After the hugs and handshakes were over, Barack had to face the sobering fact that his family would be returning to Chicago without him. “I want you and the girls to move with me to Washington,” he had told Michelle. “I’ve been apart from Malia and Sasha for too long as it is. I’ll just miss you all too much.”
But his longtime pal Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel was among the many who urged him to leave his family behind. Michelle remained close to her mother, who still lived in the same tiny apartment where Michelle and Craig grew up. Besides Marian Robinson and the built-in support network of relatives and friends that Chicago offered, Michelle still had her job at the University of Chicago hospitals. While Emanuel tried to convince Barack that it would be best for him to simply divide his time between Washington and Chicago, Rahm’s wife, Amy, told Michelle that she knew from experience that such a plan was workable.
What eventually persuaded Michelle to remain in Chicago was the fact that her children were already enrolled in school there—both at the Lab School, a private school affiliated with the University of Chicago. The girls were also extremely close to their grandmother, who often took care of them when Michelle was working, on the campaign trail with her husband, or standing in for him. “With all the crazy stuff going on,” she said, “the best thing right now is not to disrupt their lives.”
Reluctantly, Barack rented a one-bedroom apartment in a high-rise complex not far from Georgetown Law School. He stayed there from Tuesday night through Thursday night before flying back to Chicago on Friday afternoon. Saturdays were taken up with meetings and other business, leaving all day Sunday to catch up with his wife and their little girls. In between, Michelle kept a journal of the girls’ activities that she e-mailed him each day.
Trying to adjust to the proverbial joys of bachelorhood—take-out food, hours watching sports on TV, settling in with a good book—Barack soon found himself calling home several times a day just to hear the sound of his wife’s and daughters’ voices. He also admitted that he was so “domesticated, soft, and helpless” that he forgot to buy a shower curtain.
At age forty-five, Senator Obama was in the throes of separation anxiety. “I am just lonely as hell for my wife and kids,” he told a Senate colleague after just a few weeks. “It’s really getting to me.”
Not that he had that much time to himself. With an eye toward positioning Barack for either a vice presidential or presidential run as early as 2008, his team had devised a plan—actually referred to by Axelrod and Gibbs as “the Plan”—to keep him front and center on the national scene and build his reputation as a potential leader.
Toward that end, the freshman Senator’s agenda in Washington was packed with meetings—he promptly landed a plum assignment on the career-burnishing Foreign Relations Committee—and he was soon planning tours to Eastern Europe, Russia, and the Middle East. Back home in Illinois, Barack conducted at least one town hall meeting a week as part of an ongoing effort to shore up grassroots support. When he wasn’t there, Michelle took up the slack. “There is no better stand-in for Barack,” said an aide, “than Michelle. Frankly, they can connect with her in a way that they can’t connect with him. And she can sing his praises until the cows come home, and everybody accepts it because she’s his wife.”
In addition to their elevated public profile, the Obamas were discovering that Barack’s meteoric rise was having a substantial impact on their family finances. When Barack was selected to give the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention, his loyal agent and friend, Jane Dystel, looked into reclaiming the rights to Dreams from My Father and selling it to a new publisher. But Random House’s Crown division, which still owned the book, had moved quickly to reissue it in paperback.
Obama’s convention speech and the frenzy of interest it spawned propelled Dreams from My Father onto the New York Times Best Seller List; eventually, it would sell an estimated two million copies in the United States and earn Barack more than two million dollars in royalties.
Following his election to the Senate, Barack signed a new two-book deal with Crown for more than two million dollars. But this time, Michelle urged Barack to repay Dystel’s loyalty by replacing her with high-powered Washington lawyer Robert Barnett. According to former Times Books publisher Peter Osnos, who signed up Dreams back when Obama was a law student, the reason was obvious. “Whereas agents take a flat percentage of all the client’s earnings—usually fifteen percent these days,” Osnos said, “Barnett charges by the hour, which means that the bill is substantially smaller.”
Dystel, whom Osnos described as “a feisty sort,” was furious. “I have no idea about the details of the interaction between Barnett, Dystel, and Obama,” he said, “but I would bet it was not warm and fuzzy.”
The entire episode left a sour taste in Osnos’s mouth. “I just wish that this virtuous symbol…did not move quite so smoothly into a system of riches as a reward for service,” he said, “especially before it has actually been rendered.”
In the immediate wake of her husband’s Senate victory, Michelle reaped a financial windfall of her own. She returned to full-time work at the University of Chicago hospitals—and a promotion to Vice President for External Affairs that nearly tripled her salary to $316,962, from $121,910.
In justifying the dramatic and curiously timed pay hike, hospital officials pointed out that over two years Michelle had transformed a two-person part-time office into a full-time staff of seventeen and quadrupled the total number of volunteers to nearly eighteen hundred. “I wanted to send a strong message to our community that I was committed to it,” said Michelle’s boss Michael Riordan, “so I wanted to make this a vice presidential position.”
Riordan laughed off the suggestion that Michelle’s promotion was aimed at currying favor in Washington. “She was hired before Barack was Barack,” he insisted. “Michelle is the real deal and really earned every bit of her promotion on her own.” In what was probably an unfortunate choice of words, Riordan added, “She is worth her weight in gold, and she is just terrific.” (Conflict-of-interest allegations would arise months later when Senator Obama tried and failed to earmark one million dollars in federal funds for a new pavilion at the hospital.)
Michelle’s fortunes would improve even further in early 2005, when she began searching for companies eager to increase minority representation on their boards. By June, she was appointed to the board of TreeHouse Foods, one of Wal-Mart’s principal suppliers. For attending a few meetings a year, she was paid forty-five thousand dollars, with stock options that after the first full year would total sixty thousand.
Now able to pay off those college loans and settle their other long-standing debts, Michelle and Barack were in the market to move up to a nicer home. In the spring of 2005, Barack’s controversial low-income housing developer friend, Tony Rezko, called with the news that the doctor who lived across the street from Rezko in the South Side’s tony Kenwood enclave had put his home on the market.
When real estate agent Donna Schwan of MetroPro Corporation and Rezko took Michelle to see the property, she could not conceal her enthusiasm. The sixty-four-hundred-square-foot, ninety-six-year-old redbrick Georgian Revival occupied a double lot on the corner of South Greenwood Drive and East Hyde Park Boulevard. The house stood not far from the home of Muhammad Ali and directly across the street from the Byzantine KAM Isaiah Israel Temple, with its immense dome and tiled minaret.
The three-story structure at 5046 South Greenwood Drive boasted six bedrooms, six bathrooms, four fireplaces, and a wine cellar capable of storing more than a thousand bottles. The price for the house: $1.95 million. To complicate matters further, the doctor was insisting on selling the separately listed $625,000 building lot at the same time.
Michelle called her husband in DC and told him about Rezko’s find. “So, Tony really thinks it would be great for us,” Barack said. “What do you think?”
“I’m in,” Michelle told him. “I love this house. But,” she qui
ckly added, “it’s more than we were talking about paying for, but I really think it’s a great house, you should go take a look at it.”
A few days later, Rezko took Barack on a tour of the house. Barack was as “blown away” as Michelle had been, but he told Rezko that at nearly two million dollars, the asking price was just beyond the range he could afford.
Rezko, who had pumped some $250,000 into Barack’s various campaigns, was already working on a plan to bring the house within his friends’ reach. If his wife, Rita, bought the vacant lot for the full $625,000 asking price, that would give the Obamas the leverage they needed to negotiate a better deal on the house.
It was already widely known that Rezko was under investigation by the FBI for corrupt business dealings (he would eventually be convicted on sixteen counts of paying—and taking—kickbacks). Barack asked his most trusted adviser—Michelle—if she thought Rezko’s plan might at least have the appearance of impropriety.
Michelle was indignant. “He’s a good friend,” she told him. “There’s nothing wrong with what he’s suggesting.” Michelle, who now owned a mink coat, several designer dresses, and more than one pair of five-hundred-dollar Jimmy Choo shoes, knew that money and the trappings of success meant little to her husband. But she also felt they deserved a Chicago residence befitting the family of a U.S. Senator. More to the point, Michelle wanted their girls to grow up in a house with a big backyard where they could play with their friends.
“Barack wanted his family to be comfortable,” said a friend, “but he would have been satisfied with three spoons, a fork, and a dish. It was an issue for her.” The bottom line, Barack would later say, was that Michelle was “determined to have that house.”
Barack called Rezko up and told him that Michelle was on board with his plan. With Rita Rezko agreeing to purchase the “garden lot,” the Obamas were able to shave $300,000 off the asking price and buy the house for $1.65 million. Rita Rezko and the Obamas closed both deals on the same day in June 2005.
Not long after the Obamas moved into their new house, they inexplicably decided to buy a ten-foot-wide strip of the adjacent lot from Rita Rezko for $25,000, or $84,500 above the $40,500 appraisal. The purchase aided the Obamas because it rendered the adjacent lot unbuildable. (Later, when he was being pilloried in the Chicago press for dealing with a notorious slumlord who was headed for federal prison, Obama confessed that the property purchases had been “a bonehead move…. I consider this a mistake on my part,” he added, “and I regret it.”)
Consumed with town meetings, working on his new book, and making campaign appearances for fellow Democrats around the country, Barack had little opportunity to enjoy his spacious new digs. But when he was home, he did what he could to please his wife. “I try to be more thoughtful,” he said of this period in their marriage. “Sometimes it is just the little gestures that make a big difference. Just me putting the dishes in the dishwasher. Making sure I come home for dinner, even if I have to go back out.”
Barack also boasted that he would occasionally do the laundry—but without folding it. “Which is pretty useless,” Michelle hastened to point out. What Barack’s wife appreciated most was that he was her “biggest cheerleader, as a mother, as a wife and as a career person. He’s always telling me how great I’m doing. That helps keep you going when you realize that you have someone who appreciates all the hard work that you are doing—even if they don’t do enough to help!”
Michelle was equally insistent that he make time for the children—no matter what. “You’ll be there,” she often told him when there was a school pageant or a game that was too important for him to skip. “You’re doing this. Period.”
On those occasions when she did not prevail, Michelle made her displeasure known. When Barack missed one of Malia’s basketball games to campaign for New Jersey Governor John Corzine on a Sunday—the one day they had agreed to reserve strictly for the family—Michelle, in the words of one aide, “blasted him.” Later, Michelle facetiously remarked, “It’s a tough choice between ‘Do you stay for Malia’s basketball game on Sunday or do you go to New Jersey and campaign for Corzine?’ Corzine got it this time around, but it’s a constant pull to say, ‘Hey, guys, you have a family here.’”
Still, Barack attended parent-teacher conferences and, at Michelle’s insistence, always played some role in putting together the children’s birthday parties. On the eve of Sasha’s June birthday, Barack was instructed to go to the store and bring back pizza, ice, and balloons. When he volunteered to get goody bags for the twenty-odd party guests, Michelle pulled him back from the brink.
“You can’t handle goody bags,” she said, imitating Jack Nicholson’s marine colonel character on the stand in A Few Good Men. “You have to go into the party store and choose the bags. Then you have to choose what to put in the bags, and what is in the boys’ bags has to be different from what is in the girls’ bags.” After he had wandered around the store for an hour, Michelle told him, his “head would explode.”
The girls’ birthday slumber parties had become, in Daddy’s words, such “big productions” over the years that Barack and Michelle made it clear there would be no birthday presents from Mommy and Daddy. “We spend hundreds on their parties,” Daddy explained, “and we want to teach some limits.”
The same went for Christmas: none of the presents under the tree were officially from Mommy and Daddy. “I know there is a Santa,” Malia once told them, “because there’s no way you’d buy me all that stuff.”
That Halloween, Malia and Sasha both dressed up as witches, and Barack took them trick-or-treating around their Kenwood and Hyde Park neighborhoods. During the holidays, when Michelle noted that Barack’s staff had scheduled him for a Democratic Party fund-raiser in Florida on the same day as Malia’s Nutcracker recital, she glowered at her husband. “You don’t miss it,” she said pointedly. Somehow he managed to catch Malia’s afternoon performance, dash to a private plane that waited for him at Chicago’s Midway Airport, and arrive in Tampa just in time for the fund-raiser.
Not even the Obamas’ annual holiday in Hawaii was sacrosanct. Instead of flying out with the family the week before Christmas, the Senator stayed behind in Washington. He was to join them later, but the idea that Michelle and the girls had headed west without him hit Barack hard. In the middle of a meeting, he looked at his watch, gazed out the window, and sighed. “We’d be over the Pacific now,” he said.
When he did join them in Hawaii, Barack turned off his ever-present BlackBerry and returned, however briefly, to the soul-recharging business of being a full-time dad. He and Michelle swam and snorkled with the girls at Sandy Beach Park, bodysurfed at Kailua Beach, and spent long hours visiting Toot.
On this particular visit, Barack was even more concerned than usual with his grandmother’s deteriorating physical condition. The woman who had for all intents and purposes raised him was now suffering from a wide range of medical problems, from osteoporosis to cancer. Yet she continued to drink more than the family would have liked—and to smoke. Whatever damage he might have thought the latter was doing to the health of his beloved grandmother, Barack was in no position to lecture her. In fact, in Hawaii the two often unwound at the end of the day by sharing a smoke together as Michelle watched disapprovingly.
By 2006, The Plan to bolster Barack’s credentials as a national leader was in full swing. In April he appeared with actor and activist George Clooney at the National Press Club to speak about the ongoing conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan.
While photographers at the Press Club event swarmed around Clooney, no one paid much attention to AP photographer Mannie Garcia as he crouched down, snapping photos of the junior Senator from Illinois. Later, artist Shepard Fairey would transform the photo into a Warholesque portrait that would become an icon of the 2008 campaign. Later, when they noticed the image popping up again and again at events, Michelle wondered aloud when the photo was taken. Barack didn’t know. Besides, he said, he wasn’t
quite sure yet if he liked it.
That summer, he and Michelle embarked on a fifteen-day trip to Africa with a small army of reporters and photographers trailing behind them. “I offered him a ride,” his new friend Oprah Winfrey would later reveal. “He wouldn’t take it on my plane.” Instead, Barack and his entourage flew commercial.
In South Africa, Obama struck a pose for photographers inside the cell where Nelson Mandela had spent eighteen of his twenty-seven years in prison. Barack condemned the genocidal violence in Darfur, and in Kenya, where he joined Michelle and the girls, he spoke to the cheering thousands who clogged the streets just to catch a glimpse of the man they regarded as a native son.
With an eye toward bolstering both Barack’s standing abroad and his image as an inspiring, almost messianic figure at home, Axelrod, Gibbs, and the rest of Obama’s team were thrilled by the worshipful crowds that materialized wherever they went in Kenya. Barack, as self-possessed as ever, appeared to accept this undiluted adulation as his due. “He has a regal bearing, don’t you think?” said a top adviser with a self-satisfied grin. “Make that ‘presidential.’”
But there were moments, if only fleeting, that brought Barack down to earth. As he began to speak to a crowd gathered at the statehouse in Nairobi, Malia pleaded loudly, “Daddy, Daddy! Look at me!”
Michelle, who had already confessed to being “totally freaked out” by the crowds her husband could attract back in the United States, was nonplussed by their reception in Kenya. “What was that?” she asked when the crowd waiting outside their hotel roared their approval as Barack stepped into view. “I mean,” she said with a look of dismay on her face, “do they know him?”
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