As the tall, poised black woman takes the stage in the vast indoor sports
stadium, an extraordinary wave of sound runs through the 8,000-strong crowd
and bounces off the rafters: a sort of deafening ululation, a wild, excited
keening unlike anything I have heard at a political rally.
“Good Ev-En-Ing Pittsburgh,” says Michelle Obama, with a rising cadence, and
then a pause. “Are you ready?”
After his victory in North Carolina, Barack Obama seems to be building an
unassailable lead in the see-sawing Democratic primary race, and for months
Mrs Obama has criss-crossed America as the warm-up act for her husband.
Yet for many in the crowd tonight - more than half of them African-Americans,
and of those more than half women - she is the main attraction. Obama
himself stands almost diffidently to one side, with his hand in his pocket.
“You go, girl!” screams the matronly black woman standing next to me, tears
streaming down her face. “You go!”
Michelle Obama has already gone places in this election where no American
politician has ever been, helping to galvanise black support for the
Democratic contender as never before. Her story is one that millions of
black Americans can relate to instantly. She has humanised the Obama image
with the domestic detail of their lives, while bringing greater glamour to
this campaign than any candidate's wife since Jacqueline Onassis.
Michelle Obama would be not only the first black First Lady in history, but
the youngest (at 44) and the tallest (at nearly 6ft, she has at least an
inch on her husband). In one other, crucial respect she is also different
from any previous First Lady: she says exactly what she thinks, when she
thinks it, with a caustic sense of humour that is both very amusing and very
dangerous.
For while Mrs Obama is her husband's greatest asset, she could also,
potentially, become his biggest liability.
On stage on the night before the Pennsylvania primary, the air vibrating
around her with the adoration of the multitude, she cannot suppress a look
of wry disbelief.
“I'm not supposed to be standing here.” She says this at almost every campaign
stop. “I am a statistical oddity. A black girl, brought up on the South Side
of Chicago ... I'm certainly not supposed to be standing here.” There is
more than false modesty in this. Michelle LaVaughn Robinson was raised in a
one-bedroom apartment in a notoriously tough and impoverished area of
Chicago, “the baddest part of town” in the words of the old country and
western song. Her father, who had multiple sclerosis diagnosed when he was
in his twenties, worked at the city water plant. The Robinsons were never
dirt poor but they were far from rich, and nothing came free.
With hard work and determination she made it to Princeton University and
Harvard Law School, then on to a career in corporate law (while working at a
blue-chip law firm she met Barack Obama, who was working there on an
internship); then a stint in public service, most recently as a highly paid
hospital executive.
Hers is an African-American success story that is far easier to comprehend
than the more complex journey of her half-white, half-African husband. But
getting here was not easy. In an essay written at Princeton, she laid out in
stark terms the alienation she felt as a young black student: “No matter how
liberal and open-minded some of my White professors and classmates try to be
towards me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't
belong ... regardless of the circumstances under which I interact with
Whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be Black
first and a student second.”
That sense of being in the wrong place - at Princeton, on stage in Pittsburgh,
perhaps even on the campaign trail itself - may help to explain Michelle
Obama's edginess, the sharp, self-defensive wit, the tendency to make her
husband the butt of her humour. Time and again the Obama spokesmen have been
wheeled out to perform damage limitation after another outspoken remark from
the candidate's wife.
She was accused of being unpatriotic when, in an unguarded moment, she
declared: “For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country ...
because I think people are hungry for change.” Even more damaging, when
asked whether she would support Hillary Clinton if her husband's opponent
eventually wins the nomination, she could not hide her antipathy: “I'd have
to think about that - I'd have to think about her policies, her approach,
her tone.”
Perhaps most controversially of all, she has gone out of her way to put a
little homemade tarnish on the halo over her husband's head. She has spoken
of his snoring, his bad breath in the morning, how he fails to put the
butter back in the fridge or replace the plastic grip on the bread packet to
keep it fresh.
To many, this may sound like the normal joshing of a happy couple, but coming
from a potential First Lady the remarks were seen as positively risqué, even
disrespectful. First Ladies tend to fall into one of two categories -
policymaker or home-maker: either they are political operatives in their own
right (as Hillary Clinton was), or they are expected to look pleasant, back
some worthy causes and avoid saying anything either controversial or
interesting (in the manner of Laura Bush). First Ladies are not expected to
hold forth on the subject of their husbands' smelly breath.
The image of Obama as a hen-pecked husband has done him no harm, and he plays
up to it repeatedly: “She basically tells me what to do, and I do it. With
pleasure. Because it usually works out.”
Mrs Obama has been equally frank in discussing the problems of establishing a
work-life balance when your husband is running flat-out in the most
ferocious primary race for a generation: she worries about food additives,
and whether her children see their father enough, and what may or may not be
in the fridge when
she gets home to Chicago. She points
out that when she is not giving speeches
to thousands of people she is at the supermarket, buying loo paper.
Her most often-stated ambition is not political, but the determination to
retain a grip on normal life for her two daughters, aged 6 and 9: “I think
there's a level of connection that gets lost the farther you get into being
a candidate.”
Mrs Obama is said to have considered long and hard before agreeing that her
husband should run. She has apparently ruled out running a second time if
this attempt fails. Her own interest in politics, while profound, is of the
practical rather than the policymaking kind. As a former public servant and
a hospital administrator, her concerns are the solving of immediate
problems, not ideological positions in what she refers to as “this messy
thing called politics”.
When she was asked, only half in jest, whether she might run for the Illinois
senate seat that would be vacated if her husband wins the race to the White
House, her response was unequivocal and typically blunt: “Ugh, no thanks.”
Her role in the campaign has been to play on the dark side of US life, while
her husband emphasises the “audacity of hope”. At rally after rally, she
paints a picture of an America “guided by fear”, increasingly beset by
poverty and alienation. “We have become a nation of struggling folks who are
just barely making it every day,” she says.
The Obamas could hardly be said to be struggling: before she left her job to
campaign full-time, she was earning the equivalent of £140,000 a year; they
live in a mansion worth £800,000. But it is Michelle Obama's link to a
hardscrabble past that allows her to make such effective common cause with
Americans in economic pain.
As she steps away from the microphone, another huge roar reverberates around
the hall, and she pauses to lay a hand on her husband's cheek before
stepping offstage and vanishing. It takes a full minute before Barack Obama
can make himself heard: “She is the love of my life, my rock, my foundation,
the person who keeps me on track, who has put up with my nonsense not just
for 15 months but for 15 years...”
This may be partly an aw-shucks act, a riff on the heartstrings for the
cameras, but it is also a statement of fact: without her, he would probably
not be heading for the next round in this marathon primary battle, probable
victory in the fight for the Democratic nomination and, quite possibly, the
White House. Mrs Obama is black in a way that her husband is not,
spontaneous as he can never be, but also unfettered in a way that he, most
certainly, is not.
“I am trying to be as authentically me as I can be,” she said recently. That
may explain the extraordinary sound that greets her in this huge hall, but
it is also what keeps her husband's advisers awake at night.
Extract from the introduction of Michelle LaVaughn Robinson's thesis on
Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community, presented to Princeton
University, New Jersey, in 1985.
/(c) Michelle LaVaughn Robinson, 1985
My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my “Blackness”
than ever before. I have found that, no matter how liberal and open-minded
some of my White professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes
feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong. Regardless of
the circumstances under which I interact with Whites at Princeton, it often
seems as if, to them, I will always be Black first and a student second.
These experiences have made it apparent to me that the path I have chosen to
follow will likely lead to my further integration and/or assimilation into a
White cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the
periphery of society; never becoming a full participant.This realisation
has, presently, made my goals to actively utilise my resources to benefit
the Black community more desirable. At the same time, however, it is
conceivable that my four years of exposure to a predominantly White, Ivy
League University has instilled within me certain conservative values ... I
find myself striving for many of the same goals as my White classmates ...
is it possible that other Black alumni share these feelings?
This is very true! There is far too much division.
Pat Julian, Smyrna, USA
I know that what she says about being black in those ''white universities'' is true.I am. Even when you have better scores, they will always try to make you feel ''under''. They want you to feel black first and skillfull student last.Obama deserves to be president and he will. for blacks and whites.
patrick, montreal, canada
What the writer did not say was that Michelle Obama did a survey of black Princeton almni for her paper, to see if they did share her feelings and the survey showed that they did not.
Heather, Lowell, Ma, USA
No, she would not be the youngest. Basic fact checking would be useful. She would not even be the youngest in the last 40 years - Mrs Kennedy, for example, was 32 when her husband was inaugurated.
B. Hug, London, UK
Felix, explain he difference! Black people will always be black people, as far as skin color is concerned; but, as is the case of Barry & Michelle, in terms of being part of the coiety, what difference is there? The assimilationist vs. integrationist argument needs to be buried and forfotten.
Mansy, New York, USA
As an African person I don't understand why African Americans have such a need to be assimilated in the white community. Personally I find it unhealthy because it appears as though one does not feel validated unless white people do so.
We don't need to be assimilated, we need to be integrated.
Felix, leesburg, US