The Amateur (13 page)
Authors: Edward Klein
By any measure, Michelle Obama is further to the Left politically than her husband. And that’s saying a lot. Take the president’s trillion-dollar, budget-busting healthcare legislation: while presidential advisers Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, and Vice President Joe Biden all urged Obama to scale back on the unpopular bill, Michelle encouraged her husband’s messianic impulses, urging him to save America from its wicked ways and press ahead, no matter what the consequences.
“The health care overhaul fit perfectly with their shared sense of mission—their joint idea that the president’s career was not about pursuing day-to-day political victories but the kinds of fundamental changes they had sought since they were young,” Kantor writes in
The Obamas
.
The Obamas
.
This was Michelle’s most profound influence on the Obama presidency: the sense of purpose she shared with her husband, the force of her worldview, her passionate beliefs about access, opportunity, and fairness; her readiness to do what was unpopular and pay political costs. Every day he met with advisers who emphasized the practical realities of Washington, who reminded him of poll numbers; he spent his nights with Michelle, who talked about moral imperatives, aides said, who reminded him again and again that they were there to do good, to avoid being distracted by political noise, to be bold....
The first lady’s handlers have painted a picture of Michelle as a woman who, throughout her marriage, has done everything in her power to
discourage
her husband from running for public office. This view of Michelle is accepted as gospel among the chattering classes on the East and West Coasts, where liberal conventional wisdom holds that Michelle Obama hates politics and politicians.
discourage
her husband from running for public office. This view of Michelle is accepted as gospel among the chattering classes on the East and West Coasts, where liberal conventional wisdom holds that Michelle Obama hates politics and politicians.
“I didn’t come to politics with a lot of faith in the process,” she has said. “I didn’t believe that politics was structured in a way that could solve real problems for people.” Another time she said, “I am tired of just giving the political process over to the privileged. To the wealthy. To people with the right daddy.” And of course there was her famous remark to Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, France’s first lady, that her life in the White House was “hell—I can’t stand it.” (Michelle denied having made the remark, but few believed her.)
Conventional wisdom aside, Michelle’s comments raise some puzzling questions:
• If she hates politics so much, why did she hitch her wagon to a political star like Barack Obama, who had an insatiable ambition to achieve national public office?
• What can she possibly have against a political system that has brought her family nothing but financial fortune and unimaginable comfort, made her a celebrity as America’s first black first lady, and put her on
Forbes
’ list of the World’s Most Powerful Women?
• How can she say she hates politics when she is playing a major role raising money and delivering speeches on behalf of her husband’s 2012 reelection campaign?
Political wives have always found something to complain about. After all, politics is a blood sport, and spouses end up with many of the same wounds as their husbands. However, based on my reporting, I believe that Michelle’s scornful attitude toward politics has far less to do with her life as a political wife than it has to do with deep-seated grievances that she has carried over from her childhood.
Although you wouldn’t know it from the way she talks now, Michelle LaVaughn Robinson came from a family steeped in politics. The Robinsons depended for their modest livelihood and fragile perch in the middle class on political connections. Her father, Fraser Robinson III, was a precinct captain in the political machine run by the original Mayor Daley—Richard J.—who was the last of the big city bosses. In exchange for working as a precinct captain in old man Daley’s corrupt Democratic machine, Fraser Robinson was given a low-level patronage job as a Chicago city pump operator.
Precinct captains were the machine’s foot soldiers at the neighborhood level. They delivered votes on Election Day and, if necessary, stuffed ballot boxes. When Michelle was growing up, the machine was dominated by Irish Catholics like Daley who resisted racial integration and gave Chicago the reputation of being the most segregated city in the North.
Despite Fraser Robinson’s lifetime devotion to the regular Democratic organization, he and black folks like him were treated as second-class citizens. The South Side where the Robinson family lived had the worst schools in the city. When it snowed, their streets didn’t get plowed. Uncollected garbage piled up on their sidewalks. Fraser, who suffered from a painful case of multiple sclerosis and needed two canes to walk, never missed a day of work. He hobbled about the neighborhood and listened to people tell him that they needed a Parkway fence or another cop on the beat. But he didn’t receive the raises and promotions that customarily came to white precinct captains.
Fraser was a proud man who never complained about his disability or treatment. But Michelle grew up feeling sorry for him. She resented the political power structure that failed to recognize her beloved father’s value. At night, when the Robinson family gathered around the dinner table, they often talked about how it was necessary to game the system in order to get along. If you wanted to hold on to your steady job in Mayor Daley’s Chicago, you had to soil your hands in Democratic politics. As far as Michelle was concerned, however, the system was stacked against black people and she didn’t want any part of it.
According to friends, Michelle was ashamed that her father worked in such a dirty business. Though she and Santita Jackson, the daughter of the Reverend Jesse Jackson Sr., were inseparable friends at the Whitney Young Magnet High School, Michelle never admitted to Santita that her father was a precinct captain. Young Michelle spent many afternoons in the Jackson household, but she kept her father’s job as a precinct captain a secret from her best friend.
Michelle’s cynical attitude toward politics was encouraged by her mother, Marian Robinson. Friends and neighbors say that Michelle got her attitude and biting sarcasm from her formidable mother. In the words of her son, Craig Robinson, currently the men’s basketball coach at Oregon State University, Marian was “a force to be reckoned with”—a phrase that is echoed today by people who work with Michelle Obama in the White House.
In his memoir,
A Game of Character
, Craig tells a story about his mother that’s worth repeating for the light it casts on the formative influence that Marian Robinson had on her children. Once, a policeman stopped Craig and accused him of stealing the bike he was riding. “Instead of taking me at my word, [the policeman] insisted on loading the bike into the back of his cruiser and driving me home so he could speak to my parents,” Craig wrote.
A Game of Character
, Craig tells a story about his mother that’s worth repeating for the light it casts on the formative influence that Marian Robinson had on her children. Once, a policeman stopped Craig and accused him of stealing the bike he was riding. “Instead of taking me at my word, [the policeman] insisted on loading the bike into the back of his cruiser and driving me home so he could speak to my parents,” Craig wrote.
From downstairs I called up to Mom that the policeman had accused me of stealing a bike, and when she came outside, I saw a look on her face that I’d never seen before. “Go on inside, Craig,” she said, barely glancing at me but steeling her eyes on the officer, preparing to read him the riot act. I stood watching from the front screened-in porch, and she must have talked to that policeman for forty-five minutes. Then he pulled the bike out of the trunk, set it on the curb, and drove off.... But that wasn’t the end of it. The next day, Marian Robinson paid a visit to the station house. And the day after that, the policeman came to our home and apologized to me.
Like her mother, Michelle doesn’t let sleeping dogs lie. She often behaves as though others have let her down and she’s better than they are. Even on the rare occasions when people
do
meet her exalted standards—such as when whites came out and voted in large numbers for her husband in the Democratic presidential primary—Michelle can’t help but let her sense of grievance show through. Thus her most notorious remark, which she made in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on February 18, 2008: “For the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.”
do
meet her exalted standards—such as when whites came out and voted in large numbers for her husband in the Democratic presidential primary—Michelle can’t help but let her sense of grievance show through. Thus her most notorious remark, which she made in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on February 18, 2008: “For the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.”
Everyone in Michelle’s family is afraid of her. “My mom and I and my dad, before he died, we were all worried about, ‘Oh, my god, my sister’s never getting married because each guy she’d meet, she’s gonna chew him up, spit him out,’” Craig Robinson said. “So I was thinking, Barack says one wrong thing and she is going to jettison him. She’ll fire a guy in a minute, just fire him.”
Later, after Michelle and Barack married, Craig was asked if his brother-in-law used a nicotine patch to help him quit smoking. To which Craig laughingly replied: “Michelle Obama—that’s one hell of a patch right there!”
Despite her fiery reputation among friends and family, stories about Michelle’s temper have rarely appeared in the liberal mainstream media, which have gone out of their way to protect her. A reporter has to dig hard to find people who are willing to talk about their encounters with Michelle. Here are three first-hand accounts from people who have witnessed the Wrath of Michelle:
From a Harvard Law School classmate of Barack Obama’s, who asked to remain anonymous
: “When Michelle came to visit Barack at Harvard, he was living in a rundown basement apartment in a working-class neighborhood called Somerville, where he socialized almost exclusively with other African-Americans. The furniture was cobbled together from god-knows-where, and you’d sit on a chair and it would break. He had an old Toyota, which Michelle drove around. It used to break down, and they argued about it all the time.
: “When Michelle came to visit Barack at Harvard, he was living in a rundown basement apartment in a working-class neighborhood called Somerville, where he socialized almost exclusively with other African-Americans. The furniture was cobbled together from god-knows-where, and you’d sit on a chair and it would break. He had an old Toyota, which Michelle drove around. It used to break down, and they argued about it all the time.
“Barack was treated specially by a lot of people at Harvard, and Michelle found that hard to handle. His ego was pretty inflated, and Michelle would fly in from Chicago, and the first thing she’d do was take him down a peg or two. She laughed at his pretentiousness.
“But she couldn’t change the fact that he was immensely popular. He was handsome and successful and incredibly well spoken. His classmates, black and white, flocked to him. He was a guy with a slick way with words, and women especially were attracted to him. I remember one time Michelle showed up unexpectedly at his desk in the library, and found him surrounded by women. It was terrible timing, and Barack looked like the proverbial cat who swallowed the canary; he had a really pained expression on his face. He had been working his ass off studying, and girls that he knew from classes happened by just as Michelle showed up. Michelle was so damn mad that she put a hand on his shoulder in a possessive way, then gave him this disdainful look, turned on her heels, and marched out without a word, her heels clicking on the marble floors. She went back to Chicago.
“Another time, the same sort of thing happened at his Somerville apartment. She came in and found him with some women, black women. Michelle threw a fit and left. He followed her down the street, Charles Street, begging her to stay.
“I think she drove a lot of Barack’s friends away. If she didn’t find them helpful, she would simply be rude. She and Barack had constant fights, and they could be incredibly exasperated with each other. Frankly, I was surprised the relationship lasted through law school. I remember thinking,
This isn’t going to work.
This isn’t going to work.
“For a while, Michelle was very unsure about the relationship. Barack seemed to have his life the way he liked it, and she wanted to remake him. But soon after Barack graduated from law school, and the world started beating a path to his door, Michelle decided he was going to go far, and she insisted that he marry her. He got cold feet, but Michelle wouldn’t take no for an answer. She was a formidable woman even back then.”
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