Michelle Obama (9 page)

Barack wanted to begin his political career by running for the Illinois State Senate. It was 1995, and he was about to turn thirty-four. Michelle was thirty-one and eager to have children. Barack's decision scared her. She knew it would take a lot of his time. Also, the capital of Illinois is Springfield, which can be a three-hour trip from Chicago. She'd be left home alone when he had stretches of business in the capital. Going into politics would also mean Barack would give up the possibility of a good salary at his law firm. By now, Michelle was used to Barack's lack of interest in money, but she still knew they would need it to raise children comfortably.

In the end, however, she supported him. She wasn't sure if he was doing the right thing, but she knew from how hard he worked to convince her that it was the thing he wanted.

Barack ran in a district that was safe for a Democrat. The person who was giving up the position, Alice Palmer, was leaving only because she wanted to run for the U.S. Congress. After winning the election in November 1996, Barack was sworn in with the rest of the Senate in January 1997.

His political career had begun. With it, problems had also begun for Michelle and for their marriage.

When Barack was in the Illinois State Senate, the Democratic Party was in the minority. Barack did not have the influence on public policy that he had hoped to have. Being a first-year senator, he had little influence even within the Democratic Party. It was frustrating.

Michelle had just started a new job herself, at the University of Chicago. Her presence there was a sign of how far the city had come. When she was growing up, the university, despite being just a few blocks from her home, was a separate world. It didn't seem to notice the community around it. "I grew up five minutes from the university and never once went on campus," she recalled to reporter Holly Yeager. "All the buildings have their backs to the community. The university didn't think kids like me existed, and I certainly didn't want anything to do with that place." But the university wanted to change. By this time, Michelle's work for Public Allies had made her known throughout the city. The university wanted her, badly. It created a new position for her: associate dean of student services and director of the university community service center. Her job was to encourage students to volunteer in the community, and to show them how to do it. Once again, she was inside an institution that had contributed to conflict in Chicago when she was growing up, and she was helping to change it.

As always, Michelle was determined to do a good job. Although she supported Barack's political ambitions, she could not give him all her time or attention. If anything, Michelle had to demand more of these things from him.

In July 1998, their daughter Malia Ann was born. Now Michelle was a working mother with an infant child and a husband whose job was three hours away. Even when he was in Chicago, there were a lot of demands on his time. Politicians have to go to a lot of parties, whether or not they want to. On top of all that, Barack was teaching law at the University of Chicago.

Barack's solution to his own frustration wasn't to drop out of politics, but instead to aim higher. He decided to run for the U.S. Congress in the 2000 election.

Michelle was much less supportive of this desire. In his memoir
The Audacity of Hope,
he recalled that "My wife's anger toward me seemed barely contained. 'You only think about yourself,' she would tell me. 'I never thought I'd have to raise a family alone.'"

He lost that election. But he was still in the state senate, so the pressures remained. Then Natasha (Sasha) was born in June 2001. Michelle was so angry at Barack's absences that she could barely stand to speak to him on one family vacation in Hawaii. Making it worse, the governor needed Barack to return to Springfield early to vote on an important bill. Barack made the decision to stay in Hawaii, and the bill failed to pass, which caused him difficulty with the governor and led to criticism from journalists. But that was easier to face than more of Michelle's anger.

Michelle's solution was to demand less, but also to train Barack. She wouldn't ask him to be around more. But when he was around, she'd make sure he helped more. She started going to the gym long before dawn. When the girls woke up and needed to be fed, he'd have to feed them. "I spent a lot of time expecting my husband to fix things," she told Rebecca Johnson of
Vogue.
"But then I came to realize that he was there in the ways he could be. If he wasn't there, it didn't mean he wasn't a good father or didn't care. I saw it could be my mom or a great baby-sitter who helped. Once I was okay with that, my marriage got better."

Michelle also kept working. The University of Chicago Medical Center hired her to improve its poor relations with the community. She helped erase decades of mistrust with straight talk about the longstanding problems.

Around the same time, she helped her brother make the same decision she'd made earlier. After Princeton, Craig earned an MBA and went to Wall Street. He stayed there nine years, became a vice president and a millionaire, and then joined a Chicago financial firm where his success continued. But he was miserable. He didn't like the work. His unhappiness was one of the reasons he was in the middle of a divorce. What he really wanted to do, he told Michelle, was coach basketball. He had a chance to do that, at a low level and for a tiny fraction of what he had been earning. Should he? Michelle told him to do what she'd done: Follow his heart. Now he's one of the happiest head coaches in basketball. "I'm loving every day of my life," he says.

Unfortunately, Barack and Michelle's money problems didn't go away. When Barack traveled to Los Angeles for the Democratic National Convention in 2000, he discovered at the airport's car rental counter that he couldn't rent a car because he'd reached the limit on his credit card.

Every day Michelle took a more practical view of their lives. Part of her hoped that Barack would come around to her way of thinking, and walk away from the world of politics. But although she was still the planner and the worrier in the family, Barack was still the dreamer. In late 2001, he began to think about a run for the U.S. Senate in 2004.

Michelle thought he was crazy—and that was before she heard how he planned to make it happen.

Michelle later told biographer David Mendell, "The big issue around the Senate for me was, how on earth can we afford it? I don't like to talk about it, because people forget that his credit card was maxed out. How are we going to get by? Okay, now we're going to have two households to fund, one here and one in Washington.
We have law school debt, tuition to pay for the children. And we're trying to save for college for the girls.... My thing is, is this just another gamble? It's just killing us. My thing was, this is ridiculous, even if you do win, how are you going to afford this wonderful next step in your life? And he said, 'Well, then, I'm going to write a book, a good book.' And I'm thinking, '... Just write a book, yeah, that's right. Yep, yep, yep. And you'll climb the beanstalk and come back down with the golden egg, Jack.'"

Barack worked hard to convince her. He told her he really wanted to make a difference, and this seemed like the best way. He told her he'd give up politics if he lost this time. She gave in. "Whatever," she told him. "We'll figure it out. We're not hurting. Go ahead." Then, as she told David Mendell, she added a hopeful thought: "Maybe you'll lose."

Barack would write the book a few years later. It would be his second memoir,
The Audacity of Hope.
But he took a practical approach to the first problem of the campaign: finding someone to run it. After a lot of trying, he won the help of an experienced political adviser, David Axelrod. Axelrod came up with a slogan: "Yes, we can"—the same message that, without the comma, they would use for the 2008 presidential campaign.

Barack still wasn't widely known, but he and Axelrod and their team worked steadily to change that. They also believed that their opponents, whom they knew well, would stumble. That's exactly what happened. It looked as though Barack could keep gaining right up to Election Day. Then an opportunity came for Barack to deliver a knockout punch: He was asked to give the opening speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, a few months before the election.

Barack had been hoping for more Illinois media, and now the national media swarmed him. His team sweated every detail of the speech for weeks. Everyone became tense as the big night in Boston approached. There was even a last-minute debate about his tie in his hotel room. A switch was made for a tie that an aide happened to be wearing.

Michelle noticed that the nervousness of everyone around him was starting to wear on Barack. Just before he went on stage for this speech that would either launch or end his national career, she made him relax with her wicked sense of humor. That's when she told him, "Just don't screw it up, buddy."

He didn't. "There's not a liberal America and a conservative America—there's a
United States
of America," he declared. "There's not a black America and a white America and a Latino America and an Asian America—there's the
United States
of America.... We are one people...."

Four months later, he was a U.S. senator.

He was sworn in the following January. After the ceremony, the Obamas stepped outside the Capitol, followed by reporters and photographers. Malia, who was six, looked up at Barack proudly and asked, "Daddy, are you going to be president?"

The press laughed at Barack's embarrassment. But when Barack didn't answer, a reporter for the
Chicago Tribune
asked, "Well, Senator...?"

That day in Washington, Barack didn't answer the reporters—or Malia. He knew better than to admit his ambition. There was a time when he wasn't so guarded.

Back when Michelle and Barack were first dating, about fourteen or fifteen years earlier, Barack had won a position approximately as prestigious as his new Senate seat, and just as difficult to achieve: Michelle's steady boyfriend. He had made it as far as coming to a Robinson holiday party to meet the Michelle's extended family. The first person he caught up with was Craig. They hadn't seen much of each other since the basketball game, when Craig tested Barack as a favor to Michelle. Still playing the role of Michelle's big brother, Craig gave Barack a friendly quiz. What was Barack planning to do after Harvard Law? Meaning, How serious are you about my sister, and are you going to start a family or what?

"I'd like to teach." Barack said. "And maybe someday run for office."

"Oh, like city council?" Craig asked.

"No," Barack said. "Maybe the Senate. Possibly even president."

"President? President of
what
?"

"President of the United States maybe."

"Okaaay," Craig said, as if Barack had just mentioned spending a week on Mars. "Why don't you come over here and meet my Aunt Gracie? But don't tell anybody that!"

Barack wanted it. People were telling him to do it. That's a powerful combination. The only thing that could have kept him from running, maybe, was Michelle. He needed her vote before he could ask for any others.

Michelle had questions. A lot of questions. She and the top staff he'd assembled for the Senate run had two long meetings to discuss them. She hadn't been closely involved in his campaigns up to that time, so for some of them it was a first experience with Michelle's focus on planning ahead and preparing for the worst. "I took myself down every dark road you could go on, just to prepare myself before we jumped out there," she told Gwen Ifill. "Are we emotionally, financially ready for this? I dreamed out all the scenarios." She did not want this to be an "ego trip" for Barack. She needed to know it was serious. Could they win? How? What would that mean for her and Malia and Sasha?

Some of her questions were practical: Where would the money come from? Hillary Clinton already seemed to have the support of all the usual donors.
Could they build a national team to rival Clinton's? There wasn't much time to do that, and many of the nation's best professional campaign staffers were already committed to Clinton. Could Barack win in the primary contests, which select the Democratic nominee, without the votes of women? They had been key to his success in the past, but, again, Clinton would be likely to win their support. Besides Clinton, who else might Barack have to face? If Barack ran and lost, how much debt would he and Michelle have? How could it be paid? She also asked about security. She knew that because of his racial background Barack would face more threats than the usual candidate.

She had philosophical questions, too. Would Barack have to compromise his beliefs to win votes nationally? Would he have to take a vague position on complicated issues so that he didn't offend anyone?

Barack's team gave her thoughtful answers. She gave Barack her okay. As she told reporter Melinda Henneberger, "Eventually I thought, This is a smart man with a good heart, and if the only reason I wouldn't want him to be president is that I'm married to him, no, I can't be that selfish."

Michelle trusted Barack's team to do what they'd said, and she focused her attention on keeping life as normal as possible for Malia and Sasha. Her ideal family life remained the same as it was when she was growing up: everyone at home for family dinners and conversation. But after Barack's formal announcement of his candidacy in February 2007, the campaign needed her. Voters like to meet the wives of candidates. Michelle was also better than anyone at telling voters why they should vote for Barack—some days, she was better at that than Barack was.

To make it work, she had strict rules for the campaign. They could arrange appearances only on certain days. Michelle couldn't travel on days with important events like soccer games and ballet recitals. Most difficult of all, she had to fly back home before her daughters' bedtime. "Yeah, I'm a little tired at the end of the day," she told Gwen Ifill. "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." When she had to stay away overnight, her mother took care of Malia and Sasha. What did the girls really care about? The puppy they had been promised when the campaign was over.