These interactions felt natural, genuine. I found myself hugging people instinctively and getting hugged tightly back.
* * *
It was around this time that I took Malia to our pediatrician for a well-child visit, which we did every three to six months to keep tabs on the asthma she’d had since she was a baby. The asthma was under control, but the doctor alerted me to something else—Malia’s body mass index, a measure of health that factors together height, weight, and age, was beginning to creep up. It wasn’t a crisis, he said, but it was a trend to take seriously. If we didn’t change some habits, it could become a real problem over time, increasing her risk for high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes. Seeing the stricken look on my face, he assured me that the problem was both common and solvable. The rate of childhood obesity was rising all around the country. He’d seen many examples in his practice, which was made up mostly of working-class African Americans.
The news landed like a rock through a stained-glass window. I’d worked so hard to make sure my daughters were happy and whole. What had I done wrong? What kind of mother was I if I hadn’t even noticed a change?
Talking further with the doctor, I began to see the pattern we were in. With Barack gone all the time, convenience had become the single most important factor in my choices at home. We’d been eating out more. With less time to cook, I often picked up takeout on my way home from work. In the mornings, I packed the girls’ lunch boxes with Lunchables and Capri Suns. Weekends usually meant a trip to the McDonald’s drive-through window after ballet and before soccer. None of this, our doctor said, was out of the ordinary, or even all that terrible in isolation. Too much of it, though, was a real problem.
Clearly, something had to change, but I was at a loss about how to make that happen. Every solution seemed to demand more time—time at the grocery store, time in the kitchen, time spent chopping vegetables or slicing the skin off a chicken breast—all this coming right when time felt as if it were already on the verge of extinction in my world.
I then remembered a conversation I’d had a few weeks earlier with an old friend I’d bumped into on a plane, who’d mentioned that she and her husband had hired a young man named Sam Kass to cook regular healthy meals at her house. By coincidence, it turned out Barack and I had met Sam years earlier through a different set of friends.
I never expected to be the sort of person who hired someone to come into my house and prepare meals for my family. It felt a little bougie, the kind of thing that would elicit a skeptical side eye from my South Side relatives. Barack, he of the Datsun with the hole in the floor, wasn’t hot on the idea, either; it didn’t fit with his ingrained community-organizer frugality, nor the image he wanted to promote as a presidential candidate. But to me, it felt like the only sane choice. Something had to give. No one else could run my programs at the hospital. No one else could campaign as Barack Obama’s wife. No one could fill in as Malia and Sasha’s mother at bedtime. But maybe Sam Kass could cook some dinners for us.
I hired Sam to come to our house a couple of times a week, making a meal we could eat that night and another that I could pull from the refrigerator to heat up the next evening. He was a bit of an outlier in the Obama household—a white twenty-six-year-old with a shiny shaved head and a perpetual five o’clock shadow—but the girls took to his corny jokes as quickly as they took to his cooking. He showed them how to chop carrots and blanch greens, shifting our family away from the fluorescent sameness of the grocery store and toward the rhythm of the seasons. He could be reverent about the arrival of fresh peas in springtime or the moment raspberries came ripe in June. He waited until peaches were rich and plump before serving them to the girls, knowing that then they might actually compete with candy. Sam also had an educated perspective on food and health issues, namely how the food industry marketed processed foods to families in the name of convenience and how that was having severe public health consequences. I was intrigued, realizing that it tied in to some of what I’d seen while working for the hospital system, and to the compromises I’d made myself as a working mother trying to feed her family.
One evening Sam and I spent a couple of hours talking in my kitchen, the two of us batting around ideas about how, if Barack ever managed to win the presidency, I might use my role as First Lady to try to address some of these issues. One idea bloomed into another. What if we grew vegetables at the White House and helped advocate for fresh food? What if we then used that as a cornerstone for something bigger, a whole children’s health initiative that might help parents avoid some of the pitfalls I’d experienced?
We talked until it was late. I looked at Sam and let out a sigh. “The only problem is our guy is down by thirty points in the polls,” I said as the two of us began to crack up. “He’s never gonna win.”
It was a dream, but I liked it.
* * *
When it came to campaigning, each day was another race to be run. I was still trying to cling to some form of normalcy and stability, not just for the girls, but for me. I carried two BlackBerrys—one for work, the other for my personal life and political obligations, which were now, for better or worse, deeply entwined. My daily phone calls with Barack tended to be short and newsy—Where are you? How’s it going? How are the kids?—both of us accustomed now to not speaking of fatigue or our personal needs. There was no point, because we couldn’t attend to them anyway. Life was all about the ticking clock.
At work, I was doing what I could to keep up, sometimes checking in with my staff at the hospital from the cluttered backseat of a Toyota Corolla belonging to an anthropology student volunteering for the campaign in Iowa or from the quiet corner of a Burger King in Plymouth, New Hampshire. Several months after Barack’s announcement in Springfield and with the support of my colleagues, I’d decided to scale back to part-time hours, knowing it was the only sustainable way to keep going. On the road two or three days a week together, Melissa, Katie, and I had become an efficient family, meeting up at the airport in the mornings and hustling through security, where the guards all knew my name. I was recognized more often now, mostly by African American women who’d call out “Michelle! Michelle!” as I walked past them to the gate.
Something was changing, so gradually that at first it was hard to register. I sometimes felt as if I were floating through a strange universe, waving at strangers who acted as if they knew me, boarding planes that lifted me out of my normal world. I was becoming known. And I was becoming known for being someone’s wife and as someone involved with politics, which made it doubly and triply weird.
Working a rope line during campaign events had become like trying to stay upright inside a hurricane, I’d found, with well-meaning, deeply enthusiastic strangers reaching for my hands and touching my hair, people trying to thrust pens, cameras, and babies at me without warning. I’d smile, shake hands, and hear stories, all the while trying to move forward down the line. Ultimately, I’d emerge, with other people’s lipstick on my cheeks and handprints on my blouse, looking as if I’d just stepped out of a wind tunnel.
I had little time to think much about it, but quietly I worried that as my visibility as Barack Obama’s wife rose, the other parts of me were dissolving from view. When I spoke to reporters, they rarely asked about my work. They inserted “Harvard-educated” in their description of me, but generally left it at that. A couple of news outlets had published stories speculating that I’d been promoted at the hospital not due to my own hard work and merit but because of my husband’s growing political stature, which was painful to read. In April, Melissa called me one day at home to let me know about a snarky column written by Maureen Dowd of the New York Times. In it, she referred to me as a “princess of South Chicago,” suggesting that I was emasculating Barack when I spoke publicly about how he didn’t pick up his socks or put the butter back in the fridge. For me, it had always been important that people see Barack as human and not as s
ome otherworldly savior. Maureen Dowd would have preferred, apparently, that I adopt the painted-on smile and the adoring gaze. I found it odd and sad that such a harsh critique would come from another professional woman, someone who had not bothered to get to know me but was now trying to shape my story in a cynical way.
I tried not to take this stuff personally, but sometimes it was hard not to.
With every campaign event, every article published, every sign we might be gaining ground, we became slightly more exposed, more open to attack. Crazy rumors swirled about Barack: that he’d been schooled in a radical Muslim madrassa and sworn into the Senate on a Koran. That he refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. That he wouldn’t put his hand over his heart during the national anthem. That he had a close friend who was a domestic terrorist from the 1970s. The falsehoods were routinely debunked by reputable news sources but still blazed through anonymous email chains, forwarded not just by basement conspiracy theorists but also by uncles and colleagues and neighbors who couldn’t separate fact from fiction online.
Barack’s safety was something I didn’t want to think about, let alone discuss. So many of us had been brought up with assassinations on the news at night. The Kennedys had been shot. Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot. Ronald Reagan had been shot. John Lennon had been shot. If you drew too much heat, you bore a certain risk. But then again, Barack was a black man. The risk, for him, was nothing new. “He could get shot just going to the gas station,” I sometimes tried to remind people when they brought it up.
Beginning in May, Barack had been assigned Secret Service protection. It was the earliest a presidential candidate had been given a protective detail ever, a full year and a half before he could even become president-elect, which said something about the nature and the seriousness of the threats against him. Barack now traveled in sleek black SUVs provided by the government and was trailed by a team of suited, ear-pieced men and women with guns. At home, an agent stood guard on our front porch.
For my part, I rarely felt unsafe. As I continued to travel, I was managing to pull in bigger crowds. If I’d once met with twenty people at a time at low-key house parties, I was now speaking to hundreds in a high school gym. The Iowa staff reported that my talks tended to yield a lot of pledges of support (measured in signed “supporter cards,” which the campaign collected and followed up with meticulously). At some point, the campaign began referring to me as “the Closer” for the way I helped make up minds.
Each day brought a new lesson about how to move more efficiently, how not to get slowed down by illness or mess of any kind. After being served some questionable food at otherwise charming roadside diners, I learned to value the bland certainty of a McDonald’s cheeseburger. On bumpy drives between small towns, I learned how to protect my clothing from spills by seeking out snacks that would crumble rather than drip, knowing that I couldn’t be photographed with a dollop of hummus on my dress. I trained myself to limit my water intake, understanding there was rarely time for bathroom breaks on the road. I learned to sleep through the sound of long-haul trucks barreling down the Iowa interstate after midnight and (as happened at one particularly thin-walled hotel) to ignore a happy couple enjoying their wedding night in the next room.
As up and down as I sometimes felt, that first year of campaigning was filled primarily with warm memories and bursts of laughter. As often as I could, I brought Sasha and Malia along with me out on the trail. They were hardy, happy travelers. On a busy day at an outdoor fair in New Hampshire, I’d gone off to give remarks and shake hands with voters, leaving the girls with a campaign staffer to explore the booths and rides before we regrouped for a magazine photo shoot. An hour or so later, I spotted Sasha and panicked. Her cheeks, nose, and forehead had been covered, meticulously and comprehensively, in black and white face paint. She’d been transformed into a panda bear, and she was thrilled about it. My mind went instantly to the magazine crew waiting for us, the schedule that would now be thrown off. But then I looked back at her little panda face and exhaled. My daughter was cute and content. All I could do was laugh and find the nearest restroom to scrub off the paint.
From time to time, we’d travel together as a family, all four of us. The campaign rented an RV for a few days in Iowa, so that we could do barnstorming tours of small towns, punctuated by rousing games of Uno between stops. We passed an afternoon at the Iowa State Fair, riding bumper cars and shooting water soakers to win stuffed animals, as photographers jostled for position, shoving their lenses in our faces. The real fun started after Barack got swept off to his next destination, leaving the girls and me free from the tornado of press, security, and staff that now moved with him, stirring up everything in its wake. Once he’d left, we got to explore the midway on our own, the air rushing past us as we rocketed down a giant yellow slide on burlap sacks.
Week after week, I returned to Iowa, watching through the plane window as the seasons changed, as the earth slowly greened and the soybean and corn crops grew in ruler-straight lines. I loved the tidy geometry of those fields, the pops of color that turned out to be barns, the flat county highways that ran straight to the horizon. I had come to love the state, even if despite all our work it was looking like we might not be able to win there.
For the better part of a year now, Barack and his team had poured resources into Iowa, but according to most polls he was still running second or third behind Hillary and John Edwards. The race looked to be close, but Barack was losing. Nationally, the picture appeared worse: Barack consistently trailed Hillary by a full fifteen or twenty points—a reality I was hit with anytime I passed by the cable news blaring in airports or at campaign-stop restaurants.
Months earlier, I’d become so fed up with the relentless, carnival-barker commentary on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News that I’d permanently blacklisted those channels during my evenings at home, treating myself instead to a more steadying diet of E! and HGTV. At the end of a busy day, I will tell you, there is nothing better than watching a young couple find their dream home in Nashville or some young bride-to-be saying yes to the dress.
Quite honestly, I didn’t believe the pundits, and I wasn’t sure about the polls, either. In my heart, I was convinced they were wrong. The climate described from inside sterile urban studios was not the one I was encountering in the church halls and rec centers of Iowa. The pundits weren’t meeting teams of high school “Barack Stars,” who volunteered after football practice or drama club. They weren’t holding hands with a white grandmother who imagined a better future for her mixed-race grandchildren. Nor did they seem aware of the proliferating giant that was our field organization. We were in the process of building a massive grassroots campaign network—ultimately two hundred staffers in thirty-seven offices—the largest in the history of the Iowa caucuses.
We had youth on our side. Our organization was powered by the idealism and energy of twenty-two- to twenty-five-year-olds who had dropped everything and driven themselves to Iowa to join the campaign, each one carrying some permutation of the gene that had compelled Barack to take the organizing job in Chicago all those years ago. They had a spirit and skill that hadn’t yet been accounted for in the polls. I felt it every time I visited, a surge of hope that came from interacting with true believers who were spending four or five hours every evening knocking on doors and calling voters, building networks of supporters in even the tiniest and most conservative towns, while learning by heart the intricacies of my husband’s stance on hog confinements or his plan to fix the immigration system.
To me, the young people managing our field offices represented the promise of the coming generation of leaders. They weren’t jaded, and now they’d been galvanized and united. They were connecting voters more directly to their democracy, whether through the field office down the street or a website through which they could organize their own meetings and phone banks. As Barack often said, what we were doing wasn’t just about a singl
e election. It was about making politics better for the future—less money-driven, more accessible, and ultimately more hopeful. Even if we didn’t end up winning, we were making progress that mattered. One way or another, their work would count.
* * *
As the weather began to turn cold again, Barack knew he had basically one last chance to change up the race in Iowa, and that was by making a strong showing at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner, an annual Democratic ritual in every state. In Iowa, during a presidential election, it was held in early November, about eight weeks ahead of the January caucuses, and covered by the national media. The premise was that every candidate gave a speech—with no notes and no teleprompter—and also tried to bring along as many supporters as possible. It was, in essence, a giant and competitive pep rally.
For months, the cable news commentators had doubted that Iowans would stand up for Barack at caucus time, insinuating that as dynamic and unusual a candidate as he was, he still wouldn’t manage to convert the enthusiasm into votes. The crowd at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner was our answer to this. About three thousand of our supporters had driven in from all over the state, showing that we were both organized and active—stronger than anyone thought.
Onstage that night, John Edwards took a shot at Clinton, speaking in veiled terms about sincerity and trustworthiness being important. Grinning, Joe Biden acknowledged the impressive and noisy turnout of Obama supporters with a sardonic “Hello, Chicago!” Hillary, who was fighting a cold, also used the opportunity to go after Barack. “ ‘Change’ is just a word,” she said, “if you don’t have the strength and experience to make it happen.”
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