I.
Another Washington dusk, another motorcade, another intimate evening
played out in public view. On Oct. 3, just a day after their failed
Olympics bid in Copenhagen, Barack and Michelle Obama
slipped into a Georgetown restaurant for one of their now-familiar date
nights: this time, to toast their 17th wedding anniversary. As with
their previous outings, even the dark photographs taken by passers-by
and posted on the Web looked glamorous: the president tieless, in a
suit; the first lady in a backless sheath.
The Obama date-night tradition stretches back to the days when the
president spent half his time in Springfield, Ill., reuniting at week’s
close with his wife, who kept a regular Friday manicure and hair
appointment for the occasion. But five days before he ventured out for
his anniversary dinner, the president lamented what has happened to his
nights out with his wife.
“I would say the one time during our stay here in the White House so
far that has. . . .” He paused so long in choosing his words that
Michelle Obama, sitting alongside him, prompted him. “Has what?”
“Annoyed me,” the president answered.
“Don’t say it!” the first lady mock-warned. “Uh-oh.”
“Was when I took Michelle to New York and people made it into a
political issue,” he continued, recalling the evening last spring when
they flew to New York for dinner and a show, eliciting Republican gibes
for spending federal money on their own entertainment.
We were in the Oval Office, nearly 40 minutes into a conversation
about the subject of their marriage. Watched over by three aides and
Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington, the two sat a few feet
apart in matching striped chairs that made them look more like a pair
of heads of state than husband and wife. The Obamas were talking about
the impact of the presidency on their relationship, and doing so in
that setting — we were in the room that epitomizes official power,
discussing the highly unofficial matter of dates — began to seem like a
metaphor for the topic itself.
“If I weren’t president, I would be happy to catch the shuttle with
my wife to take her to a Broadway show, as I had promised her during
the campaign, and there would be no fuss and no muss and no
photographers,” the president said. “That would please me greatly.” He
went on to say: “The notion that I just couldn’t take my wife out on a
date without it being a political issue was not something I was happy
with.”
Everything becomes political here, I offered, gesturing around the room.
“Everything becomes political,” he repeated very slowly. Then he
said: “What I value most about my marriage is that it is separate and
apart from a lot of the silliness of Washington, and Michelle is not
part of that silliness.”
Perhaps she is not. But the Obamas mix politics and romance in a way
that no first couple quite have before. Almost 10 months ago, they
swept into Washington with inauguration
festivities that struck distinctly wedding-like notes: he strode down
an aisle and took a vow, she wore a long white dress, the
youthful-looking couple swayed to a love song in a ceremonial first
dance and then settled into a new house. Since then, photograph after
official White House photograph has shown the Obamas gazing into each
other’s eyes while performing one or another official function. Here is
a shot of the Obamas entering a Cinco de Mayo reception, his arm draped
protectively around her back. Next, a photo of the president placing a
kiss on his wife’s cheek after his address on health care to Congress.
Poster-size versions of these and other photographs are displayed in
rotation along the White House corridors. It’s hard to think of another
workplace decorated with such looming evidence of affection between the
principal players.
The centrality of the Obama marriage to the president’s political
brand opens a new chapter in the debate that has run through, even
helped define, their union. Since he first began running for office in
1995, Barack and Michelle Obama have never really stopped struggling
over how to combine politics and marriage: how to navigate the long
absences, lack of privacy, ossified gender roles and generally
stultifying rules that result when public opinion comes to bear on
private relationships.
Along the way, they revised some of the standards for how a
politician and spouse are supposed to behave. They have spoken more
frankly about marriage than most intact couples, especially those
running for office, usually do. (“The bumps happen to everybody all the
time, and they are continuous,” the first lady told me in a
let’s-get-real voice, discussing the lowest point in her marriage.)
Candidates’ wives are supposed to sit cheerfully through their
husbands’ appearances. But after helping run her husband’s first State
Senate campaign in 1996, Michelle Obama largely withdrew from politics
for years, fully re-engaging only for the presidential campaign. As a
result, she has probably logged fewer total
sitting-through-my-husband’s-speech hours than most of her recent
predecessors. Even the go-for-broke quality of the president’s rise can
be read, in some small part, as an attempt to vault over the forces
that fray political marriages. People who face too many demands — two
careers, two children — often scale back somehow. The Obamas scaled up.
“This is the first time in a long time in our marriage that we’ve
lived seven days a week in the same household with the same schedule,
with the same set of rituals,” Michelle Obama pointed out. (Until last
November they had not shared a full-time roof since 1996, two years
before Malia was born.) “That’s been more of a relief for me than I would have ever imagined.”
The couple now spend more time together than at nearly any other point
since their early years together. On many days, they see Malia and Sasha
off to school, exercise together and do not begin their public
schedules until 9 or even 10 o’clock. They recently finished
redecorating the White House residence, the first lady requesting an
outdoor rocking chair for her husband to read in, the president
scrutinizing colors and patterns, said Desirée Rogers,
the White House social secretary. The pair recently began playing
tennis. (He wins, she admitted; for now, he added.) This summer, the
first lady surprised her husband for his birthday by gathering his old
basketball buddies for a weekend at Camp David.
Barack and Michelle Obama are also a more fully fused political team
than ever before, with no other jobs to distract them, no doubts about
the worthiness of the pursuit dogging them. Theirs is by no means a
co-presidency; aides say the first lady has little engagement with
banking reform, nuclear disarmament or most of the other issues that
dominate her husband’s days. But their goals are increasingly
intertwined, with Michelle Obama speaking out on health care reform, privately mulling over Supreme Court
nominees with the president and serving as his consultant on personnel
and public opinion. When they lounge on the Truman Balcony or sit
inside at their round dining table, she describes how she believes his
initiatives are perceived outside Washington; later, say advisers, the
president quotes the first lady in Oval Office meetings.
If winning the White House represents a resolution of the Obamas’
struggles, it also means a new, higher-stakes confrontation with some
of the vexing issues that fed those tensions. Their marriage is more
vulnerable than ever to the corrosions of politics: partisan attacks,
disappointments of failed initiatives, a temptation to market what was
once wholly private. Some of the methods the Obamas devised for keeping
their relationship strong — speaking frankly in public, maintaining
separate careers, even date nights — are no longer as easily available
to them. Like every other modern presidential couple, the Obamas have
watched their world contract to one building and a narrow zone beyond,
and yet their partnership expand to encompass a staff and two wings of
the White House. And while the presidency tends to bring couples
closer, historians say, it also tends to thrust them back to more
traditionbound behavior.
For all of their ease in public, the Obamas do not seem entirely
comfortable with the bargain. As they talked about their marriage, they
seemed both game and cautious, the president more introspective about
their relationship, the first lady often playing the big sister
dispensing advice to younger couples.
Then I asked how any couple can have a truly equal partnership when one member is president.
Michelle Obama gave what sounded like a small, sharp “mmphf” of
recognition, and the fluid teamwork of their answers momentarily came
to a halt. “Well, first of all. . . .” the president started. His wife
peered at him, looking curious as to how he might answer the question.
“She’s got. . . .” he began, but then stopped again.
“Well, let me be careful about this,” he said, pausing once more.
“My staff worries a lot more about what the first lady thinks than
they worry about what I think,” he finally said, to laughter around the
room.
The question still unanswered, his wife stepped back in: “Clearly
Barack’s career decisions are leading us. They’re not mine; that’s
obvious. I’m married to the president of the United States. I don’t
have another job, and it would be problematic in this role. So that —
you can’t even measure that.” She did add that they are more equal in
their private lives — how they run their household, how they raise
their children, the overall choices they make.
Interpreting anyone’s marriage — a neighbor’s, let alone the
president’s — is extremely difficult. And yet examining the first
couple’s relationship — their negotiations of public and private life,
of conflicts and compromises — offers hints about Barack Obama
the president, not just Barack Obama the husband. Long before many
Americans, Michelle Obama was seduced by his mind, his charm, his
promise of social transformation; long before he held national office,
she questioned whether he really could deliver on all his earnest
pledges. For nearly two decades, Michelle Obama has lived with the
president of the United States. Now the rest of us do, too.
II.
JUST BEFORE THE
Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.
pronounced Barack Obama and Michelle Robinson man and wife on the
evening of Oct. 3, 1992, he held their wedding rings — signifying their
new, enduring bonds — before the guests at Trinity United Church of
Christ. Michelle’s was traditional, but Barack’s was an intricate gold
design from Indonesia, where he had lived as a boy.
Neither needed a reminder of just how fragile family — the black
family, marriage, life itself — could be. Barack Obama Sr.’s
relationships, not just with his wives but also with his children, were
fleeting; in 1982, he died at the age of 46. Michelle’s parents had a
long, stable marriage, but her maternal grandparents split without ever
formally divorcing, and her paternal grandparents separated for 11
years.
Before Michelle, Barack had brought only one woman to Hawaii to meet
his family, according to his younger half-sister, Maya Soetoro. He in
turn was Michelle’s first serious boyfriend, according to Craig
Robinson, Michelle’s brother: none of the others had met her standards.
During their three-year courtship, the couple shared thrilling
moments, like when Barack became the first black president of the Harvard
Law Review. But there were crushing ones too. In early 1991, Fraser
Robinson, Michelle’s father, came down with what seemed to be the flu.
Just a few days later, he was brain-dead, and his family had to decide
whether to end life support, according to Francesca Gray, his sister.
Barack was in the middle of classes, with no money to speak of, but he
flew to Chicago anyway. At the wedding the following year, Craig
Robinson took his father’s place in walking Michelle down the aisle.
The Obamas were married just a month before the presidential election,
a time of mounting excitement for Democrats in their neighborhood of
Hyde Park and beyond. Bill Clinton
looked as if he might take the White House back from Republicans.
Barack was helping by running a voter-registration drive so successful
that he won notice in Chicago newspapers and political circles.
(Clinton ended up carrying Illinois, then a tossup state.) Obama’s
efforts also helped make Carol Moseley Braun, a fellow Hyde Park resident, the first African-American woman in the U.S. Senate.
Suddenly politics seemed full of new possibilities. Barack had talked
to Michelle about running for office; she had misgivings but thought
the day was not imminent.
For the moment, he was enmeshed in writing his memoir, “Dreams From My
Father.” He had retreated to Bali for several weeks to work on the
manuscript and was still preoccupied with it after his return. “Barack
was just really involved in the book. [Michelle] and I would do lots of
shopping and movies,” Yvonne Davila, still a close friend, remembered.
“Barack doesn’t belong to you,” she told me she warned Michelle.
III.
IN THE ANNALS
of presidential coupledom, the Obamas more than slightly resemble the Clintons: a pair of Ivy League-trained
lawyers, the self-made son of an absent father and a wife who sometimes
put her husband’s ambitions ahead of her own. But unlike Bill Clinton,
who turned his wife into an unlikely Arkansan, Obama planted himself on
his wife’s turf. And while the Clinton marriage seems forged in shared
beliefs about the promise of politics, the Obama union has been a
decades-long debate about whether politics could be an effective avenue
for social change. Even as a community organizer, Barack aimed to prod
elected officials into action. His wife, who was more skeptical of
politicians, tried to bypass them: when she took a job promoting
community-organizing techniques, she focused on what neighborhoods
could accomplish without their help.
In 1995, a State Senate seat was opening up, and Barack, then 34,
announced his candidacy. “It allowed me to get my feet wet in politics
and test out whether I could get something done,” he told The Times two
years ago. Because he wasn’t from Chicago, had degrees from two elite
schools and a background that others found odd, a friend said, he felt
he had to begin by running for a relatively modest office.
As the Obamas sat with friends around their dining room table,
eating Michelle’s chili and planning the run, she was plainly hesitant.
“She was very open about not wanting to be in politics,” Davila said.
Michelle had always wanted to be a mother, three years had passed since
their wedding and now her husband — with his all-consuming memoir just
finished — would be gone several days a week. Michelle “just wasn’t
ready to share,” Carol Anne Harwell, who became the campaign manager,
recalls. Besides, he was the former president of the Harvard Law
Review, a writer and a teacher at a premier law school, the University of Chicago.
Springfield was home to financial scandal so pervasive it was barely
considered scandalous. “I married you because you’re cute and you’re
smart,” Michelle later said she told her husband, “but this is the
dumbest thing you could have ever asked me to do.”
She became his most energetic volunteer anyway. “She did
everything,” Craig Robinson says. Every Saturday morning, she and
Davila knocked on doors for petition signatures that would put Barack
on the ballot.
As a first-time candidate, Barack could be stiff; friends remember
him talking to voters with his arms folded, looking defensive. Michelle
warmed everyone up, including her husband. “She is really Bill, and he
is really Hillary,” one friend recently put it. But like Hillary Clinton
— and countless other political wives — Michelle sometimes took on the
role of enforcer. If a volunteer promised to gather 300 petition
signatures, “299 did not work because 300 was the goal,” Harwell says.
“You met the wrath of Michelle.”
Harwell also noticed that the candidate’s wife was constantly trying
to upgrade the campaign, eliminating anything that seemed tacky or
otherwise redolent of the less-than-exalted standards of Illinois state
politics. Instead of a beers-in-a-bar fund-raiser, Michelle arranged a
party at the DuSable Museum of African American History with a band and
a crowd of young professionals. When Harwell found an inexpensive
office space with dingy walls, Michelle vetoed it. “She was like, ‘Oh,
no, no, no,’ ” Harwell says. “ ‘Why would we reduce ourselves to this?’
”
IV.
ONE DAY LAST SPRING,
I walked into the Hyde Park apartment the Obamas bought when they married, hoping to find clues to their old lives.
Their unit, part of a complex of redbrick houses turned
condominiums, had a few appealing touches — a green-tiled fireplace, a
dining room with elaborate woodwork and a small porch in the back
(where Michelle let her husband smoke, a friend said). But the
apartment was narrow and worn, with fixtures that must have been aging
even several years ago.
The Hole — as Michelle called her husband’s tiny, dark office —
lived up to its name. The cramped master bedroom had a closet barely
big enough for one wardrobe. Where did Michelle keep her clothes? The
apartment was neat, friends said, but bursting with children’s gear and
toys. The dining table tilted so much that food sometimes skidded
south, eliciting an embarrassed look from Barack.
He would eventually learn to make his way in the State Senate, but
his initial reports home were dismayed: Republicans held control,
legislation he drafted was not even heard and even some Democrats
teased him about his name. “He would call me and say: ‘This person is
an idiot. They get an F,’ ” Harwell says.
“He went to Springfield without fully appreciating all of the
consequences,” said Judson Miner, Barack’s boss at the civil rights law
firm where he’d been working for several years. Shortly after arriving,
Barack called Miner to tell him that he was scaling back his legal
work: he could not stay on top of it from downstate. Barack took on a
heavier teaching load to compensate for the lost income. Michelle, who
had given up corporate law, now earned less than $50,000 a year at her
nonprofit job training young leaders, a former colleague estimates.
For Barack’s swearings-in, Michelle would travel to Springfield.
Harwell remembers Barack calling up with a report from downstate: “
‘Michelle just couldn’t believe it, she had to come down to see this
mess for herself.’ ”
As she heard Barack’s tales from Springfield, Michelle learned “how good legislation vanished overnight for political reasons,” Valerie Jarrett,
one of the Obamas’ closest friends, told me recently in her White House
office, where she is senior adviser to the president. This, Jarrett
said, left Michelle even more frustrated than her husband. “He’s more
of a pragmatist,” Jarrett says. Michelle “takes a very principled
position, and she thinks everyone should do the right thing.”
If Barack’s career was not going quite as he had hoped, Michelle did
not seem settled on what she wanted to do professionally. She had taken
a new position organizing student volunteers at the University of
Chicago. After she became a mother in 1998, she was tempted to stay
home, but like many political spouses, she felt financial pressure to
work.
“Michelle would say, ‘Well, you’re gone all the time and we’re broke?’ ” the president recalled when I spoke to the two of them. “ ‘How is that a good deal?’ ”
“You do the math,” Michelle told her friend Sandra Matthews, one day as
the two sat on a playground bench. “The time is coming pretty soon when
I’m going to have to decide. I’m torn.”
When she interviewed for a job at the University of Chicago Medical
Center, her baby sitter canceled at the last moment, and so Michelle
strapped a newborn Sasha into a stroller, and the two rolled off
together to meet the hospital president. “She was in a lot of ways a
single mom, and that was not her plan,” recalls Susan Sher, who became
her boss at the hospital and is now her chief of staff.
In addition to serving in Springfield and teaching law, Barack Obama
was making his first bid for national office, challenging Bobby Rush, a
popular South Side congressman. The race placed further strains on the
Obamas. Unlike the wife who smiles tightly and insists everything is
fine, Michelle sent a clear series of distress signals not only to her
husband but to everyone around her. “Barack and I, we’re doing a lot of
talking,” she would say when asked how she was holding up, according to
the Rev. Alison Boden, a former colleague at the University of Chicago.
Barack initially seems to have seen his absences as a manageable
issue, something to be endured, just as he had as a child when living
apart from his mother. Entering politics would be hard on a family, he
knew, but he didn’t quite understand until he lived it, Jarrett told
me. Sher remembers Michelle “talking to him, after the kids were born,
about the importance of sheer physical presence, which wasn’t something
he was really used to. She talked about how important it was for them
to at least talk every day.”
Barack helped as much as possible: on top of juggling jobs, he paid the
household bills and did the grocery shopping, often wandering
supermarket aisles late at night. When business in Springfield was done
for the week, he always drove home that same night, sometimes arriving
past midnight. “As far as I was concerned, she had nothing to complain
about,” he wrote in his second book, “The Audacity of Hope.”
One afternoon in July, sitting in Jarrett’s airy West Wing office, I
asked her how the young politician responded to his wife’s assertions
that he was leaving her to raise their children alone. Jarrett, whose
own marriage ended in part because of career-related conflict, not only
recalled Barack’s replies but she also started reciting them. “ ‘I’ll
make it work,’ ” said Jarrett, speaking in his voice. “ ‘We can make it
work. I’ll do more.’ ” It sounded as if she could have been describing
the Barack Obama of today, certain of his ability to juggle an
intimidating number of priorities.
Two months later in the Oval Office, I asked the Obamas just how severe
their strains had been. “This was sort of the eye-opener to me, that
marriage is hard,” the first lady said with a little laugh. “But going
into it, no one ever tells you that. They just tell you, ‘Do you love
him?’ ‘What’s the dress look like?’ ”
I asked more directly about whether their union almost came to an end.
“That’s overreading it,” the president said. “But I wouldn’t gloss over the fact that that was a tough time for us.”
Did you ever seek counseling? I asked.
The first lady looked solemnly at the president. He said: “You know,
I mean, I think that it was important for us to work this through. . .
. There was no point where I was fearful for our marriage. There were
points in time where I was fearful that Michelle just really didn’t —
that she would be unhappy.”
Several years later, he devoted several pages of “The Audacity of
Hope” to the conflict. (Judging from interviews, more than a few
Chicagoans knew that Michelle once openly resented what her husband’s
political career had cost her, so he may have been wise to raise the
issue before anyone else.) In the end, what seems more unusual than the
Obamas’ who-does-what battles — most working parents have one version
or another — is the way they turned them into a teachable moment,
converting lived experience into both a political message and what
sounds like the opposite of standard political shtick.
“If my ups and downs, our ups and downs in our marriage can help
young couples sort of realize that good marriages take work. . . .”
Michelle Obama said a few minutes later in the interview. The image of
a flawless relationship is “the last thing that we want to project,”
she said. “It’s unfair to the institution of marriage, and it’s unfair
for young people who are trying to build something, to project this
perfection that doesn’t exist.”
V.
IN THE HISTORYof Barack Obama, his landslide
loss against Rush is now regarded as a constructive political failure,
the point at which he shed some early dreaminess and hubris and became
a cannier competitor. For the Obamas, this period was also one of
constructive personal failure, forcing them to reckon with their
longstanding differences.
Michelle Obama accepted that she was not going to have a
conventional marriage, that her husband would be away much of the time.
“That was me, wanting a certain type of model, and our lives didn’t fit
that model,” she told me in an Iowa lunchroom in the summer of 2007. “I
just needed the support. It didn’t have to be Barack.” Craig Robinson
later told me that he and his sister, Michelle, had another
realization: if their father, a city water worker, had the kinds of
opportunities their generation did, he probably would not have been
home for dinner every night, either.
Michelle’s mother, Marian Robinson,
offered crucial help, often picking up Malia and Sasha after school.
The Obamas’ closest friends — doctors, lawyers, M.B.A. types — also
faced the strains of two-full-time-careers-plus-kids marriage. Now they
banded into a kind of intergenerational urban kibbutz, a collective
that shared meals and carpools and weekend activities.
Unlike many political wives, Michelle was almost never alone. And
she mostly skipped public events. When Barack spoke at the 2002 rally
protesting the impending invasion of Iraq, now considered a pivotal
moment of his career, his wife was not present. “I’ve had to come to
the point of figuring out how to carve out what kind of life I want for
myself beyond who Barack is and what he wants,” she told The Chicago
Tribune during his 2004 U.S. Senate campaign.
During that race, Michelle was still a somewhat reluctant partner:
at the outset, they made a deal that if he lost, he would get out
entirely. “It was a compromise,” Marty Nesbitt, one of the president’s
closest friends, told me. “O.K. One. More. Try,” he explained, banging
out each word on a side table.
When her husband was far outspent by a local millionaire in the
primary, Michelle “was almost like the mama cub coming to protect her
young,” says Kevin Thompson, a friend and former aide. By the time it
became clear that Barack might be the third African-American senator
since Reconstruction, she was headlining a few campaign events herself.
“It really clicked with her that this may be the destiny everyone was
always talking about,” Thompson said.
Michelle, who was often wary of her husband’s ambitions, may have
also pushed him ahead with her high expectations of what he could
achieve. “Forward propulsion” is the quality Maya Soetoro says her
sister-in-law brought to Barack’s career.
Two years after the Senate race, despite lingering reservations, she
helped her husband define his reasons for running for president. On an
autumn day in 2006, the Obamas sat in the Chicago office of the
consultant David Axelrod, surrounded by advisers, weighing whether Barack should move forward.
“What do you think you could accomplish that other candidates
couldn’t?” Michelle asked, according to Axelrod. The question hung in
the air. Clearly, an Obama agenda would not look very different from
that of Hillary Clinton or John Edwards.
“When I take that oath of office, there will be kids all over this
country who don’t really think that all paths are open to them, who
will believe they can be anything they want to be,” Barack replied.
“And I think the world will look at America a little differently.”
VI.
A FEW DAYSbefore the Indiana and North
Carolina primaries, Anita Dunn, a political consultant who joined the
Obama campaign, was reading the newspaper when a voter’s quote,
expressing surprise that Barack Obama was a good family man, leapt out
at her.
Ever since Obama made his debut on the national stage, he’d been a solo
act, telling the story of his singular, even lonely-sounding journey.
In Pennsylvania, where Obama lost, “the visuals of so many of our
rallies was him alone,” Dunn told me, which did nothing to allay
voters’ concerns that the candidate was too distant — too foreign,
professorial or precocious. Now Michelle and sometimes the girls were
appearing more frequently onstage with Barack. Dunn shared the quote
about Barack being a good family man with advisers, reinforcing their
growing view that he was a more appealing candidate when surrounded by
his family. The candidate beat expectations in both Indiana and North
Carolina, all but locking up the nomination.
The Obamas began the presidential campaign, it seems, still thinking of
politics as Barack’s pursuit, not Michelle’s. She would need to
participate heavily only at the beginning and end, and not much in the
middle, Michelle told Sher. Despite her outward confidence, there were
clues she was not entirely comfortable in her new role: staff members
recall that of the 26 primary debates, forums in which he struggled,
she attended only two or three. At the first, in Orangeburg, S.C., she
sat frozen in the audience, so anxious she was unable to speak. “It was
like sitting next to a pillar of salt,” says Melissa Winter, now her
deputy chief of staff. She refused to even watch the remaining debates,
avoiding television screens lest she catch a clip.
She also struggled to figure out where she fit in her husband’s
organization. Political operatives have a habitual disdain toward
candidates’ spouses, one adviser told me, which Michelle, who had
trouble obtaining even routine information like talking points,
initially could not overcome. She had only two staff members and no
speechwriter, and when she raised issues like the need to reach out
more to women voters, she wasn’t sure she had any influence on her
husband’s advisers.
Because the couple rarely campaigned together, interactions between
them swelled with intermediaries. Winter would get a nightly phone call
from Barack, then pad down a hotel hallway and tap on her boss’s door.
For Michelle’s 44th birthday, Barack deputized Winter to prepare his
gift, a silver pendant necklace. “He wanted to be sure I had it wrapped
appropriately, that it had a ribbon on it,” she told me. “There was a
lot of back and forth.”
When Jarrett officially joined the campaign at the behest of both
Obamas, in addition to a long list of duties, she served as Michelle’s
representative, as well as a kind of marital guardian and glue.
Michelle took her concerns about Barack — for instance, her worry that
his schedule allowed him no time to think — to Jarrett, who passed them
on to aides. Barack worried, Jarrett said, that his wife had taken on
too much. “Was that O.K. with her?” Jarrett says he wanted to know.
From the beginning, Michelle turned Barack’s courtship all those
summers ago into a parable of political conversion, casting herself as
a stand-in for the skeptical voter. When she first heard of him, his
name and background seemed weird, she told voters who probably felt the
same way. The first time Barack asked her out, she refused. He was a
newcomer, her mentee, so it would be strange for him to become her
boyfriend (or the president). But slowly he worked on her. One day she
heard him give a speech and found herself captivated by the
possibilities of what might be.
“When you listen to her tell that story,” Robert Gibbs, the campaign spokesman and now the White House press secretary, told me, voters thought, “It’s O.K., yeah, this could work.”
She also played a vital role in heading off the most promising
female candidate in United States history. It was essential for the
Obama campaign to present some sort of accomplished female
counterweight to Hillary Clinton, to convince Democratic women that
they could vote for Barack Obama and a powerful female figure besides.
Consciously or not, Michelle made herself into an appealing contrast to
the front-runner. She was candid; Hillary was often guarded. Michelle
represented the idea that a little black girl from the South Side of
Chicago could grow up to be first lady of the United States; Hillary
stood for the hold of the already-powerful on the political system. And
Michelle seemed to have the kind of marriage many people might aspire
to; Hillary did not.
As the campaign accelerated after the first voting contests,
Michelle Obama went from headlining intimate campaign events to
enormous ones. Television cameras appeared, and some of her more
forceful comments were endlessly replayed. When cable shows, bloggers
and opponents fixated on her — on her supposed lack of patriotism, her
supposedly angry streak — Barack was irate. As unflattering reports
played on television, he would tell aides stories about her parents,
about her as a mother, according to Gibbs, as if defending his wife in
private could somehow help. Barack even met with the Fox executives Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes in part to insist that they treat her more respectfully.
Michelle was annoyed that advisers — who had noticed for months that
she could grow a bit too vehement in speeches — had never informed her
of the developing problems, according to aides. Fearful of hurting her
husband’s chances, she even raised the prospect of ceasing to campaign,
said one adviser who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of
the matter. Jarrett recalls that “she felt she had not gotten support.”
According to Sher, “She was hurt at the idea that it was possible she
wouldn’t be an asset.” It was almost as if she was reverting to an old
pattern in her marriage: let Barack be a politician, and she would stay
out of it.
But unlike other times, Michelle did not withdraw. In fact, the
woman who had once resisted campaigning now told friends she enjoyed
the crowds, the laughs and the votes she was earning. Her husband
promised that the staff could fix whatever problems she faced. And he
clearly needed her help. After years of leaving his family behind, he
now turned to his wife to help carry him to the presidency.
“I’ve never done this before,” she said to her husband’s team, according to two aides. “I just need you to tell me what to do.”
Campaigns often prove toxic to participants’ personal lives, but
Jarrett says the Obamas’ relationship improved in the crucible of the
race. “They both rallied to each other’s defense and support,” she
says. “By having to work hard at it, it strengthened their marriage.”
VII.
ON A HUMID
September day, Mayor Richard M. Daley
of Chicago stood on a platform on the South Lawn of the White House
hawking his city’s Olympic bid. The Obamas flanked him, consciously or
unconsciously assuming a series of identical positions as he spoke.
When Michelle Obama clasped her hands in a downward triangle, the
president did, too. When he folded his arms across his chest, so did
she. During their own short speeches they gave outsize laughs at each
other’s mild jokes and even mimed what the other was saying. As the
president noted that the White House was just a tad larger than their
home in Chicago, the first lady pinched her fingers to demonstrate.
Milling around afterward, watching judo and fencing demonstrations, the
couple leaned into each other, talking and nodding.
Friends who visit the White House describe occasionally turning corners
to find the first couple mid-embrace. They also seem unusually willing,
for a presidential couple, to kiss, touch and flirt in public. It may
be that they are broadcasting their affection to the rest of us, an
advertisement of their closeness. Or they may simply be holding tightly
to each other as they navigate new and uncertain terrain. “Part of what
they provide each other with is emotional safety,” Jarrett explained.
In many ways, the Obamas have made the White House into a cocoon of
sorts, with weekends full of movie-watching (“Where the Wild Things
Are”), Scrabble games and children’s talent shows. They have surrounded
themselves with those who have known them longest and best: Marian
Robinson, the first lady’s mother, has settled in (unaccustomed to
being waited on, she won’t let the staff do the laundry). Marty Nesbitt
and his wife, Dr. Anita Blanchard, left Chicago to rent a house nearby
for the summer, while Maya Soetoro, the president’s half-sister, and
her husband, Konrad Ng, just moved here temporarily from Hawaii.
Though the president reads aloud with his children in the evenings — he
and Sasha are finishing “Life of Pi” — parenting in the White House is
more complicated. Because the first couple cannot move freely about,
their relatives take Malia and Sasha to the bookstore, on a walk
through Chinatown, to the multiplex to see “Cloudy With a Chance of
Meatballs.” Last spring, according to Sher, well-meaning White House
residence staff members tried to give the girls cellphones, so their
parents could always reach them; the first lady stepped in to refuse.
Even the Obamas’ jokes seem like coping mechanisms for the epic
changes in their lives. They are still in their 40s, and they appear to
deal with the grandeur and ritual of their new home with a kind of
satirical distance that is hard to imagine coming from first couples of
a pre-Jon Stewart
generation. The president playfully addresses his wife using her
official acronym, “Flotus” (first lady of the United States). She keeps
up a running commentary on her husband as he navigates his new home,
according to friends and relatives. Seeing him in the Oval Office
cracks Michelle Obama up, she told me. “It’s like, what are you doing
there?” she said, gesturing to the president’s desk. “Get up from
there!” In September, as they waited to greet a long, slow procession
of foreign dignitaries and their spouses at the Group of 20 Summit in
Pittsburgh, the first lady whispered in her husband’s ear about things
“that I probably shouldn’t repeat,” he said.
“She can puncture the balloon of this,” he added, making him feel like the same person he was 5 or 10 years ago.
VIII.
CLEARLY, THE OBAMAS prefer to think of
themselves as largely unaltered. “The strengths and challenges of our
marriage don’t change because we move to a different address,” the
first lady said, the president studying the carpet as she answered. But
even as they serve as sources of continuity for each other, their own
partnership is undergoing significant change, not just in outward
circumstance — the city, the exposure, the security, the staff, the
house and so on — but far more fundamentally. Michelle Obama has gone
from political skeptic to political partner to a woman with a White
House agenda of her own, and an approval rating higher than the
president’s.
Initially, her office was seen as so peripheral by some in the West
Wing that one aide referred to it as Guam: pleasant but powerless. Now
Michelle Obama is towing the island closer to the mainland. In June,
she appointed Sher — a lawyer, health care expert and member of the
tight knot of hometown friends — her chief of staff. “The first lady
wants her office to be fully integrated into the president’s agenda,”
Sher says. Early this summer, for example, the first lady directed her
staff to plan events that could help support health care reform and
then volunteered to speak publicly on the topic. The president and
first lady share a speechwriting staff, the East Wing’s press and
communications team attends their West Wing counterparts’ meetings and
every week, Dunn, Sher and Jarrett meet to discuss the integration of
the president’s and first lady’s business.
When asked about how her insights affected the president’s thinking,
the first lady seemed to bristle at the question. “I am so not
interested in a lot of the hard decisions that he’s making,” she said,
drawing out the “so.” “Why would I want to be in politics? I have never
in my life ever wanted to sit on the policy side of this thing.”
Earlier in my conversation with them, the president faced forward, even
leaning a bit away from his wife, but now he uncrossed his legs,
swiveled and studied her, looking amused.
“Did she say she’s not interested in policy?” Sher, who also
attended the Oval Office interview, tried to recall the next day,
shaking her head and smiling. “She always says that.” (The first lady
may have learned from Hillary Clinton’s example the perils of appearing
too involved with policy.) While her boss has a limited appetite for
policy details on many subjects, Sher explains, she regularly reads
briefing papers from her staff on social issues. Early next year, aides
say, the first lady will become the administration’s point person on
childhood obesity, working with her husband’s policy advisers as well
as her own on a problem that has stymied public-health experts for
years. While the overall success of the administration is Barack
Obama’s test, Michelle Obama is beginning to gauge her ability to
affect public opinion and behavior as well — which means risking
criticism and failure.
The first lady also speaks to her husband about White House management
and personnel decisions. “She is not shy about expressing her views at
all,” Sher told me, recalling a conversation last spring between Barack
and Michelle about a personnel problem. “She was like, you should do
this, dah dah dah dah and dah dah dah,” Sher said, smacking the table.
The first lady was so forceful, Sher said, that the president just
grinned back until they both started to laugh. “It’s probably great
that she does get worked up about injustices,” Sher went on to say. “It
clearly seems to have an impact on him.”
Michelle Obama is also one of her husband’s chief interpreters of
public sentiment. On almost every “domestic issue that’s come up — up
and through health care,” the president told me, the first lady has
offered “very helpful” insights on “how something is going to play or
what’s important to people.”
“She’s like a one-person poll,” he explained. “Everyman!” the first lady called out.
“We’ll sit at the dinner table,” the president said. “If our
arguments are not as crisp or we’re not addressing a particular
criticism coming from the other side, Michelle will be quick to say, I
just think the way this thing is getting filtered right now is putting
you on the defensive in this way or that way.” (Sometimes, Sher says,
when the president is describing some complicated issue, his wife
interjects: “You know what? People don’t care about that.”)
During the campaign, Michelle Obama made much of her regular-person
credentials, but they may now be expiring. She has not only a personal
trainer and a stylist but also a staff of chefs and gardeners. Her
world is somewhat less rarefied than that of her husband: she can steal
away with less fuss, and her events bring her into more contact with
ordinary citizens than his constant march of briefings. But her
celebrity is nearly as great as her husband’s, her world nearly as
artificial. (By the time of the Democratic National Convention,
Michelle told friends, she stopped knowing what the weather was each
day: she lived in the permanently controlled climate zone of airplanes,
cars and hotels.) A year or two ago, when Barack Obama talked about
staying grounded, he mentioned his wife; now he tends to talk about his
children or his dog instead. All presidential couples experience this
sort of isolation, which is part of why they tend to come to resemble
each other more than they do the rest of us.
As the great experiment of the presidency rolls on, the Obamas may
finally learn definitive answers to the issues they have been debating
over the course of their partnership. The questions they have long
asked each other in private will likely be answered on the largest
possible stage. They will discern whether politics can bring about the
kind of change they have longed for and promised to others, or whether
the compromises and defeats are too great. They will learn whether they
were too ambitious or not ambitious enough. And even if they share the
answer with no one else, the two will know better if everything does in
fact become political — if their marriage can both embrace politics and
also at some level stay free of it.
Then, in three or seven years, the president’s political career will
end. There will be no more offices to win or hold, and the Obamas will
most likely renegotiate their compact once more — this time, perhaps
more on Michelle Obama’s terms.
The equality of any partnership “is measured over the scope of the
marriage. It’s not just four years or eight years or two,” the first
lady said. “We’re going to be married for a very long time.”
Jodi Kantor is a Washington correspondent for The New York Times.
===
Barack Obama and Michelle Robinson were married in 1992 by the Rev.
Jeremiah Wright. At the ceremony, the couple toasted their fathers, who
had passed away.
The couple campaigning in 1995. Barack Obama saw an Illinois State Senate seat as a way into politics.
Barack and Michelle Obama in 1996. She was hesitant about his campaign
but became his most energetic volunteer anyway, and she warmed
everybody up — including him.
In his first bid for national office, a Congressional campaign in 1999,
Barack Obama lost to the popular Bobby Rush. He posed with his wife and
Malia, then a year old, for a campaign photo.
Barack, Michelle, Sasha and Malia Obama at a campaign event in 2004, which coincided with his 43rd birthday.
The family celebrates Barack Obama's election in 2004 as the third African-American senator since Reconstruction.
Until shortly after Barack Obama's victorious Senate race, the Obamas,
here preparing for a speech, lived in a modest Chicago condominium
crowded with children's gear.
At home in 2006. As a United States senator, Barack Obama commuted between Washington and the family home in Chicago.
During a visit home to Chicago in 2006.
During the presidential campaign in 2008, the couple traveled to events
all over the country, including a Bruce Springsteen-Billy Joel benefit
concert in New York.
President Obama and the first lady attended 10 inaugural balls on Jan. 20, 2009.
The first couple's frequent joking appears to help them cope with the
epic changes in their lives. Here, they share laughs while waiting to
greet world leaders at the Group of 20 Summit meeting in Pittsburgh.
The first couple at "Fiesta Latina," a celebration of Hispanic music at the White House in October.
Backstage at the Congressional Black Caucus Dinner in September.
“Here,”
says Michael O’Leary, shoving something the size of a small grapefruit
wrapped in red and white cardboard over the table in his office at
Dublin airport. “Lunch.”
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