In Iowa, on that remarkable winter night when it looked as though Barack Obama
could emerge from nowhere and cruise to the White House, his wife Michelle
and their two young daughters stepped on stage with him to claim victory.
She was the “love of my life, the rock of the Obama family, the closer on
the campaign trail”, he glowed.
It is her nickname: the Closer.
The statuesque Michelle, 5ft 11in tall without heels, with the style of Jackie
O and the guts to take on the role of America’s first black first lady, has
earned a reputation for persuading doubters to back her husband when he
can’t.
Tomorrow she faces the challenge of her life when she delivers the prime-time
speech on the opening day of the Democratic convention. This time she has to
seal the deal in front of the nation.
Obama has not yet persuaded voters that he is The One, as the television host
Oprah Winfrey calls him in earnest and Republicans in jest. His aides
believe Michelle provides the key to turning her super-cool half-Kenyan,
half-Kansan citizen of the world into a regular American.
There was nothing exotic about her childhood on the South Side of Chicago. Her
father, who suffered from multiple sclerosis, worked for the city water
board; her mother was a home-maker. She will be able to tell her husband’s
“very American story”, according to an aide.
She is also a bold and beautiful Glamazon, rather than the wife next door like
Laura Bush, which can be intimidating. She is at ease on the cover of
high-fashion glossies and tabloid magazines. She will wear clothes from Gap
one day and Alexander McQueen the next; the first time I met her, at a
black-tie dinner in Washington, she was wearing a daring champagne silk
bustier and had the look-at-me quality of Diana, Princess of Wales.
The sleeveless $180 black-and-white floral dress that showed off her toned
arms on breakfast televi-sion sold out within hours. She doesn’t bother with
tights either – at 44, she doesn’t have any lumps and bumps to cover up
because she works out four times a week, often rising at 4.30am to hit the
gym. If Obama wins, she will be the youngest first lady in the White House
since Jackie Kennedy.
I’ve followed her on the campaign trail and talked to her on the phone. When I
interviewed Michelle during the primary season, Obama was trailing Hillary
Clinton, the surefire “inevitable” favourite for the Democratic nomination.
“Nothing is inevitable,” Michelle said coolly. “We’re just at the point in
the race where people are starting to pay attention.” I had my doubts, but
she was right.
Behind the scenes, she made sure Obama left nothing to chance. It was Michelle
who often called party VIPs and congressmen, assuring them they had a game
plan for winning and always remembering to write thank-you notes afterwards.
“Early in Barack’s political career I was very cynical about politics. I would
have loved him to be a lecturer or a professor at the University of Chicago
and continue to write books. It’s just an easier way to live,” she told me.
“But I was never cynical about Barack’s potential. It would be selfish for
me to say: I’m so concerned about my personal wellbeing that I’m going to
deny the country this great leader.”
Most people would consider it a huge honour to live in the White House, and
this kind of talk has earned Michelle Obama a reputation among conservatives
for being the “first lady of grievance”. One of the pleasures of
campaigning, she said, without realising she might be giving offence, is
that “you have the privilege of being reminded just how decent people are”.
Most Americans like to think it is already obvious that they are. But she is
fundamentally honest and true to herself.
“Occasionally it gives campaign people heartburn,” David Axelrod, Obama’s
chief strategist, once said. “She goes out there, speaks her mind, jokes.
She doesn’t parse her words or select them with an antenna for political
correctness.”
Michelle Obama’s rise is almost as improbable as her husband’s – an important
source of confidence when the election campaign is not quite going to plan,
as now. “Everybody thought Obama would be further ahead in the polls right
now. Everybody,” said William Galston, a former White House adviser under
Bill Clinton.
It is certainly courageous – one of the most loaded words in politics – for
Michelle to headline the opening day of the convention. The decision was
taken to let America see her for herself rather than through the prism of
conservative radio stations and the internet, where she is often vilified as
radical and opinionated.
“They are taking a chance, but it is one worth taking,” said Galston. “She
comes from a real working-class background and her father’s story is
downright inspiring. She can talk about the work ethic and the sense of
responsibility he demonstrated every day by going to work despite his
disability and describe it as one of life’s lessons that she tries to pass
on to her daughters.”
Frasier Robinson, her father, was diagnosed at 30 with MS but carried on
working with the aid of two walking sticks in increasing pain for 25 years.
“He carried out his responsibilities to his family without a trace of
self-pity, giving himself an extra hour every morning to get to work,
struggling with every physical act from driving a car to buttoning his
shirt, smiling and joking as he laboured . . . across a field to watch his
son play, or across the living room to give his daughter a kiss,” Obama
wrote admiringly in his memoir, The Audacity of Hope.
Obama, 47, clearly adores his wife. On the night of Super Tuesday, when
Clinton’s juggernaut was halted, the two of them were glimpsed off stage
sharing a tender, private caress. An aide said that when they are together
“they’re like, ‘We don’t care who is standing by’”.
By placing her centre stage, Obama is saying: “Love me, love my wife.” He is
gambling that America is ready for a first couple who belong to the
generation that considers it natural to balance family, work and career but
is still sorting out how to cope with it all.
Michelle is no wee wife. Before all this began she had her own high-powered
job, as vice-president for community and external affairs at the University
of Chicago hospitals, earning more than Obama did as senator for Illinois
(her pay doubled to more than $300,000 a year when he was elected). She cut
back her work commitments when his presidential campaign took off. Obama
rarely gets to spend time with their daughters Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7, as
he is whisked across America on his campaign plane, while Michelle – who
also travels to rallies and fund-raisers – still tries to dash home to put
them to bed at night.
“When we entered the race, Barack and I said, there is a way to do this and
keep the kids sane and stable. It requires a lot more juggling on our part,
but it’s worth it,” she told me. “They are very confident about who they are
and that they are loved; and they are still the centre of our universe.
“I generally can do my campaigning in a day,” she added. “I get up really
early, get on a plane, get into a city, and it’s go, go, go. It’s like a
hard workout: you push and adjust through it. It’s a mental game as much as
a physical game. And at the end of the day you just crash and burn.”
Michelle said recently that if she becomes first lady, “my first job in all
honesty is going to be to continue to be mom-in-chief, making sure that in
this transition – which will be even more of a transition for the girls –
they are settled”.
It is a very different ambition from that of Hillary Clinton, who was
determined to be co-president when Bill Clinton was elected in 1992. “As
soon as Bill won, they were giving joint interviews on the plane and Hillary
was interrupting him and saying ‘we’,” said Sally Bedell Smith, the
political biographer. “They had to change gears when people got upset. The
Obamas have learnt from the Clintons how dangerous that is.”
Like Cherie Blair, another hyper-educated overachiever from a working-class
family, Michelle will be able to rely on help from her own mother. When she
is not at home, it is Marian Robinson, 71, who takes over. “She is my
salvation and not just because she is there, but because she is there in a
positive way,” Michelle told Ebony magazine. “I know that in addition to all
the extra love and attention, she is instilling the discipline and the
rules.” It also means that the Obamas don’t have to employ a nanny, with the
so-called buppie (black yuppie) connotations that brings.
Obama, the son of a feckless father with eight children by four mothers, was
partly drawn to Michelle because of her steady family background. When they
met, she was his senior at a law firm in Chicago and was reluctant to date
the handsome newcomer. The secretaries insisted he was cute, but “I figured
they were just impressed with any black man in a suit”, she said.
In his memoir, Obama writes that he yearned for her family’s brand of domestic
bliss. “There was Frasier, the kindly, good-humoured father, who never
missed a day of work or any of his son’s ball games. There was Marian, the
pretty, sensible mother, who baked birthday cakes, kept order in the house
and had volunteered at school . . . there was Craig, the basketball-star
brother, tall and friendly and courteous and funny.”
On their first date, Obama took her to Do the Right Thing, a Spike Lee film
about racial tension, and offered to buy her an ice cream at Baskin-Robbins:
“I asked if I could kiss her. It tasted of chocolate.”
In the end she was the one who closed the deal on their marriage. Obama didn’t
feel the need to get hitched – “He was like, marriage, it doesn’t mean
anything; it’s really how you feel,” she said – but she told him she was not
the kind of girl to hang around. “You know that is just not who I am,” she
said firmly.
Their daughters brought great joy but also tension at home. When their second
child, Sasha, was born, “my wife’s anger toward me seemed barely contained”,
Obama recalled at a time when he could still be honest about touchy
subjects: “ ‘You only think about yourself,’ she would tell me. ‘I never
thought I would have to raise a family alone’.”
They have gone on to become the very model of a modern successful family – as
middle class and nuclear as a 1950s sitcom, yet part of the postMTV
generation that knows how to bump fists and “brush the dirt off your
shoulder” like the rap star Jay-Z if you are disrespected by Bill and
Hillary. Hollywood executives are already discussing how to turn this
demographic gold into a new family sitcom if Obama should win.
“The young people of this country, the Generation Ys, are colour-blind,” a
senior Obama aide says. “People say, ‘That’s all great, but they don’t
vote’, but this is where we can defy the odds.” The rising voter
registration rolls suggest there will be a bumper youth vote.
Michelle’s brother Craig, the basketball coach at Oregon State University,
will be introducing her on stage tomorrow. “America’s passion for basketball
knows no bounds,” said Galston, “and if there is a deft way to setting to
rest for ever how she feels about being an American, that would be all to
the good.”
Obama once quipped: “She’s a little meaner than I am.” Sometimes Michelle
sounds touchy about her husband’s success. She doesn’t regard him as the
messiah – he has morning breath and leaves the bread bin open and his socks
lying about, she jokes – but she can’t understand why lesser mortals might
resist his charm. She firmly believes that her husband is the “only rational
choice” for president; I heard her say it at a meeting in a wine bar in
South Carolina. Then she added: “Is it fear, is it cynicism, is it doubt? Is
it negativity? What is stopping us from grabbing this opportunity?”
Her audience was largely black and had just begun to pay attention to the rise
of the bi-racial Obama. It is hard to imagine now, but black women were
thinking of voting for Hillary Clinton, their patron. Then they saw Michelle
and recognised a sister. Helen Quarles, a veteran Democrat, said: “I didn’t
think anything could turn me away from Hillary. Obama didn’t. His wife did.
She touched my heart.”
Michelle had a similar effect on Obama himself. When he fell in love with her,
he married into the African-American community. Obama was raised by a white
mother and white grandparents in Hawaii, but his family – his soul-mate, the
woman of his dreams and mother of his children – was black.
By choosing to root himself in the black American experience, Obama has won
the hearts of African-Ameri-cans, who are likely to vote for him by a
landslide. Their votes were decisive in the primary campaign, edging Clinton
out of the running for president by a wafer-thin margin.
Michelle’s biggest mistake so far was to let slip – quite frequently, at a
time when her audiences were smaller and largely black – that she felt
“proud” of her country for the first time during the campaign. It’s a
thought crime so much as to hint that America might not be that wonderful if
you are black, when auditioning for the White House. She was rewarded with a
satirical cartoon on the cover of The New Yorker showing her with a black
power Afro in military fatigues, giving a “terrorist” fist bump to Obama.
“She’s learnt that you can’t say the first thing that comes out of your
mouth,” a senior Obama official told me. The angry black woman is a comic
stereotype – the source of many jokes but also apprehension. It doesn’t take
much to set it off. If you are tough, outspoken and independent and you want
to be first lady, a slice of the electorate is already predisposed to be
hostile regardless of race, as Cherie Blair discovered when she found it
hard to play second fiddle to her powerful husband.
One of Michelle and Barack Obama’s earliest patrons in Chicago was Abner
Mikva, an octogenarian lawyer and former White House counsel to Bill
Clinton. “The spouse of a politician always has a complicated role to play.
They can’t take a strong position,” he told me.
“Michelle is very gracious and very personable, but she’s a different kind of
person from Laura Bush, who is content to stay pleasant and not say anything
substantive. Michelle has a lot of people skills, but she could soften her
image.”
The potential rewards of show-casing her tomorrow are as great as the risks. A
wife such as Michelle can be “a source of strength because women admire
someone like her for still having a mind of her own and speaking it”, Mikva
added.
Michelle herself scoffs at the idea that she might have had a make-over. “All
this talk about softening my image really cracks me up,” she said recently.
“I’m the same woman I’ve always been.”
During their courtship, Obama noticed a trace of vulnerability behind her
self-confident facade. “There was . . . a glimmer that danced across her
round, dark eyes whenever I looked at her, the slightest hint of
uncertainty, as if, deep inside, she knew how fragile things really were and
that if she ever let go, even for a moment, all her plans might quickly
unravel,” he recalled.
It was Craig who blazed a trail from Chicago to Princeton, an Ivy League
university. Michelle was always an A student, according to her mother. When
Craig was accepted, she visited him on campus and thought, “If he can get in
there, I can get in there,” her mother said. “So she made it her business to
get in there just like she does everything else.”
Once there, she felt like an interloper. Her student thesis about being black
has been ridiculed by conservatives. “My experiences at Princeton have made
me far more aware of my ‘blackness’ than ever before,” she wrote. “No matter
how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try
to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus: as if I really
don’t belong . . . It often seems as if, to them, I will always be black
first and a student second.”
Perhaps she was right. The mother of her first roommate, Catherine Donnelly, a
white girl, complained to the faculty that her daughter was expected to
share a room with an African-American. “I told them we weren’t used to
living with black people – Catherine is from the South,” her mother
recalled. “I was horrified.”
Donnelly said recently: “Here was a really smart black woman who I found
charming, interesting and funny. Just by virtue of having a different colour
skin we weren’t going to be friends.”
Michelle is often portrayed as more angry and militant than her husband. The
association with the Rev Jeremiah Wright, the troublesome pastor who has
said, “God damn America”, has been laid at her door, although it was Obama
who stood to gain most from the association when he was a young, rootless
politician starting out in Chicago.
Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer who has spread the allegation that there
may be a tape that shows her railing about “whitey” in the company of
friends such as Wright, believes that “she is definitely more radical than
he is. He will hang with who he hangs with in an attempt to get along”.
The tape, if it exists, would surely have surfaced by now. Michelle is adamant
that it is nothing but a smear: “I mean, ‘whitey’? Anyone who says that
doesn’t know me. They don’t know the life I’ve lived.”
When we talked, she said how proud she was that Obama was able to unite people
across party lines. “I think Barack brings something fundamentally different
to politics,” she said. “It’s a vision of who we want to be. We talk a lot
about what we’re against and not enough about what we’re for.
“People are really hungry for that, but at the same time it is a little scary,
because change is scary. Americans are creatures of habit. Sometimes we wear
the same suit even if it has got holes in it.”
When it comes to a new suit, you know Michelle Obama will look good in it.
Will it fit America? That is what we are waiting to find out.
