Whitney M. Young Magnet High School, Chicago
Whitney M. Young Magnet High School, Chicago
Associated Press
Toot and Gramps were beaming with pride when Barry graduated from Honolulu’s elite Punahou prep school in 1979. After two years at L.A.’s Occidental College, Barack, as he now wished to be called, transferred to Columbia University in New York.
Associated Press
Polaris
After four years of feeling like an outsider at Princeton, Michelle graduated with honors in 1985 and went on to Harvard Law School—where, years later, Barack would become the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. Later, Barack would teach constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School.
Associated Press
AP Photo/Obama for America
After a three-year courtship, Barack and Michelle were married on October 18, 1992. At one point during the festivities, they grabbed a few moments to kick off their shoes and relax.
Obama for America
Associated Press
Associated Press
An emotional Michelle threw her arms around her husband after he delivered the 2004 Democratic Convention keynote address that would put him on the national map. Three months later, the family watched as election returns came in, then celebrated his election to the U.S. Senate from Illinois in a blizzard of confetti.
Associated Press
Associated Press
In an effort to destigmatize AIDS, Barack and Michelle stopped at a clinic in the Kisumu, Kenya, during his image-building trip to Africa in August of 2006. That same day, he was warmly greeted by his step-grandmother Sarah Hussein Obama.
Associated Press
Hillary Clinton was the overwhelming favorite to be the next presidential nominee of the Democratic Party and Barack was a comparative unknown when they exchanged confidences at the NAACP convention in the summer of 2006.
Associated Press
Associated Press
Associated Press
Campaigning in Iowa in August of 2007, Barack and Michelle delighted locals with an impromptu dance, then at the State Fair in Des Moines paired off with Sasha and Malia to compete in carnival games. Riding the bumper cars with Sasha, Barack said, prepared him for the debates with his Democratic primary rivals.
Associated Press
Oprah decided to “go out on a limb” and endorse Barack—the first time she ever endorsed a presidential candidate—because she believed he was “something above and beyond politics.” She and Michelle huddled, then cheered their candidate when he spoke to a crowd in Manchester, New Hampshire, on December 9, 2007.
Associated Press
Associated Press
Associated Press
Several weeks later, a New Yorker cover intended to poke fun at rumors swirling about them backfired, igniting a firestorm of controversy.
Associated Press
On the campaign trail in June of 2008, Barack and Michelle exchanged knowing glances at a rally in St. Paul, Minnesota, and as they were introduced by Ohio Governor Ted Strickland in Columbus
Associated Press
Associated Press
Associated Press
Vacationing in Kailua, Hawaii, in August of 2008, Barack strolled the beach with Malia and Sasha, then joined them and two friends for “shave ice”—Hawaii’s answer to the snow cone. Later, he bodysurfed alone at Honolulu’s Sandy Beach, a spot he frequented as a child.
Associated Press
Associated Press
Three days before the 2008 presidential election, Barack and Michelle dropped into Jorge’s Sombrero Cantina and Restaurant for a bite. On election eve, he wiped away a tear while talking about his grandmother at a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina. “Toot” Dunham, who had virtually raised Barack, had died only hours earlier at age eighty-six.
Associated Press
Associated Press
The candidate and his wife beamed while they cast their votes at Chicago’s Beulah Shoesmith Elementary School. That evening, the family waved to an emotional crowd of more than two hundred thousand gathered in Grant Park to celebrate Barack’s historic victory.
Associated Press
Ensconced at Washington’s Hay-Adams Hotel, the President-Elect and his wife got up early to send Malia and Sasha off on their first day at Sidwell Friends School.
Associated Press
Associated Press
Malia and Sasha looked on proudly as Daddy took the oath of office as 44th President of the United States—an oath that, because of a mistake by Chief Justice John Roberts, would have to be repeated in private the next day. In between, the new commander in chief danced the night away with his First Lady at no fewer than ten inaugural balls.
Associated Press
Although they left for a quick trip to Chicago just three weeks after taking office, the Obamas now considered 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue home. On February 22, 2009, the nation’s hostess dazzled guests at her first formal White House affair, the Governors Ball.
Associated Press
Associated Press
After hesitating at first, Marian Robinson, a constant presence in her grandchildren’s lives, agreed to move into the White House to help out. Grandma joined Malia and Sasha in the East Room to hear the all-female a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock.
Associated Press
In the midst of the nation’s most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression, Michelle joined students from Washington’s Bancroft Elementary School to break ground for the White House Kitchen Garden on the South Lawn.
Associated Press
Associated Press
During the Obamas’ first trip abroad as First Couple, Michelle shattered centuries of English tradition when she and Queen Elizabeth put their arms around each other—the first time anyone could remember Her Majesty being physically affectionate toward anyone, including members of her own family. On that same trip, thousands turned out to greet them in Paris, Berlin, and Prague.
Associated Press
Associated Press
The life of a political wife is hard.
And that’s why Barack is such a grateful man.
—Michelle
If I’m a 10, Michelle’s an 11.
—Barack
They’re very demonstrative. You’ll always pick up a glance between them, a touch…
—Valerie Jarrett, friend
She’s my coconspirator.
—Barack on Michelle
I don’t want anybody to think that it’s easy….
We have a strong marriage, but it’s not perfect.
—Michelle
6
Now we have two things to celebrate on the Fourth of July!” Barack declared as he cradled his infant daughter in his arms for the first time. Obstetrician Anita Blanchard, who also happened to be the wife of Barack’s close pal Martin Nesbitt, was thrilled that the delivery had gone so smoothly—particularly in light of the fact that Michelle had had such difficulty conceiving.
Barack and Michelle named their first child Malia Ann, a nod to both her grandmothers. Malia is the Hawaiian equivalent of “Mary,” the closest they could come to Marian, and Ann after Barack’s mom.
Elated, he kissed his wife and left her to rest in her private room at the University of Chicago Medical Center maternity ward. It was only as he was driving back to see her a few hours later that he realized he was empty-handed. Frantic, he pulled over at the Hyde Park Shopping Center on Fifty-fifth and Lake Park Avenue and dashed into Joyce’s Hallmark card shop.
He walked up and down the aisles for a few minutes before finally approaching the store’s owner, Joyce Feuer, and throwing up his hands. “My wife has just had a baby,” Barack said, “and I’m visiting her and our incredible daughter in the hospital, and I have absolutely no clue as to what to bring her. Flowers? A card?”
An old hand at such things, Joyce and her sales staff quickly whipped up a gift bag that i
ncluded pink balloons, a card for Mom, and a plush teddy bear. She congratulated Barack as he grabbed the bag, turned, and bolted out the door. “Even for a first-time father,” said the salesclerk, “he was just over the moon with joy.”
There were plenty of reasons for Barack and Michelle to celebrate Malia’s July Fourth arrival, not the least of which was the simple fact that Daddy was actually on hand to enjoy it. During the summer, he was able to stay in Chicago because the State Senate was not in session. Nor did he have to teach any classes or spend long hours attending meetings, preparing his lectures, and grading papers. Michelle was also free; she had taken maternity leave and would not be returning to her job at the university until September.
For three months, they reveled in the joys of young parenthood. They sang to her, rocked her, burped her, dangled keys above her head to get her attention, took countless snapshots (“So many we started to wonder if we were damaging her eyes,” he said), and showed her off to anybody who happened to be in the vicinity. Because Dad was a night owl and Mom was an early bird, she turned in even earlier than usual and he stayed up until 2 A.M. heating up bottles, changing diapers, and rocking Malia to sleep. Barack would later remember this period in their lives as “magical.”
The magic, however, ended with the summer. Once again, Barack was in Springfield four days a week—sometimes more. They hired a babysitter to take care of Malia so that Michelle could return to work, but when she returned home from the office each night, she faced the job of caring for Malia alone.
The tensions that had been simmering in their marriage ever since he was elected to the State Senate were now boiling over. The phone calls between them were becoming less frequent and more terse. She scolded him for spending so much time in Springfield—where he did not have to cope with 1 A.M. bottle feedings, changing diapers, laundry, housekeeping, and—most important—a mind-numbing lack of adult conversation and companionship. “Politics,” she went so far as to tell a local reporter who asked about her husband’s nascent political career, “is a waste of time.”
More to the point, Michelle viewed Barack’s State Senate career as a costly waste of time. “She still didn’t really understand,” Dan Shomon said, “why he was not at a law firm, where he could be making seven hundred thousand or eight hundred thousand a year or a million or two, and why he was lowering himself to the state legislature.” Observed Abner Mikva, “They were poor as church mice, and she was one very unhappy mouse.”
Nevertheless, with a babysitter caring for Malia during the day, Michelle was free to put in her usual eight hours at the university. There, she managed to repeat the success she had had at Public Allies. By pushing undergraduates to go outside their comfort level and volunteer in the community, she started the process of breaking down walls of resentment that had built up over decades.
But when she came home to Malia and no Barack, Michelle felt “very much alone. It was hard to suddenly be by yourself with a baby,” she said, “and frankly I was angry.”
It wasn’t much better during the few days a week Barack did manage to spend in Chicago. Back to his old schedule, he was either teaching or out at meetings giving the kind of heartfelt speeches that had made Michelle love him in the first place. Only now, Barack’s social consciousness no longer seemed so endearing.
Michelle shared her frustrations with her brother, who had given up his career on Wall Street to coach the basketball team at Brown University, and with her mother. They had little success trying to calm her down. “Michelle is really upset with Barack,” Marian Robinson confided to an old family friend, “and you know she’s not shy about telling him off.”
Barack acknowledged his shortcomings. “I leave my socks around,” he conceded. “I’ll hang my pants on the door. I leave newspapers lying around. But she lets me know when I’m not acting right.”
For the most part, he felt he was being treated unfairly. “Whenever I could, I pitched in,” he later wrote. “All I asked for in return was a little tenderness.” Instead, when he got home he would find Post-it notes (PLEASE PICK UP AFTER YOURSELF—YOU LEFT YOUR UNDERWEAR ON THE FLOOR AGAIN!) and endless lists of chores to do and errands to run.
“I remember the lists,” Shomon said. “ Okay, Barack, you’re going to do grocery shopping two times a week. You’re to pick up Malia. You’re going to do blah, blah, blah, and you’re responsible for blah, blah, blah.’ So he had his assignments, and he never questioned her, never bitched about it.”
Occasionally, Barack struck back with a reminder that she had racked up more than her share of parking tickets, but for the most part he just asked her to be patient. He was still finding his way as a politician, he reminded her, and things would improve once he’d settled into the job. “After all,” he said, “it isn’t as if I’m out carousing with the boys every night…. As far as I was concerned, she had nothing to complain about.”
For Michelle, the final straw came with Barack’s decision to challenge incumbent Democratic U.S. Congressman Bobby Rush for his party’s nomination. The former Black Panther, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) member, and Stokely Carmichael follower had just been trounced by Richard Daley in Chicago’s mayoral primary, and Barack interpreted that defeat as meaning that Rush was vulnerable.
“You are so wrong,” Michelle would later say she told her husband. As a daughter of the South Side, she knew just how popular Rush was with the voters in his district, regardless of how he played citywide. Barack was still inexorably linked in the minds of South Side voters with the University of Chicago and Hyde Park’s academic elite. “There is just no way,” she warned him, “that you are going to beat Bobby Rush.”
“Michelle put up no pretense of being happy with my decision,” he later wrote. “Leaning down to kiss Michelle good-bye in the morning, all I would get was a peck on the cheek.”
“Michelle was not a happy camper,” said Barack’s friend and fellow Senator Denny Jacobs. “She felt he was wasting his time in Springfield, but she also felt that running for Congress just wasn’t worth the trouble. There are plenty of Congressmen. If he was going to be in politics at all, she wanted him to aim higher.” For his part, Jacobs also pushed his friend to seek higher office. “As far as you’re concerned,” he told Barack, “it’s either up—or out.”
Barack wouldn’t listen to Michelle, or to advisers who also warned that he faced real resentment from voters for even daring to challenge the popular incumbent. “The accusations were that Obama was sent here and owned by the Jews,” said Obama campaign worker Al Kindle, “that he was here to steal the black vote…that he didn’t know the black experience…. It was quite deafening.” Added Denny Jacobs’s son Mike, also a State Senator and an acquaintance of Barack’s, “He had to put up with a lot—being called an Uncle Tom was the least of it. But it just rolled off his back.”
Barack fueled this perception with remarks that were viewed by many as overtly condescending. “I gave up a career,” he reminded voters during one stump speech, “with a high-priced law firm to run for office.”
In terms of connecting on a grassroots level, the best thing Barack had going for him was Michelle. Black voters had no qualms about asking right off the bat whether Barack’s wife was white or black. “Whenever we told them he married a black woman who was born and raised on the South Side,” said a campaign worker, “you would see a whole different attitude.”
Michelle joked with voters about her bona fides (“You don’t get any blacker than me”), but privately she was angry that Barack was being viewed with suspicion. “I’ve really had it with that stuff,” she said. “When you think of all that he’s done for the community, it’s just insulting.”
Still, Barack was unable to distance himself from the notion that he somehow wasn’t black enough to represent Rush’s South Side district. It didn’t help that Barrack’s speaking style was decidedly professorial. When he first heard his friend speak at a black church, Abner Mikva was “completely disma
yed. Barrack had always appealed to the Hyde Park crowd—the eggheads—and here he was talking to a bunch of African American church ladies as if they were his law students. Frankly, it didn’t make any sense to me. I was shocked.” Eventually, Michelle would manage to convince her husband to loosen up in front of black audiences. “The single most important factor in getting Barrack to change his way of speaking in front of black audiences was Michelle,” Mikva said. “If it hadn’t been for her, Barrack would never have connected with this core constituency—and he never would have gone beyond the State Senate.”
Unfortunately for Barrack, this essential transformation from pedant to folksy orator would not take place until after the congressional campaign. In the meantime, his campaign suffered another blow when Rush’s twenty-nine-year-old son, Huey, was shot and killed. Voters were hard-pressed not to sympathize with Rush—a feeling that only intensified when, toward the end of the campaign, Rush’s father also died. Even Barack’s old South Side friends like Loretta Augustin-Herron knew he was in trouble. “Bobby Rush had suffered so many tragedies that everybody felt very sorry for him,” she said. “We are a very tight-knit community. We don’t turn our backs on our own.”
Barack and Michelle Page 20
