Barack and Michelle

by Christopher Andersen

  As tempting as the offer was, Axelrod never felt comfortable with the idea of taking on Hull as a client. Over the course of several meetings the previous year, Axelrod had learned some disturbing things about Hull—namely, that the court records from his third divorce had been sealed because of allegations of spousal abuse. Axelrod warned Hull that this information would somehow be leaked during the campaign and doom his chances of ever being elected.

  Once Axelrod was on board with Barack, he shared what he knew with his new boss and with Michelle. All three agreed that, even though Hull’s media blitzkrieg had made him the Democratic front-runner, it was only a matter of time before the contents of Hull’s sealed divorce records would be leaked, sinking Hull’s candidacy. In the meantime, Hull would draw votes away from the other Democrat in the race, the popular state comptroller Dan Hynes.

  With Barack’s main rival in the primaries self-destructing, the other candidates in the race—all white—spent most of their time attacking each other. “Nobody,” said a media adviser to one of the candidates, “wanted to risk looking racist by slamming the only black candidate in the race. And Obama didn’t seem like much of a threat, anyway.”

  Barack’s team, meanwhile, was delighted that none of the other candidates were forced to drop out. “As long as they’re competing for the same middle-class white votes,” one adviser said, “that leaves the rest for us.” This divide-and-conquer strategy, predicated on the belief that the minorities, white liberals, and some downstaters would vote for Barack, would be key to the success of the Obama campaign.

  If he was going to stitch together this kind of coalition, Barack “needed to be in about ten places at once,” an adviser pointed out. To help ease the burden, a reluctant Michelle agreed to stand in for her husband at a few fund-raisers and rallies. Occasionally, she introduced him—a task that, increasingly, she seemed to relish. “I am tired,” she told an enthusiastic crowd packed into a South Side church, “of just giving the political process over to the privileged. To the wealthy. To people with the right daddy.”

  Michelle spoke passionately to anyone who would listen about her husband’s qualifications, but she was determined that he not let her words go to his head. As he headed out the door to a candidates’ forum one Saturday morning, Michelle stopped him in his tracks. “Where do you think you’re going?” she asked. “Oohhh, no. You’ve been gone all week, and I’ve got stuff to do today, and you’re taking the kids.”

  When Barack arrived at the forum with Malia and Sasha in tow, his opponents, said Dan Hynes, “felt a little sorry for the guy…. There he was, trying to herd these two little kids, and they’re knocking things over and taking pamphlets and throwing them. And here he is trying to be this dignified Senate candidate.”

  By the spring of 2004, Barack, who had been holding back on his campaign ads, was ready to unleash a barrage of TV commercials. But when Axelrod proudly unveiled the campaign’s new slogan, Barack was decidedly underwhelmed.

  “ Yes we can?’ ‘Yes we can?’” he said between drags on a cigarette. “I don’t like it. Come on…I’d like a slogan that actually means something.”

  But Axelrod argued forcefully for the “Yes We Can” message. It was catchy, inspirational; it conveyed a sense of optimism, of hope. And most important, like any great advertising slogan, it was almost annoyingly simple and to the point—like “Where’s the beef?” or “Head On!”

  “Yeah, but I don’t want to talk down to people,” Barack objected. “ Yes we can.’ Yes we can what? What does it mean?” Unswayed by the arguments of Axelrod and his media experts, Barack told his staff to come up with another. “‘ Yes we can,’” he said, “just seems childish to me.”

  Axelrod would not budge, so Barack tried it out on Michelle. She had always resented the fact that in the black community she had to “dumb down” so that her South Side friends wouldn’t think she’d turned her back on them. Michelle understood Barack’s initial objections to “Yes We Can.” But she also knew on a gut level that the phrase would resonate in Chicago’s black neighborhoods. Jesse Jackson, who had thrown his support to Barack, agreed. And when Barack tried the phrase out on Jeremiah Wright, the reverend shouted it to the rafters as if he were at the climax of one of his hell-raising sermons: “Yes…we…can.”

  In the end, Michelle’s was the deciding vote. “I like it,” she said, trying it out again and again, each time with a different inflection. “The brothers and sisters will get it, Barack.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s so corny…”

  Michelle grew impatient. “I am telling you,” she said, “it will work. Trust me.”

  In the end, Barack deferred to Michelle, as he always did when it came to what would appeal to African American voters. “Okay,” he told her at one meeting. “You know more about that sort of thing than I do.”

  As he looked over the rest of the field, Barack realized that, more than ever, much of his appeal as a candidate hung on his squeaky-clean image. He fostered the image of himself as a devoted family man and as a clean-cut fitness fanatic who worked out daily (“like a gladiator,” said Robert Gibbs), ran, and played basketball whenever he could—despite the fact that, following a number of minor injuries on the court, Michelle was now pressuring her husband to give up basketball for something “less punishing for a man your age—you know, like golf.”

  That Barack veritably glowed with health belied the fact that he smoked—a lot. Like Jackie Onassis, who despite a life lived in front of the cameras was almost never photographed indulging her lifelong smoking habit, Barack went to great lengths to conceal his smoking from the public. He did so, he explained to one reporter, who agreed not to write about his smoking habit, because he believed it would cost him votes. People who smoked, he said, were “no longer cool. People think you lack personal discipline if you smoke.”

  Driven to and from campaign stops in a chauffeured black SUV, he would hunker down in the back of the car and sneak a few drags while he talked on his cell phone. As the SUV sped along the highway, he rolled down the window and tossed out one glowing cigarette butt after another. In the side door pocket, where he also stashed a dog-eared copy of the Bible for quick reference, Barack kept gum and Binaca to mask the smell on his breath.

  Barack, who preferred Marlboros, felt free to smoke at home—although Michelle occasionally railed against him for exposing their daughters to secondhand smoke—in closed-door meetings with his staff, on the chartered plane that he used to barnstorm the state. But as the pace of the campaign quickened and the stress mounted, he found himself becoming increasingly testy—particularly when he was unable to duck out of sight for a cigarette.

  “Having to hide it is killing him,” Michelle conceded to a coworker, adding that he seemed to be spending “half the time” looking for a stairwell or an alleyway where he could light up without being spotted by a reporter or a photographer.

  In the closing weeks of the campaign, the “Yes We Can” spots Barack had so vehemently opposed turned him into a statewide media star. Giggling girls and middle-aged women alike mobbed him on the street. Even the wife of one of his opponents looked like a smitten schoolgirl when he leaned in to kiss her on the cheek after a candidates’ debate. Meanwhile, volunteers—again overwhelmingly female—were flocking to the campaign. “People call it drinking the juice,” Dan Shomon said. “People start drinking the Obama juice. You can’t find enough for them to do.”

  Michelle had always been aware that her husband was attractive to the opposite sex, and that his long absences from home had given him ample opportunity to be unfaithful. But, unlike many of his fellow politicians, Barack had never been linked with other women. “He’s never given me reason to doubt him,” she told her friends more than once. “Not once.”

  Now that women were mobbing him on the street, even pushing Michelle out of the way to get to him, she began to confide to a few close friends that it was all getting to be “a real pain
in the ass.” According to a college friend, Michelle joked that she wasn’t going to let all the adulation “ go to his head.” But you could tell it wasn’t entirely a laughing matter to her. They have a trusting relationship—he’s a totally devoted husband and father—but no wife wants to see other women pawing her man.”

  Eventually, Michelle would resign herself to the fact that Barack would attract his share of political groupies. When asked if she worried that Barack might someday cheat on her, Michelle did not hesitate to answer. Obviously, she had given the issue plenty of thought. “First of all,” she said, “I can’t control someone else’s behavior. I’m not worried about some woman pushing up on my husband. With fidelity—with Barack and me—if somebody can come between us, we didn’t have much to begin with.”

  Those who knew them took Michelle’s laid-back answer with a grain of salt. “He has a huge ego, but he loves his girls too much to ever put his marriage in jeopardy,” said one adviser. Valerie Jarrett agreed that Barack had always been more than a little intimidated by Michelle. In their marriage, Jarrett observed, “there is a subtle element of fear on his part, which is good.”

  On primary night in March, everyone waited at the Pritzker-owned Hyatt Regency Hotel for election results to roll in. As Barack posed for photos with Malia and Sasha, Michelle assured everyone that her preternaturally calm husband was “really pretty excited” that he had won a staggering 53 percent of the vote in a four-way race. “They like you!” she told him, in a takeoff on Sally Field’s famous Oscar speech. “They really like you!” Then, when he finally stepped onstage to address his cheering supporters, Barack delivered the kind of rafter-ringing stem-winder they had come to expect.

  Behind the scenes, however, Barack was battling feelings of melancholy. Now that he was stepping onto the national stage, he knew he would be spending even less time with his family. He broke down on several occasions when he started talking about the girls. “God,” he admitted after one emotional moment, “I’m starting to remind myself of my mom.”

  In a dramatic turnabout, Michelle now reassured Barack that whatever sacrifices he made were well worth it—that as a U.S. Senator he would have the opportunity to influence the lives of millions. She also promised that she would do “whatever we have to do” to make sure that he would get to spend plenty of time with Malia and Sasha.

  First, he had to win the general election. The Republicans had fielded a formidable candidate in Jack Ryan, an articulate, movie-star handsome, Dartmouth-educated millionaire who had actually left Wall Street to become an inner-city high school teacher. Ryan was also a moderate with strong support outside Chicago, and early polls indicated he stood a good chance of eking out a narrow victory over Barack.

  Once again, fortune would smile on Barack. In the wake of Blair Hull’s troubles with sealed divorce records, the press quickly took note of the fact that Ryan had divorced TV star Jeri (Star Trek: Voyager, Boston Public, Boston Legal) Ryan, and that portions of those records were also sealed. The Chicago Tribune sued to have the files opened.

  Barack was campaigning downstate in mid-June 2004 when a Los Angeles court ordered Ryan’s divorce records unsealed. In sworn affidavits taken while the couple vied for custody of their young son, Jeri Ryan had accused her husband of taking her to sex clubs in New York and Paris where he demanded that she have sex with him in front of strangers. Ryan “wanted me to have sex with him there with another couple watching,” his ex-wife claimed. “I refused…. I was very upset.”

  Michelle was as dumbfounded as her husband. “Are you seeing this?” he asked when he called in from the road.

  “I know, I know,” she replied. “Crazy stuff. Can you believe this is happening again?”

  Barack and Michelle were both amazed that Ryan had run in the first place. “What was he thinking?” he mused. “I mean, he must have known it would get out.”

  Michelle agreed with David Axelrod and Barack’s other advisers that right now Barack should take the high road and say nothing. It was only a matter of time, they believed, before Ryan would be forced by his own party to bow out of the race.

  They were right. Ryan pulled out of the race on June 25, 2004. Once again, before the contest could begin in earnest, Barack’s main opponent had fallen victim to a sordid sex scandal. “You really have got to wonder,” he said to Michelle, “why these guys get into a race like this when they must know it’s going to bite them in the ass.”

  Now there was speculation that the Republicans would field a high-profile candidate with instant name recognition—someone like former Chicago Bears coach turned TV personality Mike Ditka. When she heard Ditka’s name mentioned, Michelle, who appreciated just how much Chicagoans loved their hometown sports heroes, grimaced. “He could be trouble,” she murmured.

  With Republicans holding a 51 to 48 edge in the U.S. Senate, the Democrats needed something to help their young candidate capture the Illinois seat. As the Democratic National Convention approached that July, Axelrod, Obama communications director Robert Gibbs, Pritzker, Abner Mikva, and virtually dozens of other well-connected party members were urging officials to pick Barack to give the keynote address. Their argument: that like such keynote speakers as Texas Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, New York Governor Mario Cuomo, and Texas Governor Ann Richards, Barack knew how to fire up a crowd.

  The man who would make the ultimate decision—presumptive presidential nominee John Kerry—had seen that quality in Barack firsthand. Barack had appeared in June at a fund-raiser for the Massachusetts Senator, and later at a factory where the two men discussed on-the-job training programs with workers. Both times Kerry, who realized that others perceived him as stiff and humorless, was impressed with how effortlessly Barack worked the crowd. Nor did it hurt that Barack was a fellow Harvard graduate and had taken an early stand against the war in Iraq.

  As he was driving from Springfield to Chicago, Barack got the call from Kerry’s campaign manager, Mary Beth Cahill. Clicking off his cell phone, he quickly called Axelrod with the news that he had been picked to deliver the keynote address. It was, the two men agreed, a “game changer.”

  When he hung up the phone, Barack leaned back in his seat. “I guess,” he said to his driver, Mike Signator, “this is pretty big.”

  “You could say that,” Signator agreed.

  No sooner had Barack told Michelle that he was the convention’s keynote speaker than she was sharing the news with relatives and friends. Although Barack’s staff sent him previous keynote addresses by Jordan, Cuomo, Richards, and others, Michelle knew that Barack’s speech would have a tone of its own. “They were great speakers,” she said, “but Barack is unique.”

  Still juggling his duties as a State Senator with the rigors of a U.S. Senate campaign, Barack organized his thoughts in the car as he drove back and forth between Chicago and the Illinois capital. Then, sitting in a hotel room in Springfield, he spent hours crafting the speech on yellow legal pads in his distinctively loopy, left-handed scrawl. Later the inveterate night owl would return to the Obamas’ Chicago condo and retire to the Hole, where he stayed up until 2 A.M. transcribing the handwritten copy onto his computer.

  Barack made endless revisions to the speech, which he then e-mailed to staffers at virtually any time of the day or night. The Kerry staff also had a hand in editing the address, but Michelle, who was being shown drafts as the process proceeded, urged her husband to resist their changes. “Stick to your guns,” she told him. “You’re the only one who knows what’s right for you.”

  When Kerry’s people excised the line “I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper,” Michelle and Barack’s staff insisted that it be put back in. “Are they kidding?” she asked, knowing that black audiences had gone wild every time Barack had uttered those words in the past. “That stays, definitely.”

  More than fifteen thousand reporters were in Boston to cover the Democratic National Convention, and a sizable chunk of them descended on Barack when he arriv
ed in town. Without ever having uttered a word on the national stage, he was already a media star, squeezing dozens of radio and print interviews in between appearances on NBC’s Meet the Press, CBS’s Face the Nation, and ABC’s Nightline.

  Michelle was unimpressed. “All of this is very flattering,” she told a reporter, “but he will not get a big head. We have a six-year-old and a three-year-old who couldn’t care less about all of this, and he comes home to that every night.”

  In reality, Michelle worried that her husband was being pulled in too many directions. On Tuesday, July 27—the day of his keynote address—Barack was looking haggard as he practiced the speech, surrounded by Axelrod, Gibbs, and a dozen other aides. Although he had whittled it down to his allotted time of seventeen minutes, leaving out much of his own history so he would have time to sing the praises of the candidate, his aides were still eager to put in their two cents.

  There were added pressures: Barack had never addressed a crowd as large as this (five thousand delegates on the floor at Boston’s Fleet Center and, even though it was not being broadcast at prime time, a cable TV audience of millions). Nor had he ever used a teleprompter. And, after talking to so many reporters since his arrival in Boston, Barack now had a seriously sore throat.

  The rehearsals took on a more urgent tone as the appointed time for the keynote address approached. At one point during one of these practice sessions, Barack grew visibly angry as he was peppered with suggestions for last-minute changes. “We were spending intense sessions tinkering with wording and commas,” said a senior member of Obama’s team. “It was pretty tense, because everybody was picking at Barack and making suggestions. He was getting a little irate.”

  To say the least. Mr. Unflappable gazed in amazement at Axelrod and the others. “Why the hell are you bringing this up now?” Barack demanded, shaking his head.

  It was then that he locked eyes with Michelle, who had been sitting calmly, watching him and digesting what the others had to say. “She was kind of handling both him as well as some of the speech,” the staff member said. “She was listening intently and, without being overly directive, was somebody that he could glance over to, almost a telepathic kind of relationship. He was clearly looking to her for her reaction.”