First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies (7 page)

Hairstylist Michael “Rahni” Flowers and his business partner Daryl Wells own Van Cleef hair salon, which is located in a refurbished church in downtown Chicago and caters to wealthy African American clients. Flowers first started doing Michelle’s hair when she was a teenager and she would come in with her mother, Marian Robinson. “Knowing her the way that we know her, this was nothing that she wanted,” Rahni said. Michelle is a “no-nonsense” woman who does not take herself too seriously, he adds. There was a casual atmosphere in the salon. Rahni remembers how he and the future first lady would talk about their shared love of bacon (“We’re bacon people,” she admitted in a 2008 interview on ABC’s
The View
), and Wells used to call her “Boo.” After her husband was elected president, Wells teased her, “Should I call you ‘First Lady Boo’? I’m going to call Marian ‘First Boo Mom.’” Now her whole world is different and her friends cannot get a message through to her directly. After her husband won the
presidential election and Flowers and Wells wanted to make an announcement that she was at their salon, she asked them not to. “I’m just here to get my hair done,” she said. “I don’t want people standing up and clapping.”

When Michelle moved her young family into the White House, it was the first time that she’d been unemployed in her adult life. Before she started scaling back her schedule at the University of Chicago Medical Center, where she was vice president of external affairs, to campaign for her husband, she was earning almost $275,000 a year. She was forty-five when she became first lady, the youngest woman to hold the position since Jackie Kennedy. “Remember, she was his mentor to begin with,” Bill Plante noted, referring to her work as an associate at the corporate law firm Sidley & Austin in Chicago and her assignment, at age twenty-five, to mentor Obama, who was a twenty-seven-year-old summer associate. (She rejected his requests to take her on a date because she thought it would be “tacky” if “the only two black people” at the law firm started dating, but she admits she fell in “deep like” with him when they first met.) She knew that the responsibility of transitioning their daughters, Malia and Sasha, who were ten and seven when they moved into the White House, would fall squarely on her shoulders. In an August 2008 interview with
Ladies’ Home Journal
she said, “They’ll be leaving the only home that they’ve known. Someone’s got to be the steward of that transition. And it can’t be the President of the United States. It will be me.” Her first chief of staff, Jackie Norris, said, “I think there were a lot of people saying no to her in the beginning, ‘No, I’m sorry, you can’t do this. No, I’m sorry, you can’t do that.’ Like going out for a walk, or ‘I just want to go to Target’ or ‘I just want to drive my kids to school.’ That’s pretty hard when you first come into an environment and have so many restrictions put on you
and such high scrutiny. It was even higher than on the campaign trail.”

Michelle took a lavish trip to Spain in 2010 with daughter Sasha and family friends that came during the economic recession. The four-day vacation cost taxpayers almost half a million dollars due to the high cost of paying for the large Secret Service contingent and the cost of sending the First Lady’s traveling staff to accompany her on the trip. The Obamas paid for hotel expenses and the equivalent of first-class airfare. A New York
Daily News
headline blared, “A Modern Day Marie Antoinette.” A year later, in 2011, Michelle did get to take that trip to Target. She was photographed at a Target department store in suburban Alexandria, Virginia, where a photographer from the Associated Press shot photos of her casually dressed in a button-down floral shirt, a Nike baseball cap, and sunglasses. The trip was not as simple as it appeared, however, with Secret Service agents arriving at the store thirty minutes before the First Lady walked in. The First Lady’s office would not discuss how the lone AP photographer happened to be positioned to take shots of Michelle checking out, but the images were used to help diffuse the uproar about her expensive taste.

Michelle spoke much more bluntly than she ever had before about her frustrations with public life during Tuskegee University’s commencement in Tuskegee, Alabama, in May 2015. She told the graduating class of mostly African American students, “Back when my husband first started campaigning for president, folks had all sorts of questions of me: What kind of first lady would I be? What kinds of issues would I take on? Would I be more like Laura Bush, or Hillary Clinton, or Nancy Reagan? . . . But, as potentially the first African American first lady, I was also the focus of another set of questions and speculations; conversations sometimes rooted in the fears and misperceptions of others. Was I
too loud, or too angry, or too emasculating? Or was I too soft, too much of a mom, not enough of a career woman?” She was angry about personal attacks against her husband, especially by those who persisted in questioning his citizenship. During the 2000 campaign, George W. Bush attacked Bill Clinton’s ethics. But the Clintons and the Bushes, unlike the Obamas, are veterans of the bruising games of politics. “Things that were said about President Obama were taken very personally because it’s hard to hear someone talk about someone you love,” said Laura Bush’s chief of staff, Anita McBride. “The Bushes and the Clintons have been at this for so long, they know they have to brush it off.” In fact, twelve days after her husband was sworn in as governor of Texas, Laura was invited to the White House for a luncheon with governors’ spouses as part of the annual National Governors Association meeting. She was not surprised to find herself seated next to Rhea Chiles, the wife of Florida’s governor, Lawton Chiles, who had run and won a heated race against her brother-in-law Jeb the previous fall. “Whether the seating was intentional or accidental,” Laura Bush wrote in her memoir, “Rhea and I were forced to make polite conversation.”

Michelle is not always comfortable in the transactional world of politics, and friends say she finds it hard not to take some things personally. She has confessed to sleepless nights agonizing over how people were seeing her, people whom she would never meet in person but who had formed opinions about her through the media. The
New Yorker
spoof of her with an Afro in combat boots and a Kalashnikov slung over her shoulder while fist-bumping her husband in the Oval Office was meant to show the outlandishness of her critics, but it wounded her. “You are amazed sometimes at how deep the lies can be,” she said in the
New York Times
. She told the students in Tuskegee that, eventually, she had to ignore
the criticism. “I realized that if I wanted to keep my sanity and not let others define me, there was only one thing I could do, and that was to have faith in God’s plan for me.”

Reggie Love, Obama’s former personal assistant—who is known as his “body man” and is like a third child to the Obamas—says that he thinks the President is a hopeless optimist about the political system and his wife is a realist. She says she’s “Eeyore” and the President is “Mr. Happy.” Ever since Obama burst onto the national stage after he delivered the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Michelle has been tamping down expectations that he can fix everything that’s wrong with Washington, though she made the case on the campaign trail in 2007 that “there is a specialness to him.” Unlike Hillary Clinton, Michelle rejects any comparisons of her young husband to President Kennedy, and of her style to Jackie Kennedy’s, even though she is the only other first lady to rival Jackie as a style icon. “Camelot to me doesn’t work,” Michelle said, referring to Jackie’s romanticized description of her family’s thousand days in the White House. “It was a fairy tale that turned out not to be completely true because no one can live up to that. And I don’t want to live like that.”

Michelle is frustrated in the White House, in part because she had to give up her career. “She can’t get up and leave and take a job in Europe or Chicago,” Love says, “so if there was something that was really appealing to her somewhere else she can’t do it.” She also doesn’t mask her feelings well. When she wrote emails to Alyssa Mastromonaco, who was in charge of the President’s schedule, to voice her concerns, she did it so bluntly that Mastromonaco asked for advice from colleagues about how to respond. (In the White House, staffers usually keep anything in an email innocuous, knowing that it could one day become public.)

President Obama knows that his wife is unhappy. In a 2013
Vogue
interview the President spoke about Michelle, revealing a tinge of guilt. “She is a great mom. What is also true is Michelle’s had to accommodate”—here he pauses—“a life that”—another pause—“it’s fair to say was not necessarily what she envisioned for herself. She has to put up with me. And my schedule and my stresses. And she’s done a great job on that. But I think it would be a mistake to think that my wife, when I walk in the door, is,
Hey, honey, how was your day? Let me give you a neck rub.
It’s not as if Michelle is thinking in terms of,
How do I cater to my husband?
” The President told
New York Times
reporter Jodi Kantor that his staff “worries a lot more about what the first lady thinks than they worry about what I think,” a sentiment echoed by Love. “He’s the leader of the free world and she’s his wife. I think even the leader of the free world has to figure out how to keep everyone happy.” Michelle is a cut-to-the-chase working mother who “doesn’t hold stuff back,” Love says. And if anyone wants to challenge her, she says simply, “I’m not running for anything.” She does not get angry at criticisms of her husband’s policies, but she becomes infuriated by personal attacks, a current Obama administration official said on the condition of anonymity. She also abhors leaks, and at the beginning of her husband’s first term, when stories leaked out about infighting, she wanted explanations. “How could this happen?” she wanted to know. “We could say it’s just the way Washington works,” the Obama official said, “but she has a way of letting you know that that is no excuse.”

Michelle is keenly aware of what’s going on in her husband’s administration. One Obama staffer says that he worked for years in a less senior position, but when he got a much bigger job that brought him into daily contact with the President, he figured he
had to introduce himself to the First Lady. “Oh, I know you,” she said, and rattled off five things about him. According to former White House Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton, Michelle watches MSNBC’s
Morning Joe
when she works out (ninety minutes, up to five times a week) and talks with the Obamas’ closest friend and adviser in the White House, Valerie Jarrett, often. “She’s plugged in,” Burton said. “She’s a consumer and knows what’s going on.” (Michelle introduced her husband to Jarrett, who has been instrumental in his political career.)

When her husband was a senator she dismissed the idea of leaving her girls, and her high-powered job, to fly to Washington for a luncheon with other Senate wives honoring then–First Lady Laura Bush. She still does not want to do anything without a specific purpose. When she became first lady she demanded that, in exchange for spending four hours at the annual Congressional Club luncheon—a tradition that began in 1912 in honor of the first lady—the well-to-do attendees commit to a day of volunteer work. “Whether it’s a food bank or a homeless shelter, there’s so much need out there,” she told the congressional wives clad in Lily Pulitzer dresses. During staff meetings, when advisers suggest she attend certain events, she will ask, “But why? I don’t want to just show up to show up.” She has always been absolutely clear to her staff that she is not Hillary Clinton. She laughs at the suggestion that she run for office herself one day, and she did not relish the battle to secure health-care reform and the fight to pass the President’s stimulus package. Unlike Hillary, whose feminism is so much a part of her identity, Michelle has said that while she agrees with much of the feminist agenda, she is “not that into labels” and would not identify herself as a feminist.

For Michelle, it’s always been about her husband’s personal exceptionalism and not about party loyalty. In a way, she is like
Nancy Reagan, who had little interest in getting to know other Republican first ladies and even had a bad relationship with Barbara Bush during the eight years that the latter was the wife of President Reagan’s vice president. Sometimes Michelle’s advisers forget that she is part of a much larger tradition. The Obamas held a mental health summit at the White House in 2013, but Rosalynn Carter, who brought about the passage of mental health legislation in 1980 and made it her signature issue as First Lady, was left off the guest list. “I got really mad,” a former Carter aide said. He called a friend who had worked for the Obamas and told her about the oversight. She then called the First Lady’s chief of staff, Tina Tchen, who responded, “Oh God, I forgot.” According to President Carter’s aide, Rosalynn did not believe them and felt intentionally excluded. When asked in an interview if Hillary Clinton had sought her input when crafting health-care legislation, or if either Michelle Obama or President Obama asked for her advice when developing the health-care overhaul because of her extensive work on mental-health issues, Rosalynn said simply: “The answer to both of these questions is no.”

When they first moved into the White House the Obamas were overwhelmed, and it took them a long time to get used to a hundred-person staff. The day after his inauguration, President Obama came into the East Room and introduced himself to the residence employees. Both the President and the First Lady looked surprised when they met the staff separately, former White House Florist Bob Scanlan recalled. “They didn’t realize that there were that many people just in the house to take care of the house. At the time it doesn’t sink in that you have maybe two plumbers, three carpenters, you have gardeners, and you have eight housekeepers, because they’re not cleaning just the private quarters, they’re cleaning from the bottom up. Half those housekeepers are
everywhere else in the house but the private quarters.” When the Obamas’ predecessors, George and Laura Bush, moved in, they knew exactly what to expect and they enjoyed reconnecting with butlers, maids, and others who affectionately referred to Bush’s father, George H. W. Bush, as “Old Man Bush.”