The Obama Diaries

by Laura Ingraham

  “He requested a romantic dinner with a view of Prague, where they can eat the best Czech food,” a Czech government source told the Daily Times of London. “They have spent days trying to decide on the right restaurant.”

  Then there was the romantic getaway to New York in May 2009. It took three Gulfstreams, a helicopter, and more street closures than the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade to pull this date night off.

  Days before GM declared bankruptcy, the president issued this defensive statement: “I am taking my wife to New York City because I promised her during the campaign that I would take her to a Broadway show after it was all finished.” Someone should inform the president that there is such a thing as touring companies. They routinely bring “Broadway shows” to your hometown. And last time I checked, most of them stop at the Kennedy Center or at the National Theater in D.C. But when Michelle Obama is promised a Broadway show, Michelle Obama gets a Broadway show.

  After jetting in from D.C., the first couple ate dinner at the West Village organic restaurant Blue Hill. They then sped uptown to the Belasco Theater to see the opening night of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. Streets were closed for blocks, traffic snarled all over the theater district, but the Obamas made their curtain.

  The British Mirror newspaper estimated that the good-looking couple’s New York date, including the “three jets of security staff,” cost taxpayers one million dollars. But, hey, it’s not about the money, it’s about the example.

  “It’s a reminder that this family is not just two folks raising kids, but it’s two folks building a life together,” Michelle said of the date nights on TV One. She explained to Roland Martin that these dates go beyond her and Barack. “What I’ve found, which is interesting, is that our girls like it . . . they like the fact that they know that we love each other. That gives them security.” (Yet another instance of their using the girls as political shields.)

  It is nice that the Obamas carve out quality time to spend together. Special time as a couple is important to a marriage. But how much alone time can a couple have when a press pool and the general public are invited to every outing? Does every date need its own press release?

  Americans seem to be getting wise to the White House message game. As early as April 2009, a Pew Research Center poll found that a full 53 percent of Americans felt that there was too much coverage of Obama’s personal life—and that was before the Manhattan getaway!

  The ostentatious date nights are yet another tool used by the White House to garner coverage from the celebrity media while promoting the idea that the Obama marriage is to be emulated and envied. The idea is, if you believe this couple has achieved the ideal, you are more likely to listen to them when they speak out on policies that affect marriage and family life. But before we accept the idea that the Obama marriage is as perfect as it appears, there are some inconsistencies in the record.

  The official line on their meeting goes something like this: In 1988, Barack Obama, then attending Harvard Law School, was hired as a summer associate at the Chicago law firm of Sidley Austin. A certain Michelle Robinson was to be his advisor for the summer. “I remember that she was tall—almost my height in heels—and lovely, with a friendly, professional manner that matched her tailored suit and blouse,” Obama writes in The Audacity of Hope.

  The story changed, however, when the president spoke in Moscow on July 7, 2009: “I don’t know if anybody else will meet their future wife or husband in class like I did . . .” he recounted. What happened to the law firm and her “tailored suit”? Perhaps this narrative is still taking shape.

  The first mother-in-law, Marian Robinson, had similar recall problems at an Education Department event on July 22, 2009, when trying to describe how her daughter met Barack Obama. She hemmed and hawed a bit, repeated the tale of the law firm meeting, and then added, “I think that’s how the story went.”

  Whatever the facts of their meeting and courtship, Michelle and Barack Obama were married in 1992 by that soft-spoken patriot, the Obamas’ spiritual father, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Within a few years, the community activist couple had grown into a family. Soon tensions emerged. They were both so busy with their careers there was “little time for conversation, much less romance,” Obama wrote in The Audacity of Hope. “Leaning down to kiss Michelle good-bye in the morning, all I would get was a peck on the cheek. By the time Sasha was born—just as beautiful, and almost as calm as her sister—my wife’s anger toward me seemed barely contained. ‘You only think about yourself, ’ she would tell me. ‘I never thought I’d have to raise a family alone.’ ”

  Barack confided to his grandmother in Hawaii, Madelyn “Toot” Dunham, “I love Michelle, but she’s killing me with this constant criticism. She just seems so bitter, so angry, all the time.” In his own memoir, A Game of Character, the First Brother-in-Law Craig Robinson recounted the hot summer night when his parents saw Michelle and Barry Obama together for the first time, when they stopped by their place on the way to a movie. “Well, he’s tall,” Marian Robinson remarked. “She’ll eat him alive,” he recalled his father Fraser saying.

  Every marriage has its rocky periods and by all appearances this was the rockiest of the Obamas’ union. But one gets the feeling from recent comments by Michelle Obama that the criticism has not exactly waned.

  “I’ve got a loud mouth. I tease my husband,” Michelle told Good Morning America in 2007. “He is incredibly smart and he is very able to deal with a strong woman—which is one of the reasons that he can be president. Because he can deal with me.”

  In her crusade to remake her image, First Lady Michelle Obama has sounded more traditional notes. “My first job, in all honesty, is going to continue to be mom-in-chief,” she told Ebony magazine shortly after the election.

  Since then she has offered her advice on everything from what children should eat to how much TV they should watch. Michelle doesn’t only hold her children to this standard, but like an evangelist, encourages other families to follow her example. In a March 2010 interview with Essence magazine her husband took up the gospel of Michelle: “The girls don’t watch TV during the week. Period. . . .”

  It isn’t that the First Lady’s child-rearing ideas aren’t laudatory or even without merit. The problem is that Michelle Obama presumes that the entire country needs her to be our “Mom-in-Chief.”

  Even the title seems self-serving, particularly when viewed in the light of an interview Michelle granted Vogue magazine in 2007. There, she candidly admitted: “The days I stay home with my kids without going out, I start to get ill.”

  Luckily for the Mom-in-Chief, since becoming First Lady she has rarely had to spend much time in the residence with the kids. “Everyone should have a chief of staff and a set of personal assistants,” Michelle joked at a “Corporate Voices for Working Families” conference in May 2009. But the joke is shot through with truth. This First Lady has the largest staff of any presidential wife in history: twenty-four staffers in all, costing taxpayers more than a million dollars annually. So how could any other American mother compete with or relate to Michelle Obama’s situation? And then there is Michelle’s greatest aide: in-house babysitter and Grandmother-in-Chief Marian Robinson.

  Michelle Obama’s mother relocated to D.C. and took up residence in the White House to continue her care of the First Daughters. And though she initially resisted the invitation, her grandmotherly instinct won out in the end. “The whole time I’m raising . . . Michelle [and her brother], I am telling them that, ‘Look, you see, I am raising my kids, so don’t you all have any kids that you expect me to help you raise,’” Robinson told the Boston Globe during the campaign. “And look at what I’m doing!”

  Marian Robinson shuttles the girls to school, helps them with homework, but obviously disagrees with Michelle’s child-rearing protocol.

  “She has them so, I don’t know, like little soldiers,” Marian Robinson confessed to the Globe in one of her only solo interviews. “I’ve heard [Mich
elle] say, ‘Mom, what are you rolling your eyes at? You made us do the same thing.’ I don’t remember being that bad. It seems like she’s just going overboard.” Of the 8:30 P.M. bedtime, Robinson opines: “That’s ridiculous!” And what the First Granny says about the one-hour weekend TV viewing: “That’s just not enough time.” And on Michelle’s militant culinary rules: “That’s not my thing . . . see when I grew up we had good food, right? . . . If you’re going to have fried chicken, have fried chicken!” At least somebody in the White House gets it.

  “She’s just worthless on [sic] the discipline area,” Michelle said of her mother on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno on October 29, 2009. “Just cookies, TV, whatever they want. It’s a shame.”

  I’ll take Marian Robinson’s spunky, commonsense attitude over Michelle’s rigid, holier-than-thou prescriptions any day.

  THE DIARY OF FIRST GRANDMOTHER MARIAN ROBINSON

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  August 19, 2009

  I almost packed up and went back to Chicago today. This afternoon, Miche caught me in the hallway bringing a stack of cookies to Sasha’s room. You’d swear she had busted me with a crack pipe. She hollers, “Mama, I’m the First Lady—and in this house you live under my rules.” I turned right around, cookies in hand, and told her, “If you don’t stop getting on my case, I’m out of here, young lady. I don’t need this.” Then I shoved one of the cookies in my mouth. “Mmmm . . . tastes a lot better than what you’re feeding those children from that toxic garden of yours!”

  I can’t wait for her to get out to Martha’s Vineyard. She wanted me to go on vacation with them, to take care of the children all week. I’d have to be nuts. I said, “No, First Lady, you’re on the clock now. Have a good vacation!” Back in February, I made a deal with Miche. I told her, “Unless you want me to head back to Chicago and tell the Sun-Times what I really know, you’d better back off and give me some room.” So now I get some weekends. I’ve made them hire a sitter when I go out to a show or something. Monday through Friday my nose is to the grindstone, but on Saturdays and Sundays— that’s granny’s time.

  Oh, I wish the weekend would hurry up and come. Barack and Michelle leave for the Vineyard on Saturday, and then I get the run of the mansion. Martha and Jean and my friend Esther are coming in from Chicago tomorrow, so I guess I can put up with Miche for a few more days. As long as they’ve got spare guest rooms, free food, and access to that presidential box at the Kennedy Center, I might as well stick around.

  Before I go to bed I’m going to sneak my granddaughters some hot cocoa and a little ice cream. They like that at bedtime, and it helps them sleep better.

  UP A FAMILY TREE

  The Obamas eagerly offer up all manner of personal details related to their immediate family lives. What is not so well-known but is perhaps more important is the background of their extended families.

  It is our personal experience that shapes our concept of what it means to be a family. Particularly important are the models offered to us by our mothers and fathers. In the case of President Obama, this fundamental understanding affects not only his worldview, but his policies. On the surface, the president’s notions of family appear solidly traditional, even clichéd—until one glances at the uppermost boughs of the Obama family tree.

  Michelle La Vaughn Robinson’s family was intact and apparently very loving. Marian and Fraser Robinson were hardworking, proud people with deep roots in Chicago’s South Side. Marian was a secretary and later a stay-at-home mother. Fraser, despite suffering from multiple sclerosis, worked for the Chicago Water Department and became a Democratic precinct captain for the Daley political machine. Unafraid of labor, the Robinsons struggled so their children could have security and enough space to grow. Education and personal responsibility were emphasized. The Robinsons taught their children to challenge themselves, furnishing them with a strong sense of confidence that would blossom in later life.

  As for Barack Obama’s own family—the story is more complicated.

  “I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles, and cousins of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents,” Barack Obama said in March 2008. And he wasn’t kidding.

  “When you get my family together, I mean you’ve got people who look like Margaret Thatcher. You’ve got people who look like Bernie Mac. You’ve got, you know my sister, she looks like Salma Hayek,” Obama told a Kissimmee, Florida, rally in May 2008, “I don’t know if you’ve seen her . . . she looks Latin.”

  Have you seen his sister? Hey, Mr. President, time to call Lens Crafters!

  “[My sister, Maya]’s got a baby, ’cause she married a Chinese Canadian, so she’s got a little—I’ve got a little niece who’s a little Chinese baby. So the point is that—that’s just how I look at the world is we all have a piece of each other and we can’t get caught up in our differences.”

  Attending an Obama family reunion would be akin to being stuck in “It’s a Small World” without the boat and the catchy tune.

  Barack Obama’s parents were an active pair. Stanley Ann Dunham, an eighteen-year-old girl from Kansas, was attending the University of Hawaii when she met a dashing Kenyan graduate student in her Russian class. She was drawn to Barack Obama, Sr.’s seductive oratory and cocksure self-confidence. He was intelligent, he smoked, and he seemed exotic. Obama had romantic notions of returning home to “shape the destiny of Africa,” according to one biography. Months after their meeting, on August 4, 1961, Stanley Ann gave birth to Obama’s child, Barack Obama, Jr.

  The official narrative is that Stanley Ann Dunham and Barack Obama, Sr., were married in February 1961. But with the Obamas, nothing is as it seems. Barack, Sr., already had a wife of five years in Kenya, Kezia Aoko. She was pregnant when he abandoned her to study in Hawaii. They would have three other children together.

  So did Dunham and Obama actually marry? Christopher Anderson, author of Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage, reports that there are no “official records showing that a legal ceremony ever took place” between Barack Obama’s parents. He adds, “There were certainly no witnesses—no family members were present, and none of their friends at the university had the slightest inkling that they were even engaged.”

  In his memoir Dreams from My Father, Obama writes of his parents’ nuptials: “how and when the marriage occurred remains a bit murky, a bill of particulars that I’ve never quite had the courage to explore. There’s no record of a real wedding, a cake, a ring, a giving away of the bride. No families were in attendance; it’s not even clear that people back in Kansas were fully informed. Just a small civil ceremony, a justice of the peace. The whole thing seems so fragile in retrospect, so haphazard.”

  Possibly because the wedding never occurred.

  Michelle Obama admitted as much during a July 10, 2008, speech at the University of Missouri when she said, Barack’s “mother . . . was very young and very single when she had him.”

  Stanley Ann and Barack, Sr., probably never lived as husband and wife, either. The well-worn story is that Barack, Sr., selfishly opted to study at Harvard in 1962 (“Why should I deny myself the best education?”), leaving his wife and son in Hawaii. But Jerome Corsi at WorldNet Daily uncovered records showing that Stanley Ann Dunham attended classes at the University of Seattle only fifteen days after the birth of her son. She and Junior apparently remained there until at least the spring of 1962. Barry would only see his father one more time, when he was ten years old.

  In the interim, Barry and his mother returned to Hawaii, where she met yet another foreign student at the university. (Match.com has nothing on this school!) Lolo Soetoro was an affable Indonesian who married Stanley Ann when Barack was six. The whole clan relocated to Indonesia a year later.

  This must have been a difficult period for young Barry. He was the only black person anyone in his neighborhood had seen. He was ridiculed for his pudginess, and being an American surely did nothing to endear him to the locals. His mother la
ter gave birth to a half sister, Maya. Bouncing between Catholic and Muslim schools in this strange land, the boy had to feel isolated and at sea. When he was ten, Barry’s mother announced that he would be returning to Hawaii—alone. He would be attending a prestigious school there and living with his grandparents. Barry was being abandoned once more.

  When he was ten, both his mother and father visited Hawaii. It would be the first time (since his birth) that Barry laid eyes on his father. It would also be their last meeting. Barack Obama, Sr., had a drinking problem by then, but he still knew how to turn on the charm. During his December visit, he tried to persuade Stanley Ann and her children to return to Africa with him. She declined. She no doubt knew of the ever-blooming Obama family tree in Africa.

  Barack Obama, Sr., was a polygamist. He had at least two wives at once and a slew of kids back in his homeland. Here is the short list of the children sired if not raised by Barack Obama, Sr.:

  Wife No. One, Kezia, bore him three sons: Abongo (sometimes called Roy or Malik), Abo (Samson), Bernard, and a daughter, Auma.

  Wife No. Two, Ruth Nidesand, was a white Harvard classmate who moved to Nairobi with Barack, Sr. She had two sons by him: David and Mark (Ndesandjo).

  Another woman, named Jael, gave birth to his youngest son, George, in Nairobi.

  At last count, Barack, Sr., fathered eight children . . . that we know of. This family tree is so twisted, genealogists have suggested that Barack Obama is distantly related to Dick Cheney, Scott Brown, President Bush, and Brad Pitt! If we give Henry Louis Gates enough time, he’ll identify you as Obama’s thirteenth cousin once removed.

  Barack Obama’s extended family is a motley crew. Half brother George, now living in the slums of Nairobi, has been busted for drug possession. According to the U.K. Mirror, Obama’s half brother Abo, who attended the inauguration, was picked up in Britain for allegedly sexually assaulting a teenage girl. (He was never charged.) He was living illegally in England at the time with his mother.