That frigid morning in Springfield, Barack and Michelle, both clad in long black overcoats, strode hand in hand to the wooden podium that had been set up on the capitol steps. Against the backdrop of the pillar-ringed statehouse rotunda and with Michelle looking on, Barack drew parallels between himself and the Great Emancipator. “As Lincoln organized the forces arrayed against slavery, he was heard to say: ‘Of strange, discordant, and even hostile elements, we gathered from the four winds, and formed and fought to battle through,’” Barack told the crowd. “That is our purpose here today. That’s why I’m in this race. Not just to hold an office, but to gather with you and transform a nation.”
Michelle nodded in agreement. “And that is why,” he continued, “in the shadow of the Old State Capitol, where Lincoln once called on a divided house to stand together, where common hopes and common dreams still live, I stand before you today to announce my candidacy for the presidency of the United States.”
With that, the crowd exploded in chants of “Obama! Obama!” as the handsome couple and their beautiful children, wrapped in wool caps and scarves, waved from the capitol steps. After the speech, Barack headed straight for Iowa, where the first votes in the Democratic primary process would be cast a year later. By this time, he had adopted a new greeting as he shook the hands of voters that was as cloying as it was awkward. “I,” he would say with conviction, “appreciate you.”
The day after Barack formally announced his candidacy, the Obamas’ joint interview with Steve Croft aired on CBS’s 60 Minutes. Michelle and Barack, both mindful of the fact that it was Croft whose questions back in 1992 about Bill Clinton’s alleged infidelity prompted Hillary Clinton to say she wasn’t “some Tammy Wynette standin’ by her man,” waited for a gotcha moment that never came.
Instead, Michelle reiterated that one of the prerequisites for the race was that Barack “couldn’t be a smoking President. Please, America, watch,” she joked into the camera. “Keep an eye on him and call me if you see him smoking.”
It was in this role as the great leveler that Michelle found her groove. That March, at a fund-raiser in New York, Michelle rolled out the crowd-pleasing shtick that would serve as her mantra throughout the campaign. Just as Barack could be guaranteed a laugh when he claimed that people usually referred to him as “Alabama” or “Yo Mama,” Michelle riffed on his shortcomings as a husband.
“He’s a man who’s just awesome,” she began, “but he’s still a man…. There’s Barack Obama the phenomenon, Barack Obama the genius, the editor of the Harvard Law Review, the constitutional law scholar, the civil rights attorney, the community organizer, the bestselling author, the Grammy winner. This Barack Obama guy’s pretty impressive.
“Then,” she added with a wry smirk, “there’s the Barack Obama that lives in my house. That guy’s not so impressive. He still has trouble putting the bread up and putting his socks actually in the dirty clothes and he still doesn’t do a better job than our five-year-old daughter, Sasha, making his bed. So you have to forgive me if I’m a little stunned by this whole Barack Obama thing.”
Often, Barack was there to take Michelle’s good-natured needling. “Hey, you left the butter on the counter this morning,” she would say as he shook his head and grinned sheepishly. “You’re just asking for it. You know I’m giving a speech about you today.”
Barack loved it. “I’m often reminded by events, if not by my wife,” he would say, “that I’m not a perfect man.”
Soon she was drawing crowds almost as big as her husband’s—in some cases ten thousand or more. More important, after each appearance she collected more signed commitment cards than Barack. When Axelrod and others complimented Michelle on her speech-making ability, she was taken aback. “Why,” she asked indignantly, “is everybody so surprised?”
Soon Barack’s staff had a new nickname for Michelle. They called her “The Closer.”
On the national stage, however, stories of Barack’s failings—his snoring, his morning breath, his odd penchant for leaving his underwear on the kitchen floor—did not play quite so well. Some critics believed that Michelle’s good-natured ribbing diminished the first black man seeking to occupy the White House.
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd went further, accusing Michelle of making “emasculating” remarks about her husband that only served to make him look like an “undisciplined child.” Dowd began calling Barack “Obambi.”
When asked to comment, Michelle shrugged off Dowd’s comments. “She obviously,” the candidate’s wife said, “doesn’t know who I am.” But privately, Michelle expressed anger at what she saw as an attempt to cast her as “just another angry, castrating black woman beating up on her husband. That’s the stereotype, right? The mold I’m supposed to fit?”
Later, with Barack’s blessing, she addressed the issue head-on. “Somehow I’ve been caricatured as his emasculating wife,” she said at one point. “Barack and I laugh about that. It’s just sort of like, do you think anyone could emasculate Barack Obama? Really now.”
As for toning down her remarks: “I know who I need to be,” Michelle declared in answer to her critics. “I’m a grown-up. I’ve seen it up and I’ve seen it down, and I know who I need to be to stay true to who I am.”
During the campaign, Michelle, who never resorted to notes, would seldom deviate from her standard forty-five-minute script. In addition to pointing out her husband’s accomplishments and his harmless, endearing foibles, Michelle spoke of her Chicago roots. “Ozzie and Harriet—South Side working-class version,” she said of her childhood. “My favorite mental images are of family. Summertime images of barbecues and folks sitting around, kids playing. Of just being with the people you’ve loved your entire life, and feeling a sense of security and comfort and safety—the feelings and emotions, for me, of what it means to be an African American.”
For Michelle, life on the road—even though she was never away from Sasha and Malia for long—quickly took its toll. On the hustings, she devoted part of her spiel to talking about how she still managed to juggle campaigning and motherhood. “I get them to a neighbor’s if I can’t get them to school,” she said of her children. “I get on a plane. I come to a city. I do several events. I get on a plane. I get home before bedtime. And by doing that, yeah, I’m a little tired at the end of the day, but the girls, they just think Mommy was at work. They don’t know I was in New Hampshire. Quite frankly, they don’t care.”
Marian Robinson’s decision to retire in the summer of 2007 so she could pitch in more with the grandchildren would prove to be a “godsend” for Michelle. Robinson, in turn, had nothing but “total admiration” for her daughter’s commitment to the campaign. “I think supporting her husband is what is necessary,” Robinson said. “For her to dive into it the way she does is just the way she does everything.” But, Michelle confided to a small group of women volunteers in Las Vegas, “This is hard. This is really a hard thing. This isn’t a natural choice to be made in your life. It’s strange, all this.”
Then why do it? she was asked. “I took myself down every dark road you could go on, just to prepare myself before we jumped out there,” she said. “The bottom line is, man, the little sacrifice we have to make is nothing compared to the possibility of what we could do if this catches on.”
Besides, she admitted that Barack made it hard for her to complain. “It’s harder for him, being on the road,” she said. “I’ve got my girls and our routine. I am feeling their love. He is missing that.”
Through it all, Michelle tried to maintain something resembling a normal home life for her children. After returning from a campaign event in Minnesota, she squeezed in a workout and then stopped off at Target in her gym clothes to buy toilet paper. The next day she was off again—this time to give speeches in New York and Connecticut before heading home to take Malia and Sasha to ballet classes and a performance of Disney on Ice. In the few moments she could spare for herself, Michelle might sit back and watch reruns
of two of her favorite TV programs—Sex and the City and The Dick Van Dyke Show.
Whenever Barack managed to break away from the campaign for a few days and return to Chicago, Michelle insisted “that he be part of this life, real life. He doesn’t come home,” she insisted, “as the grand poohbah.”
Even when he did manage to steal a day or two to spend with his family, Barack was distracted by endless phone calls, text messages, and e-mails. Axelrod was accustomed to getting midnight calls from his boss; he always knew when Obama was calling by his ring tone—“Signed, Sealed, Delivered” by Stevie Wonder.
Increasingly, Michelle would wake up in the middle of the night to discover that her husband had sneaked out of bed and into the study, where he was frantically scribbling notes. That is how, Michelle told a friend, she could tell Barack was “really stressed out. When he is writing small notes late at night. When he’s really sort of brooding about something, it’s late at night, and there’s a lot of little note writing going on. That’s when I know.”
That’s also when Michelle would put on her robe and join him in the study. “What’s happened?” she would find herself asking again and again. “What’s going on?” Barack never hesitated to share his problems with her. “Michelle is his sounding board,” Valerie Jarrett said. “There is not a problem he would hesitate to share with her, because he knows she’ll never hold back.” Unlike other advisers who might be less than forthcoming, Michelle is “very direct. She’d tell him exactly what she’s thinking” before returning to bed.
Much later, Barack would join her and fall fast asleep, only to be jostled by Sasha and Malia as they climbed under the covers with their parents just after dawn. Michelle would turn on the lights: “So we’re sort of waking up. And we talk. We talk about Daddy being President, about adolescence, about the questions they have.” Through it all, Daddy would lie there, motionless. “A dead body,” sniffed Michelle. Eventually, the girls stopped joining them in bed if Barack was there because, said Michelle, “Daddy is too snorey and stinky.”
Such lines drew the expected laughs when Michelle delivered them on the stump. But many people were surprised to discover that the overall tone of her message was decidedly downbeat. While Barack traveled the country spreading his generally optimistic message of hope and change, his wife seemed to relish the role of bad cop—especially when talking to African American audiences.
Black church ladies made up Michelle’s most receptive audiences, and she took great care to speak to them in their language. “On behalf of my church home and my pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright,” she invariably began, “I bring greetings.”
Then, to establish her working-class African American credentials, she spoke of the Robinson family’s South Carolina roots, of her South Side girlhood, and the relatives who saved up enough money to buy nice furniture just to wrap it in plastic. To those who feared for Barack’s life were he to be elected—following a series of threats, he had already been assigned Secret Service protection—Michelle implored audiences not to “wrap us in plastic just because you’re afraid.”
Relaxing into the black vernacular, Michelle instructed her listeners to get “ten other triflin’ people in your life” to volunteer for her husband or to contribute to his campaign. She wanted them to do this now, she said, because America under George W. Bush was a divided nation “guided by fear,” a country that is “downright mean.” We are “cynical” and “lazy…. We just don’t care about each other anymore.”
Health care? “Let me tell you,” she warned, “don’t get sick in America.” College? “Who can afford it? We just got out of debt ourselves.” Retirement? “Pensions are drying up. People have to work longer than they ever thought they’d have to.” The bottom line, according to Michelle: “We have become a nation of struggling folks who are barely making it every day. Folks are just jammed up, and it’s gotten worse over my lifetime. And, doggone it, I’m young!”
Michelle’s unremittingly bleak view of America actually played well in these venues. But once again, on the larger national stage, Michelle’s caustic observations made her look…bitter.
Indeed, once she was no longer playing to an audience, Michelle seemed oddly detached. “Her bearing is less royal than military: brisk, often stone-faced…mordant,” commented the New Yorker’s Lauren Collins. “Her winningly chipmunk-cheeked smile is doled out sparingly, a privilege to be earned, rather than an icebreaker or an entreaty.”
Barack’s minders considered Michelle’s candor to be something of a double-edged sword. “Occasionally it gives campaign people heartburn,” allowed Axelrod, who complained to Barack that his wife’s comments might alienate white voters. “She’s fundamentally honest—goes out there, speaks her mind, jokes. She doesn’t parse her words or select them with an antenna for political correctness.”
It was a problem shared by at least one of the seven other Democrats running for President at the time. When asked in February 2007 what he thought about newcomer Barack Obama, longtime Delaware Senator Joe Biden said, “I mean, you got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s storybook, man.”
No sooner had African American leaders expressed indignation over Biden’s use of the word clean to describe Barack than Biden called Barack to apologize. He also issued a statement and spoke to reporters trying to clarify what he meant. “My mother has an expression: clean as a whistle, sharp as a tack,” he explained. “That’s all I was trying to say.”
Barack brushed it off. “He was very gracious,” he said of his fellow Senator. “I have no problem with Joe Biden.”
But Michelle did. “‘The first African American who is articulate and bright and clean,’” she said as she read Biden’s comments in the New York Times. “Gee, go figure. He’s black and he’s articulate and he’s clean. So typical—I’ve heard things like that all my life. ‘My, you’re so well-spoken—you sound just like a white girl!’” According to one acquaintance, “Michelle was furious with Joe Biden. It rolled off Barack’s back, but not hers.”
Ignoring her critics, Michelle crisscrossed the country with her “something’s wrong with America” message. “We are our own evil,” she said at one campaign event, claiming at another that, because of its inherent racism, the United States was the only country “on the planet” where “a man with the credentials and the commitment and the ability of Barack Obama” would have difficulty being elected President. To supporters in Iowa, she stated flatly that, while her husband was prepared to be President, it remained to be seen if Americans were worthy of him. “Barack cannot lead a nation,” she said, “that is not ready to be led.”
To be sure, the Obama campaign faced an uphill battle. Despite a state-of-the-art Internet operation devised in part by twenty-four-year-old Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes, and a hit “Yes We Can” YouTube video by hiphop artist will.i.am, Barack lagged far behind Hillary in the polls.
The situation only got worse in April, when Barack squared off against Clinton, Biden, former North Carolina Senator John Edwards, Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, and former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel in the first of seventeen nationally televised Democratic primary debates. When asked how he would respond to a surprise terrorist attack, Barack waffled. In comparison with Hillary, who promised to “move as swiftly as is prudent to retaliate,” Obama stammered a vague response that made him sound, said Time’s Karen Tumulty, “like a candidate to head the volunteer fire department.”
From the outset, Hillary did not hesitate to charge that Barack’s inexperience and immaturity made him “unelectable.” Barack, however, was reluctant to strike back. “I am not interested in tearing into Hillary Clinton,” he replied when asked why he wasn’t taking a more forceful stand. “I think she is an admirable person, a capable Senator.”
In an attempt to offset criticism that Barack appeared “detached
” and “aloof” during the first debate, the Obamas hauled out their biggest gun. On May 2, 2007, Oprah appeared on CNN’s Larry King Live to announce that, for the first time, she was endorsing a candidate for President. “What he stands for,” she told King, “is worth me going out on a limb for.” Her endorsement of Barack, she added, “doesn’t mean I’m against Hillary. I haven’t got anything negative to say about Hillary Clinton.”
Like her husband and Oprah, Michelle had also long admired the Clintons. Bill had been so popular in the African American community that he was often affectionately referred to as the country’s “first black President,” and it seemed only fitting that, after leaving the White House, he would establish his postpresidential headquarters in Harlem.
Yet, after Hillary sniped that Barack had done nothing to prove he was worthy of the nomination, Michelle, in the words of a friend, “lost respect for the Clintons.” She now joined with Obama’s inner circle of advisers—whom Gibbs described as “panicked”—in urging Barack to “punch harder.”
Barack resisted. “That’s not,” he said, “who I am.”
After he stumbled during the second debate, Michelle told him point-blank that he was going down to defeat if he did not “take off the gloves.”
Chimed in Axelrod: “Michelle is right: you have got to engage.”
The Hillary juggernaut continued through the summer months. As late as September 2007, polls put her 23 points ahead of Barack; 37 percent of voters did not even know who Obama was.
It was then that Barack finally decided to strike back. During the subsequent debates and in interview after interview, he charged that it was Hillary who was unelectable. She was a polarizing figure, a symbol of politics as usual, and, Barack pointed out repeatedly, an early supporter of the war in Iraq—a war that he had opposed from the beginning.
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