by Edward Klein
“Barack was treated specially by a lot of people at Harvard, and Michelle found that hard to handle. His ego was pretty inflated, and Michelle would fly in from Chicago, and the first thing she’d do was take him down a peg or two. She laughed at his pretentiousness.
“But she couldn’t change the fact that he was immensely popular. He was handsome and successful and incredibly well spoken. His classmates, black and white, flocked to him. He was a guy with a slick way with words, and women especially were attracted to him. I remember one time Michelle showed up unexpectedly at his desk in the library, and found him surrounded by women. It was terrible timing, and Barack looked like the proverbial cat who swallowed the canary; he had a really pained expression on his face. He had been working his ass off studying, and girls that he knew from classes happened by just as Michelle showed up. Michelle was so damn mad that she put a hand on his shoulder in a possessive way, then gave him this disdainful look, turned on her heels, and marched out without a word, her heels clicking on the marble floors. She went back to Chicago.
“Another time, the same sort of thing happened at his Somerville apartment. She came in and found him with some women, black women. Michelle threw a fit and left. He followed her down the street, Charles Street, begging her to stay.
“I think she drove a lot of Barack’s friends away. If she didn’t find them helpful, she would simply be rude. She and Barack had constant fights, and they could be incredibly exasperated with each other. Frankly, I was surprised the relationship lasted through law school. I remember thinking, This isn’t going to work.
“For a while, Michelle was very unsure about the relationship. Barack seemed to have his life the way he liked it, and she wanted to remake him. But soon after Barack graduated from law school, and the world started beating a path to his door, Michelle decided he was going to go far, and she insisted that he marry her. He got cold feet, but Michelle wouldn’t take no for an answer. She was a formidable woman even back then.”
From Charles Thomas, a veteran political reporter for Chicago’s ABC News affiliate ABC 7: “I accompanied Obama on a trip he made to Africa in 2006, and when he returned, Time magazine did a cover story on him with the cover line Why Barack Obama Could be the Next President. The morning Time’s story appeared, Michelle had a previously scheduled interview on our local ABC TV news show. Her people told our people that we couldn’t ask her about the Time cover story. But my editor told me to go down to the green room and see if she would comment about it.
“So I went down to the green room. I asked, ‘Michelle, how are the kids? We want to talk to you about the Time magazine piece.’ And she rose up out of her chair. She’s a lot taller than I am. And she put her hand on her hip and glared down at me. Waving her forefinger at me, she said, ‘Charles, don’t you try that shit with me or I’ll walk out of here!’”
From African-American talk-show host Tavis Smiley: “About five years ago, I published a book, The Covenant with Black America, and I got PBS to let me moderate a prime-time nationally televised debate in which the candidates were questioned only by journalists of color on issues of interest principally to people of color. All the candidates showed up. All the big-time Hillary supporters and all the big Obama people were there. The debate took place at Howard University, and afterward the media said Hillary had killed Obama and gotten the most applause.
“After the debate, with the cameras still rolling, the candidates were on the stage shaking hands. And in the midst of all this, Michelle Obama comes up on the stage and grabs me by the back of my jacket, and yanks me backward, and gets in my face. ‘Why are you messing with Barack,’ she yells at me. This is in front of the auditorium with thousands of people. ‘You were unfairly tough on Barack,’ she says. ‘You should know as a black man what he’s up against and what he’s trying to do.’ And she proceeds to lay into me. I had to leave her standing there because it was getting really testy.”
If Michelle ever had any reservations about Barack’s grandiose political dreams, they didn’t come from her qualms about politics, but from her belief that he wasn’t aiming high enough. For example, when he ran for a seat in the Illinois state legislature, Michelle told him that it was “too small time.” Remarks a friend of the Obamas: “They both already knew so many important people [and] she just wanted him to go straight to the national stage.”
For the first several years of their marriage, Michelle and Barack lived in a flat in a lower-middle-class neighborhood. But after Barack’s memoir Dreams from My Father hit the bestseller lists and he joined the United States Senate, the couple moved to a million-dollar mansion, and Michelle landed a cushy job at the University of Chicago Medical Center with a salary of $317,000 a year.3 It hardly seemed a coincidence that Valerie Jarrett was the medical center’s chairwoman, and that a hospital board member, Kelly R. Welsh, was an executive vice president at Northern Trust Company, which had extended the Obamas a $1.3 million home mortgage.
Chicago-style cronyism marked Michelle’s tenure at the University of Chicago Medical Center. Given all her righteous talk about “fundamental change,” “access,” “opportunity,” and “fairness,” everyone expected Michelle to promote programs to assist the underprivileged denizens of the black South Side. Instead, she helped launch a program, dubbed the South Side Health Collaborative, to save the hospital millions of dollars by redirecting poor and uninsured patients from its emergency room to surrounding community hospitals in the South Side. The University of Chicago’s Medical Center beds were reserved for prosperous patients who used profitable procedures.
The president of the American College of Emergency Physicians, Dr. Nick Jouriles, released a statement saying Michelle’s program came “dangerously close to ‘patient dumping,’ a practice made illegal by the emergency Medical Labor and Treatment Act, and reflected an effort to ‘cherry pick’ wealthy patients over poor.”
To deflect criticism, Michelle gave the program a more appealing name, the Urban Health Initiative, and hired a public relations firm co-owned by David Axelrod, who was soon to become Barack Obama’s chief strategist for his presidential campaign. Axelrod’s job was to sell the Urban Health Initiative to community skeptics like Edward Novak, president of Chicago’s Sacred Heart Hospital, who described Axelrod’s PR efforts to justify the program as “bull.” As for Michelle’s moral imperatives, a survey by the polling firm Peter D. Hart Research Associates noted: “More than a few staff members—particularly medical staff—express strongly worded concern or disappointment with UCMC in its commitment to the community.”
Though Michelle now likes to pretend that she plays no part in personnel decisions or in formulating policy in the White House, the facts tell quite a different story. Michelle’s aides meet regularly with the president’s senior communications team and select public events that will maximize and reinforce the Obamas’ joint message.
According to a New York State Democratic Party official, “Michelle certainly played a role” in selecting Joe Biden, instead of Hillary Clinton, as her husband’s vice presidential running mate. “Do you really want Bill and Hillary just down the hall from you in the White House?” Michelle asked her husband. “Could you live with that?” He couldn’t.
Also, according to one of Barack’s closest confidants, Michelle “was one of the strongest voices” arguing for the appointment of Federal Appeals Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor to replace retiring Associate Justice David Souter on the Supreme Court. “The First Lady thought Sotomayor had all those ... qualities her husband was looking for in an appointee,” the confidant said. “Barack has always listened to what she has to say.”
Michelle rarely conveys her opinions directly to the president’s staff. When she is upset about something, she generally turns to her best friend, Valerie Jarrett, and makes Jarrett the messenger of her displeasure. Such was the case in the fall of 2010 when the story broke that Michelle had told Carla Bruni-Sarkozy that she “can’t stand” life in the White House, that it
was “hell.” Robert Gibbs, Obama’s longtime press secretary, worked furiously to put out the fire and get the Élysée Palace in Paris to issue a denial. He accomplished his task, but apparently he didn’t do so quickly enough to satisfy Michelle Obama.
The next day at the president’s 7:30 a.m. staff meeting, Valerie Jarrett let it be known that the first lady was “dissatisfied” with the way Gibbs had handled the matter. As Jodi Kantor recounts in The Obamas, Gibbs blew his stack.
“Fuck this, that’s not right, I’ve been killing myself on this, where’s this coming from?” he bellowed. “What is it she has concerns about? What did she say to you?”
Jarrett offered a vague response.
“What the fuck do you mean?” Gibbs said. “Did you ask her?”
Jarrett explained that the denial from the Élysée Palace had not come fast enough.
“Why is she talking to you about it?” Gibbs demanded to know. “If she has a problem she should talk to me!”
“You shouldn’t talk that way,” Jarrett said.
“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” Gibbs said.
“The first lady would not believe you’re speaking this way,” Jarrett said.
“Then fuck her, too!” Gibbs said.
Michelle’s interference in White House policy was also a touchy subject with Rahm Emanuel when he was chief of staff. He and the first lady had never gotten along. They were the yin and yang of the White House, frequently on opposite sides of an issue. They gave each other a wide berth, but still grated on each other’s nerves. Emanuel particularly resented the fact that the first lady sent scolding emails to Alyssa Mastromonaco, the president’s director of scheduling, and that these emails were passed around the White House, undercutting his authority. When the Washington Post ran a story saying that Emanuel was trying to save the president from his amateurish inclinations—“Why Obama Needs Rahm at the Top”—it was assumed that the chief of staff, who was famous for calling reporters, had leaked the story. As a result, his stock fell to a new low with Michelle.
In January 2010, the Democrats lost Edward Kennedy’s Senate seat from Massachusetts, costing the party its filibuster-proof majority and dooming Obama’s chances of passing legislation for a government-run, single-payer healthcare system. Michelle was fit to be tied. She couldn’t understand why the president’s advisers had failed to read the political tea leaves in Massachusetts, or why they had sent Obama to Massachusetts at the eleventh hour on a fruitless mission to save Martha Coakley, the inept Democratic candidate. The whole thing smacked of amateurism, and according to several sources, Michelle told the president that he needed a new team of advisers, starting with Rahm Emanuel.
“She feels as if our rudder isn’t set right,” the president told his aides. When Emanuel heard that, he strode into the Oval Office and offered his resignation. It was turned down. But by then Emanuel’s days were numbered.
From time to time, Michelle did impulsive, silly things that spoiled her carefully crafted image. At such moments, her handlers were forced to launch one of their frequent PR makeovers. This practice first became apparent right after Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination in June 2008. Voters still held serious reservations about his wife, who seemed to take pleasure in demeaning the candidate and mocking his “stinky” morning breath.
As Kate Betts wrote in Everyday Icon: Michelle Obama and the Power of Style:Her approval rating lingered at 43 percent. Something had to be done. Political dreams have been dashed on less daunting obstacles than an unpopular spouse. With a savvy sense of what was necessary, and no hint of strain, in a matter of weeks Michelle Obama appeared to make a midcourse correction. She changed the content and tone of her speeches. She changed the way she dressed. She replaced the corporate armor of sleek jackets and pantsuits with soft cardigans and June Cleaver-esque 1950s-style floral print dresses. On the surface it looked as if Michelle Obama was swapping Power Woman for Power Wife....
As Michelle began to substitute homey anecdotes about tucking her kids into bed at night for stump speeches about public policy, she made parallel adjustments to her wardrobe, softening her look and enhancing the idea of accessibility through her clothing.... Her approval ratings started to rise. At the end of August [2009] they had climbed to 53 percent.
Another example of Michelle’s impulsive, narcissistic nature was her decision to go on a lavish vacation to Spain in the summer of 2010, at the height of the Great Recession, even though practically her entire staff advised against it. She overruled them and flew off on an Air Force 757 along with three shifts of uniformed plainclothes agents and military personnel. Her security entourage numbered seventy people. Her vast army of support personnel checked into the Villa Padierna Palace Hotel in Marbella, a five-star resort on the Spanish Costa del Sol. The trip cost American taxpayers several hundred thousand dollars, and the backlash was harsh and immediate. A column by Andrea Tantaros in the New York Daily News was headlined: “Material Girl Michelle Obama Is a Modern-Day Marie Antoinette on a Glitzy Spanish Vacation.”
Though the trip to Spain garnered most of the publicity, it was hardly Michelle’s only foray into expensive vacations. Between August 2010 and August 2011, she spent a total of forty-two days on vacation—or one out of every nine days. (During the same period of time, the number of Americans on food stamps increased from thirty-two to forty-six million.)
In February 2012, just weeks after a seventeen-day Christmas vacation in Hawaii, Michelle decided she needed another break. With gas prices at an historic winter high, the government struggling to cut the federal deficit, and many American families forgoing their annual holiday vacations, Michelle thumbed her nose at political convention and jetted off with Sasha and Malia on Presidents’ Day weekend for the upmarket ski slopes of Aspen, Colorado. “Several people have known about the ‘low-key’ vacation, with the Secret Service in town for the past few days scoping out places for the family to relax and enjoy what the resort has to offer,” wrote Aspen Daily News columnist Carolyn Sackariason. “Pritkin County Sheriff Joe DiSalvo confirmed that he has met with the Secret Service and has loaned seven deputies to help protect the first lady and her family.”
The question naturally arises: Why would someone who is as politically savvy as Michelle Obama do such foolish things?
The answer seems to lie in Michelle’s personality, which is acquisitive and materialistic by nature. For her forty-fourth birthday, Obama bought his wife something she had long coveted—a set of diamond stud earrings. He spent $5,000. She promptly returned them in exchange for bigger diamonds that cost $12,000.
“Michelle has expensive tastes,” writes Carol Felsenthal in chicagomag.com. “It was she who wanted to trade up from their two-bedroom condominium on the first floor of a three-story walkup, for which they had paid $277,500 in 1993, to the $1.65 million six-bedroom Georgian revival Kenwood mansion that landed them in a deal with the wife of Tony Rezko, the convicted felon and fundraiser/fixer....”
As a high-maintenance woman, Michelle feels right at home in the White House. “It’s a cool time in her life,” says a journalist who is assigned to follow the first lady full time. “She doesn’t have to work hard; she has more help; she’s treated like a queen; she never has to worry about money again. She has a contract to write a book about a year in the life of the White House garden.
“Nowadays,” continues the journalist, “Michelle doesn’t have much stuff to nag Barack about. After all, he’s home for dinner most nights of the week. Her kids are in a good place. She’s home when the kids come home. She’s shown the girls the world. She has time for tennis lessons and workouts. She spends a good part of the day working out in the gym, picking out her wardrobe, and doing her makeup. She’s living in a dream world. You know that old saying, When mom’s happy, everyone’s happy.”
CHAPTER 12
OUT TO LUNCH
Politics is all about relationships, people. A lot of it’s emotional. It’s not rocket
science.
—Former White House Chief of Staff William M. Daley
When Barack Obama appointed Bill Daley as his new chief of staff in January 2011, the bald, genial Chicagoan was widely expected to be a welcome change from the ruthlessly aggressive Rahm Emanuel. A world-class schmoozer and political fixer, Daley was weaned on politics: he is the son of the legendary Mayor Richard J. Daley and the brother of Mayor Richard M. Daley. Thanks in large part to his family connections, Bill Daley was appointed as commerce secretary in the Clinton administration, and later became head of the office of corporate responsibility for JP Morgan Chase, which in practice meant he spent a lot of time wining and dining the bank’s clients. With Daley’s experience in both the public and private sectors, and his genuinely warm personality, it was hoped that he would smooth Obama’s frayed relationships with the business community and Congress, and bring a grownup, centrist sensibility to a White House that was populated by a crew of cloistered leftwing amateurs.
It didn’t happen.
What everyone in the White House had overlooked was that Daley had little legislative experience. Predictably enough, his honeymoon lasted less than a year—a tumultuous year in which he failed to help Obama reach a bipartisan grand bargain with the House of Representatives on reducing the federal budget deficit, and allowed the president to engage in a degrading mud-wrestle with congressional Republicans over raising the debt ceiling.
These raucous ideological arguments left Obama looking weaker than ever, and Valerie Jarrett—who was expert at enhancing her power by finding fault with others—pointed a finger of blame at Daley for failing to protect the president from the political fallout. After getting an earful of anti-Daley static, Obama lost faith in his chief of staff and transferred most of his management responsibilities to Pete Rouse, a longtime aide and political strategist. The hapless Daley was unceremoniously relegated to the sidelines in the West Wing.
