The Obamas

When Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election, he also won a long-running debate with his wife Michelle. Contrary to her fears, politics now seemed like a worthwhile, even noble pursuit. Together they planned a White House life that would be as normal and sane as possible. Then they moved in. In the Obamas, Jodi Kantor takes us deep inside the White House as they try to grapple with their new roles, change the country, raise children, maintain friendships, and figure out what it means to be the first black President and First Lady. Filled with riveting detail and insight into their partnership, emotions and personalities, and written with a keen eye for the ironies of public life, The Obamas is an intimate portrait that will surprise even readers who thought they knew the President and First Lady. gt; gt;PART ONEgt; gt;ARRIVALgt; gt; gt;Chapter Onegt; gt;Tgt;HEgt; Dgt;EBATERSgt;gt; gt;FALL 2008gt; gt;gt;Mgt;ichelle Obama was wearing dark sunglasses and a baseball hat, trying to escape notice.gt; gt;In early November 2008, just a few days after her husband had won the presidential election, she slipped out of the armed fortress formerly known as her Chicago home with her seven-year-old daughter, Sasha. Their destination was Sasha’s tennis lesson at a public court behind an elementary school a few blocks away. The leaves had already turned but the weather was still warm, and boys were playing baseball next to the tennis court.gt; gt;The notion that her husband was truly going to be the president of the United States was just sinking in. It had only started to seem real on election night, when she stood on stage for his victory speech in front of celebrants in Chicago and far beyond. (“You actually pulled this off?” she murmured to him.) But things were happening fast: he was sketching out what his senior staff and cabinet would look like, and people were already standing for him when he walked into the room. A new Chicago transition office was being prepared, the Secret Service laying thick sheets of bulletproof plastic over the windows. Laura Bush called to invite Michelle to come see the White House. A nationwide guessing game was already erupting over where her daughters would attend school in Washington and even what breed of puppy they would get. Dazed by it all, almost as if reluctant to face the enormity of what had happened and what she would need to do, the president-elect’s wife was clinging stubbornly to familiar routines: hence the tennis lesson.gt; gt;At the park, they ran into Susan McKeever and her daughter, Alana Sahara. They were part of the close-knit group that had seen the Obamas through their rapid rise, watching the girls, keeping the candidate and his wife company in hotel suites in strange cities. They were real friends, from the neighborhood, not political acquaintances. Michelle and Susan were on the board of the same African dance troupe, and just a few years before they had been planning fund-raisers together, including one that filled the Obamas’ brick home with loud, rhythmic drumming.gt; gt;As the two women caught up, McKeever discreetly inquired about an issue the Obamas had quietly been discussing.gt; gt;“What’s the plan? Have you figured things out yet?” she asked.gt; gt;The first-lady-to-be shook her head. “I still don’t know what we’re doing,” Michelle said, looking worried.gt; gt;Only a handful of friends and aides knew what Michelle was considering: staying behind in Chicago with her daughters for the rest of the school year while the new president moved to Washington alone. They would all attend the inauguration, of course, but Michelle wasn’t sure the rest of the family had to relocate so soon. Perhaps they could take the rest of the year to research school options, slowly move homes. She could commute back and forth, and her mother, Marian Robinson, could stay with the girls in Chicago on the days Washington duties called. That was how the Obamas had lived during the presidential campaign and for a long time before. Why not continue for six more months?gt; gt;Barack Obama hated the idea. At forty-seven years old, he had never lived full-time under the same roof as his daughters. He started commuting to Springfield, the Illinois capital, as a state senator in 1997, before they were born, and in 2005, when he became a U.S. senator in Washington, he had initially wanted his family to move with him, before conceding they would be better off in their familiar Chicago world. The 2008 presidential campaign had made him a near-stranger to his own bed. In an unusual bit of logic, the prospect of finally living with his wife and daughters had helped him get excited about running for president in the first place: it was a reward for all of the years of separation. He argued that even when the Obamas moved to Washington, they would hold on to their old lives, return to Chicago frequently.gt; gt;Outsiders would have found his wife’s hesitation shocking: wouldn’t living in the White House be a matchless experience, filled with moments and opportunities of which most people could only dream? First families always moved in on inauguration day, part of the pageantry that accompanied every new administration, and the idea of a commuter first lady was hard to conceive. Any presidential victory was thrilling, but Barack Obama’s came with extra superlatives: the fastest rise in memory; the fall of the ultimate racial barrier. Michelle had worked her heart out to help drive him to victory, and untold numbers of strangers looked forward to the Obama family moving into the house of Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Kennedy.gt; gt;If people all over the world were celebrating the prospect of the Obamas arriving at the White House, why was she hesitating?gt; gt;Mgt;ICHELLEgt; Ogt;BAMA COULD BE Agt; hard figure to understand: both more charming and more cutting than her husband, his most ardent supporter on the outside and his most devastating critic in private, more idealistic but also more cautious than he was, far less sophisticated politically but also quicker to sense problems.gt; gt;The idea of lingering in Chicago was naïve, an indication of her innocence about how the presidency or politics really worked. She was a contrarian by nature, often suspicious of what others wanted or expected her to do; just because others assumed she would be excited about something didn’t mean she would be. She was anxious about relocating her children to a new city in the middle of the school year, as the president’s children no less. And both Obamas were still attached to the idea that they could make private, independent choices about how to live, instead of surrendering to public opinion. Even though staying behind in Chicago could set off criticism, the Obamas barely consulted their political advisers on the question of when Michelle and the girls would move, and the public never found out what they had been considering.gt; gt;Their discussions about the move were only the latest in the long series of private debates that stretched back to the beginning of their relationship. Some political couples ran hand in hand together toward power, fame, and glory, hoping that one day they might have a shot at living in the nation’s most famous residence. The Obamas were not like that. Behind every one of Barack Obama’s decisions about his political career, behind all the speeches and announcements and races, lay a series of heartfelt, sometimes contentious debates with his wife about the nature of politics. He believed that he could use politics to achieve true, lasting change, that he could surmount the obstacles that limited others, that his career would not cost his family a normal life, that his wife would find a comfortable place for herself within his universe. She wanted to believe all of that, and sometimes she did. But over the years, she had also found considerable reason for doubt.gt; gt;Tgt;HE FIRST TIME THEgt; Ogt;BAMASgt; laid eyes on each other was in the summer of 1989, at the Chicago law firm Sidley Austin. He was a student working there for the summer after his first year at Harvard Law; she was the recent graduate assigned to mentor him. Early on, he would watch her while she worked in the law library. When he walked into her office, she appeared disinterested, but as soon as he left, she would turn to her office mate with her mouth open and eyebrows up. gt;Wowgt;.gt; gt;Soon each was gushing to friends about how smart the other was. Barack was worldlier and more mature than many other law students, with a beguiling willingness to ignore barriers and dream big. He was not yet thirty, but he had already lived in Indonesia and Hawaii, where he was raised, and organized public-housing residents in Chicago. When he became the first black president of the gt;Harvard Law Reviewgt;, the nation’s most prestigious legal journal, other students cried, newspapers across the country wrote about him, and his new girlfriend back in Chicago had her first concrete evidence of what he might achieve.gt; gt;If Barack opened Michelle’s horizons, she offered him something he never had: the prospect of a stable family life. His upbringing was exotic but lonely. His father, a Kenyan graduate student, returned to Africa when Barack was two, barely kept in touch, drank too much, and died in a car crash. His mother was a wanderer, a white anthropologist who sent her son to live in Hawaii with his grandparents while she worked in Indonesia. As a result, he was unusually solitary and self-reliant; law school classmates remembered him as too serious, too much of a loner, to attend first-year parties with everyone else.gt; gt;Michelle had never kept boyfriends for long before. She was statuesque, impassioned, and loyal, with a wicked comedic glint. But she was tough on everyone around her, with expectations others often found unrealistically high, and few compunctions about calling people out when she felt they had failed. Those standards appealed to Barack. He wanted to live up to his potential, to hedge against the bitterness and disappointment of his father’s life. He sought a partner who would “help him remember what he was there to do and who he was,” said his sister, Maya Soetoro.gt; gt;The bedrock of the budding Obama relationship was their shared passion for social change. Each had spent time on Ivy League campuses and in the poorest Chicago neighborhoods, and had seen the way certain advantages—education, employment, health—fostered others, while one disadvantage led to a cascade of others. The two young lawyers believed that the gaps between the two places lay less in talent or hard work than in opportunity, power, access, and wealth.gt; gt;Behind the backs of Sidley partners, Barack chided fellow summer associates for pursuing private-sector careers. Over after-work beers, he grilled them on what they wanted to do. Banking or litigation, most said. “What do you want to do with that?” he would prod. To advance, to provide for our families—he dismissed those answers. He didn’t care about money and didn’t always relate to people who did. “It’s got to be about what you can give back,” he would say, a former fellow associate, Thomas Reed, recalled.gt; gt;Obama envisioned himself as a writer, among other things, and he was awarded a contract to write a book about race relations after winning the law review presidency. But he threw himself into the project without much planning, changed the book to a memoir, ran a voter registration project as he wrote, and blew his deadline. After the Obamas were married, in 1992, he spent weeks alone in Bali with the manuscript, and in Chicago, he slipped off for long hours to write, leaving Michelle behind. “Barack Obama does not belong to you,” Yvonne Davila, a friend, used to tell her. She meant that there were big things in store for him, bigger than family; people were always making that kind of portentous prediction about Barack. But that raised a question for Michelle: where did her husband’s ambitions, not to mention his solitude and tendency to overestimate what he could handle, leave her?gt; gt;Egt;ARLY IN THEIR MARRIAGEgt;, the Obamas made two discoveries: the world of politics and government was not the right place for Michelle, and, as Barack admitted, it was in many ways an uncomfortable fit for him, too.gt; gt;In 1991, Michelle left Sidley to work as an aide to Chicago’s mayor, Richard M. Daley, the new and still unproven heir to his father’s machine. She and Barack were nervous about the job. Daley senior had opposed the desegregation of schools and presided over an ethically challenged political operation, and the new mayor’s first run for the job had ended in ugly racial divisions. “Having grown up in a proud African American family, she wasn’t sure if there was a conflict between her values and his,” said Valerie Jarrett, the mayoral aide who recruited Michelle and became a mentor to both Obamas. Jarrett, young, elegant, and educated at top schools, was an example of how the younger Daley intended to be different. She was from one of the best-established African American families in Hyde Park, a generally anti-Daley neighborhood, but she believed in gaining power to change things from above.gt; gt;Some of Michelle’s work was straightforward, like helping downtown businesses during a massive flood, but when she served as a liaison to agencies that provided for the city’s most vulnerable—seniors, the disabled, and children—she was distressed by how heavily the projects were influenced by connections and favors. It was “the ugly underbelly in city government on how decisions are made—or not made,” Kevin Thompson, who worked with her, said. Underlying issues of poverty and education had little chance of being addressed. She disapproved of how closely Daley held power, surrounding himself with three or four people who seemed to let few outsiders in—a concern she would echo years later with her own husband. At work, Michelle always seemed crisp and professional, but she could be harshly critical of the mayor’s administration behind closed doors.gt; gt;She particularly resented the way power in Illinois was locked up generation after generation by a small group of families, all white Irish Catholic—the Daleys in Chicago, the Hyneses and Madigans statewide. “Someone doesn’t have the right to be elected because of whose womb they came out of,” she would say a few years later to Dan Shomon, her husband’s political adviser. “You shouldn’t have a better chance if you’re a Kennedy than if you’re an Obama. Why is it that they have the right to this?”gt; gt;She lasted only two years before moving on to a job leading a program that spoke volumes about her conclusions. It was called Public Allies, and its aim was to train a new generation of urban leaders from more diverse backgrounds—an alternative to the established power structure. Two years later, in 1995, Valerie Jarrett was unceremoniously dumped from her post: she was standing in the way of powerful developers, who convinced the mayor to let her go, and even though Jarrett and the mayor were close, he never spoke to her about the decision. The Obamas were horrified, their worst suspicions about that world confirmed.gt; gt;Barack saw the same problems with politics as Michelle did. But for him, those weren’t reasons to stay out; they were reasons to get in. He believed in his own talent and singularity; he felt sure that the usual rules would not apply. That summer, a state senate seat representing Hyde Park was opening up, and Barack, who had been teaching law and working at a civil rights firm, told Michelle he wanted to run. “I married you because you’re cute and you’re smart, but this is the dumbest thing you could have ever asked me to do,” she told him.gt; gt;As a state senator, he grandly insisted, he would do nothing less than redefine the job and restore ethics to politics. “What if a politician were to see his job as that of an organizer,” he said in an interview, “as part teacher and part advocate, one who does not sell voters short but who educates them about the real choices before them?” He would have to raise funds from wealthy donors in the short term, he conceded, but would be able to do without them once he was better known.gt; gt;Those sorts of statements worried Michelle: how was a person like that going to fare in a notoriously corrupt state capital? Later, others would wonder whether her husband was too earnest, too conflict-averse, but Michelle had seen and said all of it long before. “I think he’s too much of a good guy for the kind of brutality, the skepticism,” she worried to an interviewer at the time. The former law review editor was going to become part of a system she deplored—and at the same time, they were talking about starting the close-knit family they both craved. He told her it would work out; she was dubious.gt; gt;Still, Michelle made a decision she would repeat over the years: she dedicated herself to his victory and success. If he was going to run, she was not going to let him lose. She tried to elevate the campaign with a nice office and a classy fund-raiser at the local black history museum—none of the usual tackiness or tawdriness of state politics. She made herself the arbiter of who on the campaign was performing and who was not. If a volunteer promised to gather three hundred petition signatures, “two hundred ninety-nine did not work because three hundred was the goal,” said Carol Anne Harwell, the campaign manager. If you underperformed, “you met the wrath of Michelle.” And for the first time in his political career but not the last, she helped connect him with other people. Some voters were quizzical about Obama’s unusual name, even rude—he clearly wasn’t from the South Side. But when Michelle knocked on doors on his behalf, neighbors instinctively understood that she, and therefore he, was one of them.gt; gt;Igt;Ngt; Dgt;ECEMBER OF 2003gt;, Barack and Michelle gathered with family and friends at a lush nature preserve in Oahu to celebrate Maya Soetoro’s marriage to Konrad Ng, a Canadian Chinese doctoral student. The Obamas had two small daughters by then, Malia and Sasha, dressed in identical red-and-white sundresses that day. The bride and groom had asked Barack to start off the ceremony. He rose to speak to the assembled guests against a spectacular backdrop: green lawns, rocky cliffs, the sparkling Pacific Ocean, the occasional peacock wandering past.gt; gt;But there was nothing idyllic or romantic about his remarks; he spoke frankly about the difficulty of marriage. The odds were stacked against enduring happiness, he told the small crowd. “Our society has not necessarily equipped us to sustain relationships,” Ng recalled him saying. Careers, not to mention children, drove partners in opposite directions, he warned.gt; gt;Only a few guests knew that the Obamas were just emerging from the lowest point in their relationship. Barack had won the state senate seat, but his time in Springfield had been frustrating for both Obamas. As soon as he arrived, he complained it was not serious enough: legislation he drafted was not even heard and some new colleagues—Democrats!—even poked fun at his name. “He would call me and say, ‘This person is an idiot. They get an F,’ ” Harwell recalled. Michelle reached her limit when, in 2000, her husband rushed into a poorly planned challenge to Representative Bobby Rush, a former Black Panther and well-connected South Side operator. Rush swatted Obama away easily, labeling him a pretentious interloper whose lofty ideas about reform did nothing for people who didn’t have gt;jobsgt;. Michelle felt her husband was self-absorbed and unrealistic: he was trying to run for Congress, serve in Springfield, teach law on the side, and be a father and husband. Their disagreements had grown so deep that the Obamas needed two or three years to recover, the president said later.gt; gt;While Michelle wished he had chosen a more stable career, not to mention a more lucrative one, she also felt he wasn’t achieving as much as he could. If he was going to be a politician, she believed, his accomplishments were going to have to be weighty enough to justify the sacrifices. Michelle always reminded him “about his own potential and power to effect change,” as Soetoro put it later. Smarting from his loss to Rush, Obama had publicly questioned whether seeking elective office was the best way for him to improve people’s lives.gt; gt;Now, at the Hawaii wedding, he alluded to his wife’s faith in him. The key to a lasting union, he told the gathering, was to choose the right partner—“somebody who sees you as you deserve to be seen,” he said; someone who recognizes your potential gt;andgt; your vulnerabilities.gt; gt;No one asked Michelle to speak, but at an open microphone a few hours later, she told the newlyweds to expect to labor over their union—“part of the contract,” as she put it. Marriage could be worth it, she promised: not easy, but ultimately worth the struggle.gt; gt;As the terraced hills and Pacific views faded into darkness, five-year-old Malia paired off with a little boy on the dance floor. Barack was such an eloquent speaker that he should run for president, guests clucked. Unbeknownst to them, he was running for U.S. Senate. He had made a deal with his wife: it would be his last run, and if he lost, he would leave politics forever.gt; gt;Tgt;HAT WAS WHEN THE STORYgt; turned in a way that neither Obama could have dreamed. First, Barack won the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate seat in March 2004, with surprising support from many white voters in rural areas. Over the summer, his new communications director from Washington, Robert Gibbs, helped convince staffers for Senator John Kerry, about to become the Democratic presidential nominee, to give Obama the keynote slot at the party convention. In an electrifying speech, he created an instant reputation as a counter to the sitting U.S. president. Unlike George W. Bush, Barack Obama was self-made, introspective, intellectual, and gifted with words.gt; gt;It wasn’t just a speech; it was a statement of the Obama worldview. He emphasized his unique story, his ability to overcome odds and do what others could not. He conjured up an appealing image of American unity, arguing that the divisions between red and blue America did not even exist. He was rising in politics by arguing against politics, casting himself as a new kind of leader who would look past ossified labels, unify the country, and tackle long-standing issues.gt; gt;It was as if a river that Barack Obama had been swimming upstream spontaneously reversed course to send him surging ahead. State politics had punished his erudition and earnestness; now those qualities were rewarded. Instead of making fun of his name, many people admired his life story. His campaign staff had used boxes of gt;Dreams from My Fathergt;, his long-dormant memoir, as doorstops; now the book became a best seller.gt; gt;Michelle found a way of finally accepting that her husband was a politician: by refusing to admit he was one. “Barack is not a politician first and foremost,” she told a reporter around that time. “He’s a community activist exploring the viability of politics to make change.” Together they were like tailors who called themselves “garment reconstruction engineers,” unwilling to fully acknowledge the business they were really in.gt; gt;Over the years, many Chicagoans thought Michelle showed just as much promise as her husband did, maybe more. “If someone said to me, one of them is going to grow up to be president, I may have bet on her,” said Ann Marie Lipinski, former editor of the gt;Chicago Tribunegt;, as she recalled meeting the Obamas for the first time. But his success in 2004 put them on different planes: he was the instant celebrity, she the still-unknown spouse, an administrator at the University of Chicago Medical Center. At some events, he was so thronged by fans that he would escape into the men’s room to speak with his wife on the phone. Sometimes Michelle flipped on the radio or television and heard her husband’s voice talking at her. “Look, I’m in the picture, too,” Michelle told a friend at the supermarket checkout line, showing her a glossy celebrity magazine with Barack’s picture in it. “That’s my elbow!”gt; gt;Michelle could be funny about it: At Malia and Sasha’s school, the Obamas were upgraded from the planning committee for the annual fund-raiser to honorary chairs. When they were introduced at the event, Barack reached for the microphone but Michelle snatched it out of his hands. “I know you came here to listen to Barack,” she announced, “but tonight he’s just arm candy.” The crowd roared, and Barack smiled a Cheshire cat smile, looking amused to play number two.gt; gt;But she felt left out in other ways, too. She worried that her husband was not home enough, that campaign staff weren’t sharing daily talking points with her or helping her get to a campaign event and then home again to feed her kids, and she spoke to them bluntly about it. “Her very direct way is very direct and it can rub some people the wrong way at times,” said Thompson, who served as Barack’s personal aide on the race. Sometimes as he and Barack drove back from an event in some remote Illinois county, Michelle would call to ask him to bring home eggs and milk. Some staff members were dubious. As later generations of aides would continue to wonder: her husband had been slogging around all day; couldn’t she go easy on him?gt; gt;In her few campaign appearances during the Senate race, she was just as outspoken; in front of a fifty-person crowd in Edwardsville, she ripped into then President Bush. Her father suffered from multiple sclerosis but managed to send two children to Princeton, she said. So to hear a “rich, spoiled president” lecture about family values was insulting, she told the audience.gt; gt;At moments when she was expected to say standard political-wife things—to tell anyone who would listen that Barack Obama was simply the best—she delighted in playing against type. “If he loses, it might not be so bad,” she told a reporter during the final stretch of the Senate race in September 2004, rubbing her hands together with mock glee. She was willing to speak up for herself, too: “What I notice about men, all men, is that their order is me, my family, God is in there somewhere, but me is first. And for women, me is fourth, and that’s not healthy,” she added. “I’ve had to come to the point of figuring out how to carve out what kind of life I want for myself beyond who Barack is and what he wants.” Her long-standing debate with her husband was now spilling into the pages of the gt;Chicago Tribunegt;.gt; gt;Michelle may have felt overlooked by her husband’s staff, but they saw the gap between Barack’s soaring career and Michelle’s desire for stability, and they were always trying to smooth things. As Barack sailed to victory in the Senate race, the Obamas had dinner with Rahm Emanuel, then a U.S. congressman from Illinois, and his wife, Amy Rule. Though Barack wanted his family in Washington, Emanuel and Rule urged the Obamas to do as they had: keep the family in Chicago and endure the commute. Otherwise Michelle and the girls could end up with the worst of both worlds, living in a strange town with no support network and a busy Barack. Rule was pointed: she had been to Washington to see her husband sworn in and she had not been back. Emanuel and Rule’s message had been planned out with David Axelrod, a top campaign consultant who was now advising Obama.gt; gt;Soon after Barack won the U.S. Senate seat, in November 2004, with 70 percent of the vote—the bid by his Republican opponent, Jack Ryan, melted away in a marital scandal—the public and private calls for him to run for president began. Michelle tried to calm everyone down. He was a man, not a prophet, she told anyone who would listen, and he had barely done anything on the national stage yet. For everyone else, his boundless enthusiasm inspired hope; but it caused her worry, because she sensed expectations were getting out of hand. But the satisfaction of watching others see her husband as she saw him eroded some of Michelle’s resistance. “It really clicked with her that this may be the destiny everyone was always talking about,” Thompson said.gt; gt;“If he runs in 2008 and serves two terms, he’d only be fifty-four afterwards,” she said over dinner with Thompson. “What would we do then?”gt; gt;But Barack sometimes had trouble discussing the prospect of running for president with his wife. He had asked so much of her already, and never anything nearly as great as this before. He could be in physical danger. She was new to the public stage, in uncharted territory. Forget a black first lady—the country barely had any famous black professional women to begin with, only entertainment and sports celebrities.gt; gt;In September of 2006, Obama accepted an invitation to attend Senator Tom Harkin’s annual steak fry in the early-voting state of Iowa—the strongest hint yet that he was considering running. Michelle found out from a news alert on the gt;Chicago Tribunegt; website. When Obama, back in Washington, admitted to Robert Gibbs that he had not told his wife, Gibbs was alarmed. “Are you gt;crazy?gt;” Gibbs asked.gt; gt;Igt;Ngt; Ogt;CTOBER 2006gt;, Bgt;ARACK PUBLISHEDgt; a new book, gt;The Audacity of Hopegt;, a virtual White House audition memo. On a rainy night in Chicago that month, the members of greater Obamaworld gathered for a book party under a tent in the backyard of Valerie Jarrett’s parents. As Barack took to the center of the tent to address the crowd, the guests all had the same question on their mind, one to which even Axelrod and the other advisers present didn’t know the answer: would he run?gt; gt;Initially, Barack had tuned out the presidential talk, too. But he was just as disappointed with the U.S. Senate as he had been with the state senate—he had gone to Washington to do big things, but he was a junior member of a slow, rule-bound, Republican-controlled body. “Shoot. Me. Now,” he wrote to an aide, in the middle of a particularly long-winded oration. (The speaker was Senator Joe Biden.) The appeal of a 2008 run was hard to resist. Top Democrats were telling him he could skip the grind of Capitol Hill—where he was so new he still got lost in the hallways—and go directly after the presidency. “This country is ready for a transformative politics of the sort that John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt represented,” he told Joe Klein, of gt;Timegt; magazine, that same month, a bold self-comparison. Mos In this book the author explores the Obama family's transition into the White House, capturing the emotions and personalities beneath the public façade as the president and the First Lady deal with their new roles