Michelle Obama

by Peter Slevin

  That brought the wrath of adult naysayers, not to mention an array of students who took to YouTube and Twitter using the hashtag #ThankYouMichelleObama to complain that new meals created by school cooks tasted awful or left them hungry. It was a significant sign of her stature in the national debate that Michelle became the focus of criticism. Never mind that Congress had approved the approach by bipartisan vote or that the Department of Agriculture developed the rules based on independent recommendations from the nonpartisan health arm of the National Academy of Sciences. Michelle was the face of the program, so she took the heat. But backing down unless absolutely necessary was not her style. “I know that kids occasionally grumble about eating healthier food,” she said. “But, look, that is to be expected because, frankly, that’s what kids do, including my own kids. They want what they want when they want it, regardless of whether it’s good for them or not. And when they don’t get what they want, they complain.… It’s our job to say, ‘No, you cannot have a candy bar for breakfast.’ And, ‘Yes, you have to eat some vegetables every day.’ And, ‘No, you can’t sit around playing video games all day. Go outside and run.’ ”

  By 2014, about 90 percent of schools across the country reported being in compliance with the rules, some through gritted teeth. What followed, however, was a revolt among members of Congress, assisted by the School Nutrition Association, a trade organization backed by corporations that did billions of dollars in business with school cafeterias. The battle was already brewing in 2011, when lobbyists persuaded Congress, over the objections of the Obama administration, to count an eighth of a cup of tomato paste in pizza sauce as the equivalent of a half cup of vegetables. Michelle took to the opinion pages of The New York Times three years later to defend the nutrition standards. Referring to the pizza squabble, she said, “You don’t have to be a nutritionist to know that this doesn’t make much sense.” She also challenged an effort by the potato lobby and federal legislators to expand access to white potatoes for millions of participants in the Women, Infants and Children program. Potatoes are fine, said the first lady, who often described french fries as her favorite food. But research showed that many women and young children in the supplemental nutrition program were already getting enough starch and potatoes—which they could purchase with food stamps, if they chose—and not enough “nutrient-dense fruits and vegetables.”

  What really bothered Michelle, however, and prompted her to make repeated calls to individual senators, was the attempt to waive the school nutrition rules. Such efforts, she said, went against science and good sense and did a disservice to parents, who were “working hard to serve their kids balanced meals at home and don’t want their efforts undermined during the day at school.” Not incidentally, she argued that obesity was now contributing to $190 billion in higher annual health costs. She insisted that the $10 billion spent by taxpayers on school lunches should not pay for “junk food for our children.” The heart of her argument rested on the needs of impoverished children. She noted that millions of disadvantaged kids relied on school meals as their main source of nutrition and cited research that well-fed children do better in school. “We simply can’t afford to say, ‘Oh, well, it’s too hard, so let’s not do it,’ ” she said.

  MICHELLE CONTINUED to work on Let’s Move! and on Joining Forces. She called homelessness among military veterans “a stain on the soul of the nation.” She helped enlist local leaders to work on the problem as federal authorities delivered more money for housing vouchers. Drawing attention to women who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, she said it was “just wrong” that their 11.2 percent unemployment rate was five points higher than men from the same wars, and more than double the rate of civilian women. She also took tentative steps to add a new project to her portfolio. Early in the White House years, she had envisioned a larger international role for the second term, but with the girls in school, Barack under pressure, and the optics of foreign travel a potential political liability, she looked for issues closer to home and her heart. Her message was direct and her tone was raw when she spoke up for a $50 million public-private partnership that would deliver after-school programming to urban kids in Chicago. The fate of black teenagers was on her mind. Her voice caught in her throat as she recalled a private scene from Hadiya’s funeral, when it was “hard to know what to say to a roomful of teenagers who are about to bury their best friend.” She declared that adults have a “moral obligation” to provide children with safe neighborhoods, cultural opportunities, and classrooms without “crumbling ceilings and ripped-up textbooks.”

  Following the Newtown shootings and Hadiya’s death, Michelle discussed gun violence with friends and staff, but did not make urban violence or gun laws or after-school programs a significant part of her agenda. Rather, she turned to higher education and patterns of unequal access to college. In her Chicago speech, she repeated a conviction that had been a constant in her thinking and Barack’s. It was the view that disparate outcomes in minority communities had less to do with the young residents’ aptitudes than with the disparate opportunities they were afforded. Growing up in South Shore in the 1960s and 1970s, she felt safe, she took part in a range of engaging activities, and she had adults who pushed and supported her. “And that, in the end, was the difference between growing up and becoming a lawyer, a mother and first lady of the United States—and being shot dead at the age of fifteen.”

  Through a new East Wing project called Reach Higher, she set out to encourage young people from low-income families to attend college or training schools and to persevere long enough to get a degree. The need was clear: Only one in ten young people from low-income backgrounds typically earned a bachelor’s degree by age twenty-five, while roughly half from high-income families did. Following the formula of Let’s Move! and Joining Forces, the project supported Barack’s agenda, in this case his effort to construct a smarter, more skilled workforce. In 1990, the United States ranked first in the world in the percentage of college graduates in the 25-to-34 age group. By 2014, the country had fallen to 12th. Noting that education would influence the nation’s economic future and rates of upward mobility, Barack tried to set the nation’s sights on regaining the top position by 2020. His project was called North Star.

  Michelle and Barack had long talked publicly about the obstacles to higher education for disadvantaged students and the struggles many of them faced when they got there. They saw the disparities during their own climbs through college and, more recently, in the experiences of Malia and Sasha, who attended Sidwell Friends, where the 2014–2015 tuition was $36,264 per student. Students in the girls’ circle not only received a first-rate education, but valuable practice in taking college admission exams, which Barack described as standardized tests that are “not standardized.” Unequal access to preparation, he said, “tilts the playing field. It’s not fair and it’s gotten worse.”

  A few months earlier, Michelle had watched a new film, The Inevitable Defeat of Mister and Pete. Partly funded by singer Alicia Keys, it was a story that made her cry not only when she watched it, but when she thought back on its most poignant scenes. The movie depicts the struggles of two young boys largely fending for themselves in a Brooklyn housing project while their mothers are behind bars. By the time the credits rolled, Michelle had decided to screen the film in the White House to advance the initiative that would become Reach Higher. “Because there are millions of Misters and Petes out there who are just struggling to make it,” she said, vowing that the film would be the guidepost for her remaining time as first lady.

  At the White House screening in January 2014, on the eve of a gathering of university presidents to discuss ways to improve college access, Michelle spoke soberly and directly, explaining her plan to use her pulpit. She would tell adults that kids needed schools to teach them, programs to support them, and universities “to seek them out and give them a chance and then prepare them and help them finish their degrees once they get in.” However much her progressiv
e critics might urge her to play a more active role, Michelle said there was little she could do personally, on the policy or spending front. “The one thing I can bring to this is the message that we can give directly to young people.”

  To young people all around the country, Michelle set out to be booster, coach, advocate, and role model. She was the mom-in-chief, and she wanted them to see their rocky path through childhood as a strength, not a weakness. Life was tough, sure, but they were still standing. Resilience, as she liked to tell Malia and Sasha, was a response learned through experience. She set out to deliver reassurance and practical advice to teenagers who doubted that they had what it takes, just as she had done at Anacostia High, the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School, Hadiya Pendleton’s funeral, and a hundred other places all the way back to the offices of Public Allies. She had proven that she belonged at one unlikely destination after another, that she was supposed to be there. So, too, were they.

  MICHELLE FLEW TO Atlanta one day in September 2014 to tell her story and repeat her mantra at Atlanta’s Booker T. Washington High School, opened in 1924 as the first public high school in Georgia built for African American children. Standing at a lectern in the school gymnasium as her prepared remarks scrolled through twin teleprompters, Michelle said that she had faced challenges getting her education and she recognized that many Washington High students had confronted worse, from financial hardship and tumult at home to the wounds of drugs and guns. She said their tribulations were “advantages,” and their successes demonstrated courage and grit. She urged the ninth and tenth graders to make a plan to advance themselves and instructed the eleventh and twelfth graders to study for college assessment tests. She told them all to ask for help, not once but often. “Are you listening to me?” she asked the hundreds of students who packed the bleachers and stood in front of the stage. “Do you hear what I’m telling you, because I’m giving you some insights that a lot of rich kids all over the country—they know this stuff and I want you to know it, too, because you have got to go and get your education. You have got to!”

  MTV personality Sway Calloway flew in from New York to emcee the event. He told the students to look lively because his reports would appear on MTV, BET, and Nickelodeon. He said the first lady “could be anywhere on this planet today, literally, but she chose to come to your high school.” Calloway’s presence offered evidence of the way that Michelle and her staff had promoted her programs on their own terms, to the audences they coveted. Michelle made no time for questions from news reporters, but she gave risk-free one-on-one backstage interviews to Calloway and LGBT media figure Tyler Oakley, whose upbeat conversation with her registered 1.2 million YouTube views in just ten days.

  To the students in the gym, Michelle spoke of racism and Jim Crow. She invoked Booker T. Washington and the school’s most famous alumnus, Martin Luther King Jr., who graduated from Morehouse, a ten-minute walk away. She said the two men had bequeathed to the students a legacy of progress and a responsibility to better themselves and their families. “There is absolutely no excuse,” she told the teenagers. “If there’s anybody telling you that you’re not college material—anyone—I want you to brush ’em off. Prove them wrong.” She might as easily have been talking about the legacy that her grandparents passed to her parents and that Fraser and Marian Robinson passed to her and to Craig. Ever the South Side girl, Michelle was passing it on, too. “I love you all,” she said. “God bless. Keep working hard.”

  Epilogue

  Nearly six years into her White House life, Michelle took to the campaign trail in late 2014 as Democrats fought to retain their Senate majority. Barack seemed beleaguered, his hair ever grayer and his favorability numbers in the low forties, at least twenty points lower than his wife’s. Many candidates calculated that a campaign rally with the president would be a net loss, but coveted a visit from Michelle. In more than a dozen states from Florida to Maine to Colorado and three trips to Iowa, she became Barack’s proxy, talking up the things that were going right and criticizing Republican behavior that “just wastes time and wastes taxpayer dollars. In fact, it’s gotten so bad, they’re even trying to block the work that I do on childhood obesity. And that’s really saying something.” Barack made a ripe target. Demonized in ever more fantastical ways, he seemed unable to find a response that worked, even to persuade fellow Democrats. In November, the country was in such a sour mood that only 36 percent of voters bothered to cast ballots, the lowest figure since 1942. Republicans surged gleefully into control of the Senate, leaving the forty-fourth president ever more isolated.

  Michelle carried on with her projects, but her public and private reflections sometimes took on a valedictory tone. As attention shifted to the election of Barack’s successor, she told friends that she intended to stay in Washington until Sasha graduated from high school in 2019, if that’s what Sasha wanted. Despite her Chicago roots and the friends and family still living on the South Side, Barack set his sights on New York, at least as one of their future homes. If it came to that Michelle reckoned that she could be more anonymous there than in Chicago, an appealing thought after the White House fishbowl. She said she looked forward to staying fit, traveling to beautiful places, and, one day, being a grandmother. At an event with Laura Bush, who appeared to be carving a satisfying post-politics life in Dallas, Michelle said she saw in the Bush family “a level of freedom” that comes when the spotlight shifts. “There is more that you’re able to do out of office, oftentimes, than you can do when you’re in office.” Working on a memoir likely to fetch millions of dollars, she told friends that she would have much to say when she no longer had to worry quite so much about the consequences. Privately, she once mused that when she left the White House, she would be just like Barbara Bush. She paused for comic effect as her guests conjured the unlikely image. Because you’ll start wearing three strands of pearls? one perplexed friend asked. No, Michelle laughed, because I’ll be able to say whatever the hell I want.

  Michelle had once called herself a “statistical anomaly,” a black woman who had climbed from the Chicago working class into elite American society. Her place in history reflected the distance she and the country had traveled since January 1964. Opportunities had multiplied and paths had grown smoother. And yet she remained, in so many ways, an exception that proved the rule. More than a half century after her birth, the odds remained daunting for the vast majority of the 41 million people in the United States who identified themselves as African American. There were yawning gaps between blacks and whites in household income, home ownership, college completion rates, and net worth, not to mention disparities in incarceration rates and levels of confidence in the legal system. Michelle herself said in May 2014, “We know that in America, too many folks are stopped on the street because of the color of their skin.” The idea of the country being post-racial would have been laughable were it not so depressing. Michelle belongs to a generation, said historian Marcia Chatelain, that sees “incredible amounts of change and incredible amounts of stagnation.” When the first lady considered the stacked deck and grew impatient, Barack would remind her that they were “playing a long game here, and that change is hard and change is slow and it never happens all at once. But eventually we get there, we always do.”

  One day in the Oval Office, very quietly, so quietly that Barack had to ask him to repeat it, a five-year-old black boy named Jacob Philadelphia asked the president a question. He said, “I want to know if my hair is just like yours.” Barack invited him to see for himself and, standing beside his desk, leaned down. As Jacob reached up to touch his hair, a White House photographer snapped a picture. For more than five years, the photo hung in the West Wing as dozens of others were swapped out. Michelle described the scene to an African American church audience in Nashville, offering it as a sign that progress does come, however glacial, however imperfect. “I want you to think,” she said, “about how children who see that photo today think nothing of it because that is all they’
ve ever known, because they have grown up taking for granted that an African American can be president of the United States.” She once reflected, while hosting a White House workshop to celebrate the rise of 1960s Motown music, that “something changed when little girls all across the country saw Diana Ross on The Ed Sullivan Show.” Just maybe, she thought, something was changing, too, as little girls and boys across the country saw Michelle Obama in the White House.

  Michelle devoted countless hours to her work on obesity, education, and military families. She hoped her projects, and the messages behind them, would endure. And yet the power that she invoked most often in her public life was the symbolic power of her trajectory—the fact that she made it from Richard J. Daley’s unforgiving Chicago all the way to Princeton, to Harvard, to prosperity and a measure of professional fulfillment, and then to the gleaming pulpit that was the White House. That was why she told her story so often to students who felt marginalized and unsure. It was why she emphasized discipline, persistence, and decency—and why she gave out all those hugs. One day, explaining “why, as first lady, I do this,” she told a high school audience in Washington that she urged them onward “because this is all I can be for you right now, is just this model of an alternative.” Could she do more? That was the lingering question of her final stretch in the White House and the years to come.