Barack and Michelle

by Christopher Andersen

  Understandably, there were those on Barack’s team who delighted in Bristol’s predicament. Michelle was not one of them. Aware that Palin was also raising a four-month-old son suffering from Down syndrome, Michelle told Barack that she had “nothing but sympathy” for the Governor. Barack agreed, issuing a statement defending the Palin family’s right to privacy and warning his campaign staff not to make any comments about Bristol’s pregnancy.

  Five days after Barack’s historic acceptance speech in Denver, Palin gave an acceptance speech of her own at the Republican Convention in Saint Paul, Minnesota. The Alaska Governor’s address, which electrified Republicans and engrossed a TV audience even larger than the one Barack had drawn, was aimed squarely at white working-class voters—some of whom had supported Hillary. Palin was not shy about praising Clinton and reminding Hillary’s supporters that there was still a woman they could vote for in the general election.

  Palin managed to hold her own against Biden in the sole vice presidential debate on October 2, but a series of disastrous TV interviews chipped away at the public’s desire to put her a heartbeat away from the presidency. Palin would be the topic of several phone calls between Barack and Michelle, who admitted to being “fascinated by this woman.”

  The presidential candidates themselves, meanwhile, went toe-to-toe in three debates. During the second debate, a town hall-style event in Nashville, McCain pointed to Barack and referred to him as “that one” to make a point. Later, McCain joked that he was simply taking a cue from Oprah. “She called him ‘the one.’ I just called him ‘that one.’ What’s the big deal?”

  Michelle got the joke. For the foreseeable future, whenever she wanted to bring him down a peg, she took special pleasure in calling her husband “that one.”

  For the remainder of the campaign, it often seemed as if both candidates would take a backseat to Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, a plumbing contractor who confronted Barack as he campaigned door-to-door in Ohio. When Wurzelbacher demanded to know if Barack’s tax plan would cost him as a small business owner, Obama replied offhandedly, “I think that when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

  The comment was captured on video, and soon Wurzelbacher—now simply known as “Joe the Plumber”—was being touted by Republicans as a working-class hero who had dared to expose Barack’s tax-and-spend, share-the-wealth agenda. During the final presidential debate, at Hofstra University in New York, McCain invoked Joe the Plumber’s name no fewer than nine times.

  Away from reporters, Michelle and Barack joked about Joe the Plumber. While Barack had cautioned everyone associated with the campaign to avoid taking personal shots at McCain, Michelle could not disguise her contempt for Joe the Plumber—especially when it was revealed that he was not really a licensed plumber and he had actually not paid all his taxes. (In fairness, even McCain saw the humor in his Joe the Plumber rap when South Carolina’s Republican Senator Lindsey Graham started calling their old Senate pal “Joe the Biden.”)

  While Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber seemed to be dominating the airwaves—along with a worsening economic crisis that looked increasingly impossible for the Republicans to overcome—an Obama family drama was unfolding half a world away. On the eve of the October 7 presidential debate in Tennessee, Barack’s grandmother had fallen in her Honolulu apartment and broken her hip. She was treated at Kaiser Permanente’s Moanalua Medical Center, and returned home.

  Over the next two weeks, her condition deteriorated. On October 20, Barack’s sister Maya, who now taught at Honolulu’s La Pietra–Hawaii School for Girls and cared for their grandmother, called to tell him that Toot, who was also battling a recurrence of cancer, might die at any time.

  “I never saw self-pity or fear,” Maya said of their grandmother. “She was clear about wanting to stay home, protective of us, dignified, and determined to be herself to the very end.” Toot kept her sense of humor, too. “Oh, my,” she told Maya as flowers flooded in from well-wishers. “With all this hullabaloo, it’s going to be embarrassing if I don’t die.”

  Three days after Maya called, Barack broke away from his campaign, boarded a plane, and flew nine hours to be by his beloved Toot’s side.

  For Barack, who had always regretted not being there when his mother died, it was important to say good-bye to the woman who raised him. “One of the things I wanted was to have a chance to sit down with her and talk to her,” he explained before departing for the islands. “She’s still alert and she still has all her faculties and I wanted to make sure that I don’t miss that opportunity right now.” He and Michelle decided that it would be best if Malia and Sasha stayed behind in Chicago with their mother.

  As soon as he landed in Honolulu, he went by motorcade straight to her Beretania Street apartment building. That night, he stayed at the Hyatt Waikiki Hotel before returning the next morning at eight fifteen to spend the day with Toot.

  At one point, Barack, wearing a T-shirt, went out for a stroll along Young Street—and, if he could avoid being spotted, a smoke. While the Secret Service kept a discreet distance, he got only so far as the Times Supermarket before a crowd began to gather. “Everybody was screaming and running,” recalled local resident Josef Werner. “Everybody was yelling, ‘Barack, Barack is here! Obama is here!’”

  Two days later, he was back on the campaign trail in Nevada. “She’s gravely ill,” Barack told ABC’s Good Morning America. “We weren’t sure and I’m still not sure she’ll make it to Election Day. We’re all praying and we hope she does.”

  It would not be long before another relative—this time on his father’s side of the family—was making news. On October 30, it was reported that Barack’s Auntie Zeituni, Barack Obama Sr.’s half sister Zeituni Onyango, was living in a Boston public housing project despite the fact that a federal judge had denied her political asylum from her native Kenya in 2002 and two years later ordered her to leave the country.

  Barack had written extensively about his beloved Auntie Zeituni in Dreams from My Father, and she had even attended the swearing-in ceremonies when he became a U.S. Senator in 2005. But Auntie Zeituni’s nephew claimed he was unaware of her immigration problems.

  Calling it “a family matter,” the McCain campaign chose not to pursue Auntie Zeituni’s illegal status as an election issue. In a bizarre twist, however, Homeland Security quietly issued a special directive requiring high-level approval before federal immigration agents arrested fugitives. Federal documents would later show that the Bush administration feared that arresting Obama’s aunt might generate “negative media or congressional interest”—that it would make it appear they were trying to influence the election.

  By the same token, new accusations of widespread voter registration fraud by Obama-friendly ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) fizzled, as did a last-minute TV blitz featuring some of the more outrageous statements by Jeremiah Wright. Asked by a reporter to comment on the latest round of GOP ads concerning the Obamas and Wright, a top Obama official text-messaged his response: “Zzzzz.”

  Just after 8 A.M. on November 3—election eve—Barack was in Florida when Michelle called from Chicago. “Toot passed yesterday, Barack,” she told him. “I am so so sorry.”

  After he hung up, Barack went to the gym for his daily hour-long workout, then to a rally in Jacksonville. From there, he traveled to North Carolina. It was in Charlotte, standing before an afternoon crowd of twenty-five thousand, that he summoned the courage to talk about Toot. “She has gone home,” Barack said, his voice beginning to crack. “I’m not going to talk about it too long because it’s hard, a little, to talk about it,” he said. In contrast to the Clintons or the Bushes or so many other politicians who were prone to choking up or crying, Barack rarely indulged in public displays of emotion. But today, he pulled out a handkerchief and wiped away the tears that glistened on his cheeks.

  On Election Day, Michelle and Barack voted at 7:35 A.M. at their usual polling place, Chicago’s Be
ulah Shoesmith Elementary School. Michelle lingered so long in the voting booth, savoring the moment, that her husband joked, “I had to check out to see who she was voting for.”

  Malia and Sasha went to school as they normally would, and then got their hair done at a local beauty parlor for the night ahead. Daddy, meanwhile, flew off to Indiana for some last-minute campaigning. “Hey, guys!” he said as he dropped into a voter canvassing center. Then he picked up a phone and began talking to voters, who stammered in disbelief.

  That night the Obamas had a steak dinner at home in Chicago before the family hied away to a suite at the Hyatt Regency Hotel. There they were joined by the people who had been with Barack from the beginning—Valerie Jarrett, David Axelrod, Robert Gibbs, and Obama campaign manager David Plouffe. While they watched the returns on television, a stream of children that included Malia and Sasha, Craig Robinson’s son and daughter, Gibbs’s son, and Biden’s grandchildren scurried about.

  Ohio had been a toss-up, so when it looked as if Barack had locked it up, he turned to Axelrod. “So it looks like we’re gonna win this thing, huh?” he asked Axelrod. “It looks like it, yeah,” Axelrod said cautiously.

  Around 9:45 P.M., the family repaired to a smaller suite upstairs. Barack plopped onto a sofa next to his mother-in-law and held her hand as they continued watching the returns. Michelle’s uncle, Steve Robinson, had declared Barack the winner early in the evening, so when it began to look as if that victory was in reach, Robinson blurted, “I told you.”

  “We had our little laugh when he said it,” Marian recalled of her brother’s remark. “It was like, okay, that means it’s true.”

  When Barack was officially declared the winner at 11 P.M., the mood was oddly solemn. “Everybody was quiet,” Marian said. “I can’t tell you how subdued it was. We weren’t like the people in the stands—you know, yelling and screaming.” As she continued holding Barack’s hand, she turned to him and said, “I was thinking about what a journey you have to come…” Then she fell silent. “It was almost like,” she said of that moment, “there weren’t any words.”

  Of that moment, Michelle would later say, “I was proud as a wife, amazed as a citizen. I felt a sense of relief, a sense of calm that the country I lived in was the country I thought I lived in.”

  Not far away, in Chicago’s Grant Park, a crowd of more than two hundred thousand erupted in whoops and shrieks. Strangers embraced, weeping at the realization that history had been made with the election of the nation’s first African American President. The achievement seemed even more staggering given that Barack had been on the national political scene just four years and, at forty-seven, stood to be the third youngest (behind Theodore Roosevelt and JFK) President in history.

  The euphoria continued unabated, reaching a fever pitch when Barack, Michelle, and the children appeared onstage at Grant Park. They had dressed entirely in red and black—Barack in black suit and red tie, Malia in a red dress, Sasha in a black dress, and Michelle in a red-and-black silk Narciso Rodriguez outfit. (She would later be criticized for spoiling her appearance by wearing a plain black cardigan over the designer dress, but Michelle was unapologetic. “Hey, I was cold,” she said. “I needed that sweater!”)

  Among the faces in the crowd were Jesse Jackson and Oprah, crying openly as Barack delivered his victory speech behind eight-foot-high plates of bulletproof glass. “I know my grandmother is watching,” he said at one point, “along with the family that made me who I am.”

  Back in Hawaii, Barack’s sister was sitting in the apartment where he had spent his high school years with his grandparents. “I was too tired to grieve in front of millions,” Maya said of her decision not to accept her brother’s invitation to join him in Chicago. That very day, the koa urn containing Toot’s ashes was delivered to the apartment, and Maya placed pictures of their mother, Ann, and Toot’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren around it. Then she sat back with her husband and their five-year-old daughter, Suhaila, and watched the returns on television. Like many of those in Grant Park that night, Maya wept as she watched her brother give his victory speech.

  Barack reserved his most lavish praise for Michelle. “And I would not be standing here tonight,” he told the cheering throng, “without the unyielding support of my best friend for the last sixteen years—the rock of our family, the love of my life, the nation’s next First Lady, Michelle Obama.” As they threw their arms around each other once again, Barack pulled her to him and whispered, “I love you.”

  Afterward, Michelle and Barack finally let loose, celebrating with friends and supporters. “They’re big huggers,” said one aide, “so there’s a lot of hugs, a lot of thank-yous, a lot of warmth.”

  Since the girls were allowed to stay up past midnight, Marian Robinson was convinced their mother would cut them a little slack. “Well,” she told the girls, “surely your mother’s not going to make you go to school tomorrow after being up this late at night. That would be cruel. Just don’t set your alarm clocks.” Malia and Sasha were allowed a little extra time in bed the next morning, but then they were shipped off to school as usual.

  Before holding his first press conference as President-Elect on November 7, Barack, properly attired in a dark suit, joined a baseball-capped, jeans-clad Michelle for a parent-teacher conference at the University of Chicago Lab School. When they returned to their waiting SUV, Michelle was cradling a flower arrangement—a congratulatory gift from the girls’ teachers. The next day, the Obamas resumed their old date-night routine with an intimate dinner at one of their favorite Italian restaurants, Spiaggia.

  On November 10, the Bushes welcomed the Obamas to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. While Laura took Michelle on a tour of the upstairs family quarters and the two women talked about their children, Presidents number forty-three and forty-four conferred in the Oval Office. As he walked down the colonnade outside the Oval Office, Barack slapped his hand on Bush’s shoulder as they went back inside—as if, said a Bush aide, “he was the host and President Bush was his guest.”

  Even as the country faced its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, both the outgoing and incoming administrations worked together to make the transition as seamless as possible. Toward that end, Barack named as his new chief of staff the famously temperamental Rahm Emanuel. The Chicago Congressman had once mailed a dead fish to one of his enemies, and his penchant for purple-veined tantrums laced with profanity was legendary. (Barack liked to talk about how, while working as a teenager at Arby’s, Rahm had accidentally sliced off a piece of his right middle finger—“which,” Obama said, “rendered him virtually mute.”)

  There were those within the party who wondered if Emanuel was temperamentally suited to the Chief of Staff job, and, as he often did when faced with a tough choice, Barack asked for Michelle’s input. Michelle reaffirmed what Barack had known all along—that there was no one more loyal than Rahm, and no one would pursue the President’s agenda with more tenacity. “He doesn’t quit,” Michelle said, “until he gets it done.”

  That December, the Obamas returned to Hawaii to celebrate the holidays and take care of some unfinished family business. Two days before Christmas, they attended an hour-long memorial service for Toot at a modest two-story house in Honolulu’s working-class Nuuanu neighborhood that now served as home to Honolulu’s First Unitarian Church.

  Following the afternoon service, Barack’s motorcade drove along the coast and pulled over at a spot called Lanai Lookout. It was here that Barack had come four months earlier to toss a lei into the surf in memory of his mother. Now, as the wind whipped up the surf along the shoreline, Barack, wearing khakis, a dark blue Hawaiian shirt, and sunglasses, climbed over a stone wall and made his way over the rocks toward the water. Michelle, Malia, Sasha, Barack’s sister Maya, and more than a dozen friends followed close behind. Then Barack and Maya, who had removed Toot’s ashes from the koa urn, scattered them in the Pacific.

  When they returned to Washington, Barack a
nd Michelle were eager to see Malia and Sasha settled in at Sidwell Friends School, Chelsea Clinton’s alma mater. However, it was unclear where the Obamas would be living during the few weeks prior to the inauguration. When they asked if they could move into Blair House, the President’s official guesthouse, the Obamas were told by Bush administration officials that they would have to wait until just five days before the swearing-in ceremony. Blair House, it seemed, had already been promised to former Australian Prime Minister John Howard.

  Forced to look for a hotel, the Obamas settled on the historic Hay-Adams. Situated around the corner from Blair House, it offered unobstructed views of the White House directly across Lafayette Square Park.

  “Do you see our new house?” Michelle asked her friend André Leon Talley as she drew back the curtains of the Obamas’ Hay-Adams suite. From this vantage point, Michelle and Talley could see security officers dressed in black perched on the White House roof. “They tell me they do that a lot,” Michelle said matter-of-factly.

  On January 5, 2009, the Obamas had breakfast in their Hay-Adams suite, and then Daddy said good-bye to his daughters as they headed off at 7:10 A.M. with Mommy for their first day at their new school. Making new friends would not be a problem. Joe Biden’s grandchildren, with whom fifth grader Malia and second grader Sasha had already bonded over pizza and popcorn during several sleepovers, attended Sidwell Friends.

  The motorcade suddenly appeared from under a security tent that had been put up outside the Hay-Adams, and sped off to Sidwell’s middle school on Wisconsin Avenue. They arrived at 7:30—a half hour before school started—and within minutes after depositing Malia, Michelle emerged from the school and slipped back into the White House SUV. Then it was off with Sasha, yawning away in the backseat of the SUV, to Sidwell’s lower school campus just outside DC in Bethesda, Maryland. Since Sasha’s school day ended at 3:00 P.M. and Malia’s at 3:20, from now on the motorcade would pick up Sasha first and stop off for Malia on the way home to the White House. “I’ll try to bring them to school and pick them up every day,” Michelle vowed, but then admitted that “there’s also a measure of independence. And obviously there will be times I won’t be able to drop them off at all. I like to be a presence in my kids’ school. I want to know the teachers; I want to know the other parents.”