on back down there and do what you’re supposed to do.’ ”
WHERE MICHELLE BELIEVED she could make the greatest difference was in the lives of young people. She spoke to elite audiences from time to time, including the high-profile White House interns, who were already well on their way. When they won seats at the table, she informed them in no uncertain terms, they had a responsibility to speak for people less privileged. And if they were not willing to risk their power, as she put it, they should step aside for someone who would. Far more often, however, Michelle chose to speak to disadvantaged teenagers, particularly from minority communities. Drawing on the narrative of her own upbringing and a cold-eyed assessment of current conditions, she shared tactics and conclusions that flowed from her own experience, all but willing them across the finish line. She implored students on society’s bottom rungs to concentrate on the factors they could control. Implicit in her message was the fact that no one, including a well-intentioned president, could remove the vast structural obstacles and equalize the odds any time soon. They should not wait for the cavalry to rescue them, she was saying. There was no cavalry.
“The only reason that I am standing up here today is that back when I was your age, I made a set of choices with my life. Do you hear me? Choices,” Michelle told several thousand Chicago schoolchildren in March 2013. “Although I am the first lady of the United States of America—listen to this, because this is the truth—I am no different from you. Look, I grew up in the same neighborhoods, went to the same schools, faced the same struggles, shared the same hopes and dreams that all of you share.” Her message was fundamentally conservative and it negated the cardboard critique that she and Barack encouraged victimhood, favored government solutions, and played to racial hostility. Nor was she calling for collective action or protest. She was addressing young people as individuals and imploring them to pursue a path to success, one step at a time. Then, if all went well, they could reach back and help others as they climbed. It was a formula that had worked for Michelle, who braced them for the difficulties ahead. “You will get your butts kick
ed sometimes and you will be disappointed. And you will be knocked down, and you have to get back up. There will be people hating on you.… Can you handle that? As you improve your lives, are you going to be afraid? Are you going to be afraid, and then retreat back into what’s comfortable?”
Barack, too, used his own story to instruct African American students. Two weeks before Michelle spoke in Chicago, his motorcade pulled up at Hyde Park Academy High School, where Michelle’s uncle, Nomenee Robinson, had been a student leader sixty years earlier. To an audience of black teenagers, Barack confessed to getting stoned, getting drunk, neglecting his schoolwork, and being angry about his absent father. He urged them to get serious about their studies and craft “a backup plan in case you don’t end up being LeBron or Jay Z.” The startling part of his message, in one young man’s eyes, was less what Barack accomplished in high school than what he did wrong. “Are you talking about you?” the boy asked uncertainly, unable to reconcile the story with the fact that the storyteller was the president of the United States.
Soon after their Chicago visits, Michelle and Barack delivered graduation speeches two days apart at historically black colleges. Their remarks emphasized personal responsibility, an element of what was sometimes called respectability politics. Michelle spoke on May 17, 2013, at Bowie State University, founded in January 1865 by the Baltimore Association for the Moral and Educational Improvement of Colored People. She told of slaves who risked their lives to read and write. She noted schools burned to the ground and black students jeered, spit upon, and ostracized just for seeking an education. She recalled the Little Rock Nine and six-year-old Ruby Bridges, who integrated a New Orleans school in 1960, then spent the year being taught alone when white parents refused to allow their children to be taught alongside her. (Photographs of the little girl being escorted to school by white federal marshals inspired Norman Rockwell to paint The Problem We All Live With, a canvas later displayed in the Obama White House, where Barack welcomed Bridges and paid homage to her.) Each of the protagonists in Michelle’s speech had suffered and forged ahead. Yet in modern-day America, she pointed out, only one in five African Americans between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-nine possessed a college degree. Michelle made no more than a glancing reference to the failure of government and society to address the nation’s stark inequities. Rather, she focused on individuals and their choices. “When it comes to getting an education, too many of our young people can’t be bothered,” she said. “Today, instead of walking miles every day to school, they’re sitting on couches for hours playing video games, watching TV. Instead of dreaming of being a teacher or a lawyer or a business leader, they’re fantasizing about being a baller or a rapper.”
Two days later, on May 19, Barack delivered the commencement address at Morehouse College in Atlanta. He spoke of policy in ways that Michelle did not. He described underfunded schools, violent neighborhoods, and the dearth of opportunities for more than the fortunate few. He said society has a collective responsibility “to advocate for an America where everybody has a fair shot in life.” In sync with Michelle, he also invoked the importance of individual decisions. He guessed that each one of the graduates had been told by an elder that “as an African American, you have to work twice as hard as anyone else if you want to get by.” He recalled periods in his youth when he dismissed his own failings as “just another example of the world trying to keep a black man down,” but he asked the students to look to the tribulations overcome by their black forebears, including some of the greats: “They knew full well the role that racism played in their lives, but when it came to their own accomplishments and sense of purpose, they had no time for excuses.”
“THERE’S A LOT WRONG HERE,” writer Ta-Nehisi Coates commented after studying the Obamas’ speeches that graduation season. Coates believed that the United States had never properly reckoned with the consequences of slavery or the government’s role in racial oppression. In his view, Michelle and Barack did not sufficiently acknowledge or address the causes of inequality in low-income, largely segregated neighborhoods. He said Barack was a “remarkable human being” who was “better read on the intersection of racism and American history” than any of his predecessors. Yet he saw the president becoming “the scold of ‘black America.’ ” If the dreams of many black kids did not extend much past LeBron and Jay Z, Coates said, one cause was the limited cultural exposure in “impoverished, segregated neighborhoods. Those neighborhoods are the direct result of American policy.”
THE DISCUSSION WAS NOT NEW. The debate over uplift and personal responsibility had a history in the black community that dated to the nineteenth century. What was sometimes painted in shorthand as Booker T. Washington versus W. E. B. Du Bois became by the end of the twentieth century a tangled knot of questions about who was to blame for the problems of the black underclass. The questions persisted—indeed, they intensified—during Barack’s presidency. Was black disadvantage a product of institutional racism and the cumulative discrimination suffered by African Americans at the hands of a white-ruled society? Was it modern-day inattention to the grotesque inequality of opportunity in U.S. cities? Was it a failing by a segment of the black community that looked too readily to others for deliverance, or at least a helping hand? To the Obamas, it was pieces of each of these. Barack reported in 2014 that “some thoughtful and sometimes not so thoughtful African-American commentators have gotten on both Michelle and me, suggesting that … we’re engaging in sort of up-by-the-bootstraps Booker T. Washington messages that let the larger society off the hook.” Invoking Malcolm X and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., he argued that there is “no contradiction” between calls for greater personal responsibility and an acknowledgment that some troubles in the black community “are a direct result of our history.”
To do something meaningful was the challenge. Harvard professor Randall Kennedy asserted in the summer of 2014 that Barack fell woefully short. On “critical matters of racial justice,” Kennedy said, “he has posited no agenda, unveiled no vision, set forth no overarching mission to be accomplished.” The president “might work on black issues behind the scenes,” wrote Kennedy, the brother of Michelle’s friend, Angela Kennedy Acree. “But he won’t be caught promoting them out front, not even now, when he is free of the burden of seeking reelection.” It was Eric Holder, the attorney general, who had spoken most assertively, painting the United States as “a nation of cowards” on racial matters.
During the first term Barack had confided that he could not talk as openly about race as he wanted. And shortly before he moved into the White House, he had a revealing conversation with Jim Montgomery, a black trial lawyer and Hyde Park neighbor who dropped by with celebratory champagne. As Montgomery recalled it, he told Barack while they were making small talk that he wanted to discuss domestic policy when the president-elect had a moment. Barack asked what he had in mind. Montgomery explained, “When you get ready to spend these billions of dollars on infrastructure and all this jazz to create jobs, make sure there is a provision in there for some set-asides and some employment for black people.’ He says, ‘Jim, you ain’t gonna ever change. If I did something like that, white folks would go crazy.’ ” In the same period, a wealthy white woman on Chicago’s North Shore shared that very worry with Montgomery: “Jim, I’m concerned. Is he just going to be a president for the black people?” Montgomery replied with a point about electoral math. The onetime civil rights lawyer from the South Side told her, “You will find that Barack is going to be the whitest president you’ve ever seen.”
One year into the second term, Barack launched an effort to help young black and Latino men through a mentoring program called My Brother’s Keeper, underwritten by $200 million in starter pledges from foundations and corporate entities. Why young black men? He cited the “plain fact” that there are “groups that have had the odds stacked against them in unique ways that require unique solutions; groups who’ve seen fewer opportunities that have spann
ed generations.” Earlier, he had argued for expanded Head Start programs and universal preschool, but this was not Great Society 2.0. My Brother’s Keeper was a modest public-private partnership that consciously echoed the model of Let’s Move! and Joining Forces. In the wake of protests against the treatment of African Americans by police and prosecutors, Barack announced that My Brother’s Keeper would expand. Adding his name to a project specifically designed to help black people was a second-term sign that Barack felt liberated—in his ever cautious and pragmatic way—to be a president explicitly for African Americans, as well as for all Americans.
THE REUTERS DAYBOOK, a catalog of upcoming events in Washington, announced the screening of a Muppets film at the White House, part of Michelle’s effort to draw attention to military families: “Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey and Kermit the Frog participate.” The March 2014 exchange between the frog, the general, and the first lady featured plenty of cornball humor and drew laughs, with Kermit saying to the assembled families, “I may not be a Marine, but I am marine life. I salute you.” The media spread the word, boosted by entertaining photos and video, and Michelle notched a small win. Ditto in October 2014, when she did a six-second Vine video, dancing with a purple-and-white turnip in a riff on the song “Turn Down for What.” In less than a month, viewers looped through the video more than 34 million times.
Laughs were fewer when Michelle engaged in an unusually public fight over nutrition standards with congressional Republicans who sought to dilute the policy at the heart of Let’s Move!. She was not shy about defending the regulations she had lobbied Congress to pass four years earlier and her promise to “fight until the bitter end” showed that the issue was not as benign as some critics suggested. When the House of Representatives approved the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act by a vote of 264–157 in 2010, it started a process designed to promote healthier school meals at a time when 31 million children bought school lunches each day, including 20 million low-income students subsidized by the federal government. The new law expanded access to the program and tightened nutrition regulations to include more whole grains, fruit, and vegetables and less salt, sugar, and fat. The measure also encouraged use of school gardens and locally grown produce, while setting a deadline for improving the healthiness of food sold in school vending machines. When skeptics complained that the costs would weaken school finances, Michelle and a raft of public-interest groups countered that the expenses were manageable and justified, given the stakes. “When we send our kids to school,” Michelle said, “we have a right to expect that they won’t be eating the kind of fatty, salty, sugary foods that we’re trying to keep from them when they’re at home.”