As this tumult was beginning, I flew to South Africa for a goodwill visit that had been planned months in advance. Sasha and Malia’s school year had just ended, so they were able to join me, along with my mother and Craig’s kids Leslie and Avery, who were now teenagers. I was headed there to give a keynote address at a U.S.-sponsored forum for young African women leaders from around the continent, but we’d also filled my schedule with community events connected to wellness and education, as well as visits with local leaders and U.S. consulate workers. We’d finish with a short visit to Botswana, meeting with its president and stopping at a community HIV clinic, and then enjoy a quick safari before heading home.
It had taken no time at all for us to get swept up in South Africa’s energy. In Johannesburg, we toured the Apartheid Museum and danced and read books with young children at a community center in one of the black townships north of the city. At a soccer stadium in Cape Town, we met community organizers and health workers who were using youth sports programs to help educate children about HIV/AIDS, and were introduced to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the legendary theologian and activist who’d helped dismantle apartheid in South Africa. Tutu was seventy-nine years old, a barrel-chested man with bright eyes and an irrepressible laugh. Hearing that I was at the stadium to promote fitness, he insisted on doing push-ups with me in front of a cheering pack of kids.
Over the course of those few days in South Africa, I felt myself floating. This visit was a long way from my first trip to Kenya in 1991, when I’d ridden around with Barack in matatus and pushed Auma’s broken-down VW along the side of a dusty road. What I felt was one part jet lag, maybe, but two parts something more profound and elating. It was as if we’d stepped into the larger crosscurrents of culture and history, reminded suddenly of our relative smallness in the wider arc of time. Seeing the faces of the seventy-six young women who’d been chosen to attend the leadership forum because they were doing meaningful work in their communities, I fought back tears. They gave me hope. They made me feel old in the best possible way. A full 60 percent of Africa’s population at the time was under the age of twenty-five. Here were women, all of them under thirty and some as young as sixteen, who were building nonprofits, training other women to be entrepreneurs, and risking imprisonment to report on government corruption. And now they were being connected, trained, and encouraged. I hoped this would only amplify their might.
The most surreal moment of all, though, had come early, on just the second day of our trip. My family and I had been at the Nelson Mandela Foundation headquarters in Johannesburg, visiting with Graça Machel, a well-known humanitarian and Mandela’s wife, when we received word that Mandela himself would be happy to greet us at his home nearby.
We went immediately, of course. Nelson Mandela was ninety-two at the time. He’d been hospitalized with lung issues earlier in the year. I was told he seldom received guests. Barack had met him six years earlier, as a senator, when Mandela had visited Washington. He’d kept a framed photo of their meeting on the wall of his office ever since. Even my kids—Sasha, ten, and Malia, about to turn thirteen—understood what a big deal this was. Even my eternally unfazed mother looked a little stunned.
There was no one alive who’d had a more meaningful impact on the world than Nelson Mandela had, at least by my measure. He’d been a young man in the 1940s when he first joined the African National Congress and began boldly challenging the all-white South African government and its entrenched racist policies. He’d been forty-four years old when he was put in shackles and sent to prison for his activism, and seventy-one when he was finally released in 1990. Surviving twenty-seven years of deprivation and isolation as a prisoner, having had many of his friends tortured and killed under the apartheid regime, Mandela managed to negotiate—rather than fight—with government leaders, brokering a miraculously peaceful transition to a true democracy in South Africa and ultimately becoming its first president.
Mandela lived on a leafy suburban street in a Mediterranean-style home set behind butter-colored concrete walls. Graça Machel ushered us through a courtyard shaded by trees and into the house, where in a wide, sunlit room her husband sat in an armchair. He had sparse, snowy hair and wore a brown batik shirt. Someone had laid a white blanket across his lap. He was surrounded by several generations of relatives, all of whom welcomed us enthusiastically. Something in the brightness of the room, the volubility of the family, and the squinty smile of the patriarch reminded me of going to my grandfather Southside’s house when I was a kid. I’d been nervous to come, but now I relaxed.
The truth is I’m not sure that the patriarch himself completely grasped who we were or why we’d stopped in. He was an old man at this point, his attention seeming to drift, his hearing a little weak. “This is Michelle Obama!” Graça Machel said, leaning close to his ear. “The wife of the U.S. president!”
“Oh, lovely,” murmured Nelson Mandela. “Lovely.”
He looked at me with genuine interest, though in truth I could have been anyone. It seemed clear that he bestowed this same degree of warmth upon every person who crossed his path. My interaction with Mandela was both quiet and profound—maybe more profound, even, for its quietness. His life’s words had mostly been spoken now, his speeches and letters, his books and protest chants, already etched not just into his story but into humanity’s as a whole. I could feel all of it in the brief moment I had with him—the dignity and spirit that had coaxed equality from a place where none had existed.
I was still thinking about Mandela five days later as we flew back to the United States, traveling north and west over Africa and then across the Atlantic over the course of a long dark night. Sasha and Malia lay sprawled beneath blankets next to their cousins; my mother dozed in a seat nearby. Farther back in the plane, staff and Secret Service members were watching movies and catching up on sleep. The engines hummed. I felt alone and not alone. We were headed home—home being the strange-familiar city of Washington, D.C., with its white marble and clashing ideologies, with everything that still needed to be fought and won. I thought about the young African women I’d met at the leadership forum, all of them now headed back to their own communities to pick up their work again, persevering through whatever tumult they faced.
Mandela had gone to jail for his principles. He’d missed seeing his kids grow up, and then he’d missed seeing many of his grandkids grow up, too. All this without bitterness. All this still believing that the better nature of his country would at some point prevail. He’d worked and waited, tolerant and undiscouraged, to see it happen.
I flew home propelled by that spirit. Life was teaching me that progress and change happen slowly. Not in two years, four years, or even a lifetime. We were planting seeds of change, the fruit of which we might never see. We had to be patient.
* * *
Three times over the course of the fall of 2011, Barack proposed bills that would create thousands of jobs for Americans, in part by giving states money to hire more teachers and first responders. Three times the Republicans blocked them, never even allowing a vote.
“The single most important thing we want to achieve,” the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, had declared to a reporter a year earlier, laying out his party’s goals, “is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” It was that simple. The Republican Congress was devoted to Barack’s failure above all else. It seemed they weren’t prioritizing the governance of the country or the fact that people needed jobs. Their own power came first.
I found it demoralizing, infuriating, sometimes crushing. This was politics, yes, but in its most fractious and cynical form, seemingly disconnected from any larger sense of purpose. I felt emotions that perhaps Barack couldn’t afford to feel. He stayed locked in his work, for the most part undaunted, riding out the bumps and compromising where he could, clinging to the sober-minded, someone’s-gotta-take-this-on brand of optimism that had always guided him.
He’d been in politics for fifteen years now. I continued to think of him as being like an old copper pot—seasoned by fire, dinged up but still shiny.
Returning to the campaign trail—as Barack and I began to do in the fall of 2011—became something of a salve. It took us out of Washington and returned us to communities all around the country again, places like Richmond and Reno, where we could hug and shake hands with supporters, listening to their ideas and concerns. It was a chance to feel the grassroots energy that has always been so central to Barack’s vision of democracy, and to be reminded that American citizens are for the most part far less cynical than their elected leaders. We just needed them to get out and vote. I’d been disappointed that millions of people had sat out during the 2010 midterm elections, effectively handing Barack a divided Congress that could barely manage to make a law.
Despite the challenges, there was plenty to feel hopeful about, too. By the end of 2011, the last American soldiers had left Iraq; a gradual drawdown of troops was under way in Afghanistan. Major provisions of the Affordable Care Act had also gone into effect, with young people allowed to remain longer on their parents’ insurance policies and companies prevented from capping a patient’s lifetime coverage. All this was forward motion, I reminded myself, steps taken along the broader path.
Even with an entire political party conspiring to see Barack fail, we had no choice but to stay positive and carry on. It was similar to when the Sidwell mom had asked Malia if she feared for her life at tennis practice. What can you do, really, but go out and hit another ball?
So we worked. Both of us worked. I threw myself into my initiatives. Under the banner of Let’s Move! we continued to rack up results. My team and I persuaded Darden Restaurants, the parent company behind chains like Olive Garden and Red Lobster, to make changes to the kinds of food it offered and how it was prepared. They pledged to revamp their menus, cutting calories, reducing sodium, and offering healthier options for kids’ meals. We’d appealed to the company’s executives—to their conscience as well as their bottom line—convincing them that the culture of eating in America was shifting and it made good business sense to get out ahead of the curve. Darden served 400 million meals to Americans each year. At that scale, even a small shift—like removing tantalizing photos of cool, icy glasses of soda from the kids’ menus—could have a real impact.
A First Lady’s power is a curious thing—as soft and undefined as the role itself. And yet I was learning to harness it. I had no executive authority. I didn’t command troops or engage in formal diplomacy. Tradition called for me to provide a kind of gentle light, flattering the president with my devotion, flattering the nation primarily by not challenging it. I was beginning to see, though, that wielded carefully the light was more powerful than that. I had influence in the form of being something of a curiosity—a black First Lady, a professional woman, a mother of young kids. People seemed to want to dial into my clothes, my shoes, and my hairstyles, but they also had to see me in the context of where I was and why. I was learning how to connect my message to my image, and in this way I could direct the American gaze. I could put on an interesting outfit, crack a joke, and talk about sodium content in kids’ meals without being totally boring. I could publicly applaud a company that was actively hiring members of the military community, or drop to the floor for an on-air push-up contest with Ellen DeGeneres (and win it, earning gloating rights forever) in the name of Let’s Move!
I was a child of the mainstream, and this was an asset. Barack sometimes referred to me as “Joe Public,” asking me to weigh in on campaign slogans and strategies, knowing that I kept myself happily steeped in popular culture. Though I’d moved through rarefied places like Princeton and Sidley & Austin, and though I now occasionally found myself wearing diamonds and a ball gown, I’d never stopped reading People magazine or let go of my love of a good sitcom. I watched Oprah and Ellen far more often than I’d ever tuned in to Meet the Press or Face the Nation, and to this day nothing pleases me more than the tidy triumph delivered by a home-makeover show.
All of this is to say that I saw ways to connect with Americans that Barack and his West Wing advisers didn’t fully recognize, at least initially. Rather than doing interviews with big newspapers or cable news outlets, I began sitting down with influential “mommy bloggers” who reached an enormous and dialed-in audience of women. Watching my young staffers interact with their phones, seeing Malia and Sasha start to take in news and chat with their high school friends via social media, I realized there was opportunity to be tapped there as well. I crafted my first tweet in the fall of 2011 to promote Joining Forces and then watched it zing through the strange, boundless ether where people increasingly spent their time.
It was a revelation. All of it was a revelation. With my soft power, I was finding I could be strong.
If reporters and television cameras wanted to follow me, then I was going to take them places. They could come watch me and Jill Biden paint a wall, for example, at a nondescript row house in the Northwest part of Washington. There was nothing inherently interesting about two ladies with paint rollers, but it baited a certain hook.
It brought everyone to the doorstep of Sergeant Johnny Agbi, who’d been twenty-five years old and a medic in Afghanistan when his transport helicopter was attacked, shattering his spine, injuring his brain, and requiring a long rehabilitation at Walter Reed. His first floor was now being retrofitted to accommodate his wheelchair—its doorways widened, its kitchen sink lowered—part of a joint effort between a nonprofit called Rebuilding Together and the company that owned Sears and Kmart. This was the thousandth such home they’d renovated on behalf of veterans in need. The cameras caught all of it—the soldier, his house, the goodwill and energy being poured in. The reporters interviewed not just me and Jill but Sergeant Agbi and the folks who’d done the real work. For me, this was how it should be. The gaze belonged here.
* * *
On Election Day—November 6, 2012—my fears sat with me quietly. Barack and the girls and I were back in Chicago, at home on Greenwood Avenue, caught in the purgatory of waiting for an entire nation to accept or reject us. This vote, for me, was more fraught than any other we’d gone through. It felt like a referendum not only on Barack’s political performance and the state of the country but also on his character, on our very presence in the White House. Our girls had established a strong community for themselves, and a sense of normalcy that I didn’t want to upend yet again. I was so invested now, having given over four years of our family’s life, that it was impossible not to feel everything a bit personally.
The campaign had worn us out, maybe even more than I’d anticipated. While working on my initiatives and keeping up with things like parent-teacher conferences and monitoring the girls’ homework, I’d been speaking at campaign events at an average of three cities a day, three days a week. And Barack’s pace had been even more grueling. Polls consistently showed him with only a tenuous lead over Mitt Romney. Making matters worse, he’d bombed during their first debate in October, triggering a wave of eleventh-hour anxiety among donors and advisers. We could read the exhaustion on the faces of our hardworking staffers. Though they aimed never to show it, they were surely unsettled by the possibility that Barack could be forced out of office in a matter of months.
Throughout it, Barack stayed calm, though I could see what the pressure did to him. During the final weeks, he began to look a little wan and even skinnier than usual, chewing his Nicorette with unusual vigor. I’d watched with wifely concern as he tried to do everything—soothe the worriers, finish out the campaign, and govern the nation all at once, including responding to a terrorist attack on American diplomats in Benghazi, Libya, and managing a massive federal response to Hurricane Sandy, which tore up the Eastern Seaboard just a week before the election.
As polls on the East Coast began to close that evening, I headed up to the third floor of our house, whe
re we’d set up a kind of de facto hair and makeup salon to prepare for the public part of the night ahead. Meredith had steamed and readied clothes for me, my mom, and the girls. Johnny and Carl were doing my hair and makeup. In keeping with tradition, Barack had gone out to play basketball earlier in the day and had since settled into his office to put finishing touches on his remarks.
We had a TV on the third floor, but I deliberately kept it off. If there was news, good or bad, I wanted to hear it directly from Barack or Melissa, or someone else close to me. The babble of news anchors with their interactive electoral maps always jangled my nerves. I didn’t want the details: I just wanted to know how to feel.
It was after 8:00 p.m. in the East now, which meant there had to be some early results coming in. I picked up my BlackBerry and sent emails to Valerie, Melissa, and Tina Tchen, who in 2011 had become my new chief of staff, asking them what they knew.
I waited fifteen minutes, then thirty, but nobody responded. The room around me began to feel strangely silent. My mother sat in the kitchen downstairs, reading a magazine. Meredith was getting the girls ready for the evening. Johnny ran a flat iron over my hair. Was I being paranoid, or were people not looking me in the eye? Did they somehow know something I didn’t?
As more time passed, my head started to throb. I felt my equilibrium beginning to slip. I didn’t dare turn on the news, assuming suddenly that it was bad. I was accustomed at this point to fighting off negative thoughts, sticking to the good until I was absolutely forced to contend with something unpleasant. I kept my confidence in a little citadel, high on a hill inside my own heart. But for every minute my BlackBerry lay dormant in my lap, I felt the walls starting to breach, the doubts beginning to rampage. Maybe we hadn’t worked hard enough. Maybe we didn’t deserve another term. My hands had started to shake.
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