POLITICS: The Obamas: A Mission, a MarriageBy Jodi Kantor Allen Lane, 368pp. £14.99
IN FROZEN IOWA this winter, old-age pensioners and an evangelical pastor told me that Barack Obama should be “rode out of town on a rail” and that the president was a pro-homosexual Muslim who must be defeated at all cost. I was stunned to hear the same people sing the praises of Michelle Obama, because she “cares about children”.
First ladies are usually more popular than their husbands, but their perilous balancing act is performed under constant scrutiny. Michelle Obama’s predecessors have clashed with White House staffers, suffered depression and alcohol and drug addiction, and been humiliated by their husbands’ affairs.
The Obamas were criticised for using government transport on a ‘“date night” to Manhattan. (How else were they supposed to travel?) Michelle was pilloried for taking a daughter on holiday to Spain and for wearing Lanvin designer sneakers, worth at least $500, to do volunteer work at a food bank. But when she wore shabby old shorts on a holiday to the Grand Canyon she was mocked for that too. Obama’s fight against childhood obesity and her initiative on behalf of military families have more than compensated for such quibbles.
Jodi Kantor, a reporter for the New York Times, interviewed more than 200 people, including 33 current and former White House officials, for The Obamas. The book is really three narratives in one: a chronological account of the triumphs and disappointments of the Obama presidency; a trove of inside-the-Beltway gossip about the president's West Wing offices and the first lady's more discreet East Wing headquarters; and, above all, a portrait of the Obama marriage, with its small tensions and fierce mutual loyalty.
When the Bushes introduced the Obamas to the White House, Laura Bush showed Michelle the hideaway sitting room from which first ladies peer across the Rose Garden at the windows of the Oval Office, condemned to remain on the outside looking in.
Michelle is much easier to read than Barack, Kantor writes. The first lady’s thoughts and emotions are written on her face, while the president has spent a lifetime achieving a level of calm and self-discipline that can make him appear aloof.
Michelle’s early difficulties in the White House and her attainment of a kind of fulfilment there make hers the more compelling story.
Her visit to a predominantly immigrant girls school in London in April 2009 helped to define her role as “first mom”. “History proves that it doesn’t matter whether you come from a council estate or a country estate,” she said. “We are counting on every single one of you to be the very best that you can be.” The East Wing had discovered its winning formula: “Put Michelle Obama in a roomful of kids, especially kids who were outsiders in one way or another – just let them interact,” Kantor writes. Whether in London, Washington’s poor black district of Anacostia or in Mumbai, where Michelle Obama kicked off her shoes to play hopscotch, the scenes are guaranteed to generate emotion.
The first two years of the Obama White House were marred by feuding between what Kantor calls the “power centres” established by the vice-president, the chief of staff, senior advisers and the press secretary. Rahm Emanuel, the former chief of staff who left to become mayor of Chicago, ignored Michelle Obama. While she pressed her husband to persevere with health care and immigration reform, Emanuel urged the president to abandon both.
Tension between the former press secretary Robert Gibbs and Michelle Obama was particularly acute. She wanted a flawless presidency to be a source of pride for African-Americans. Gibbs feared the first family might give the impression of extravagance at a time when Americans are suffering through economic crisis. “Gibbs began to play an unenviable role: the internal enforcer,” Kantor writes. “Barack Obama, who felt guilty about the sacrifices his wife was making, was unwilling to tell her what she could not do . . . so Gibbs took on the task.”
Valerie Jarrett, the senior adviser from Chicago who is a mother and sister figure to both Obamas, so close that she accompanies them on holiday, acted as intermediary between Michelle Obama and her husband’s staff.
The biggest blow-up took place in September 2010, when a book published in Paris quoted the French first lady, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, recounting that Michelle Obama had said life in the White House was hell. Gibbs tried, unsuccessfully, to reach Jarrett, who was participating in a morning television show, and Michelle Obama, who was playing tennis in Georgetown. He worked the telephones and quickly obtained a denial from the Élysée Palace. In a cabinet meeting the next morning, Jarrett announced that the first lady was displeased with the way the incident was handled. Gibbs exploded, cursed Michelle Obama and stormed out of the room. It later transpired that Jarrett was wrong: the first lady had no problem with Gibbs’s crisis management. But it was Gibbs, not Jarrett, who subsequently left the White House.
Michelle Obama reacted to the titillation surrounding Kantor’s book in an interview on CBS News. “I guess it’s more interesting to imagine this conflicted situation,” she said. “But that’s been an image that people have tried to paint of me since the day Barack announced [that he was a candidate for the presidency]: that I’m some angry black woman.”
Kantor portrays Michelle Obama as intelligent and in many ways stronger and more politically savvy than her husband. It’s unfortunate that the first lady felt compelled to respond so defensively.
Over the past three years Barack and Michelle Obama have in a sense changed places. “She entered with her expectations low and then exceeded them,” Kantor concludes. “He had entered on top of the world, and had been descending to earth ever since.”
Lara Marlowe is Washington Correspondent
