She came, she hugged, she conquered. Statuesque, poised, yet down-to-earth,
Michelle Obama wowed Britain last week in a way that no American first lady
has done since Jackie Kennedy’s visit in 1961.
Perhaps it was the Queen’s historic breach of her own “no touching” protocol,
when she put a friendly arm around the US president’s wife at a Buckingham
Palace G20 reception, prompting her guest to return the gesture and leaving
courtiers flustered.
Maybe it was the catch in Michelle Obama’s voice as she told 100 enraptured
teenage girls at a north London school that she could never have predicted
how a girl from the South Side of Chicago would be standing before them as
the first African-American first lady. “I do hugs,” she added, and was
immediately mobbed.
The outfits may have had something to do with her mystical allure – creations
by Isabel Toledo, Jason Wu, Azzedine Alaia and J Crew, the high street
chain. Allied to her striking looks, sculpted arms and a display of bare
legs, it amounted to a package of star quality. The Guardian reported
breathlessly: “Michelle Obama will for ever be to Stansted Harrods Terminal
what Anita Ekberg [the Swedish actress] is to the Trevi Fountain.”
While Barack Obama’s hugger-in-chief won plaudits here, coverage of her London
visit sent her stock soaring in the United States and her popularity rating
has shot past that of Oprah Winfrey, the television presenter and
African-American role model. “The TV coverage of the last two days has
dialled her up dramatically to another level,” reported Tina Brown, editor
of The Daily Beast blog site.
At a moment when her husband’s halo is losing some of its shine, Michelle’s
boost to the Obama brand could not be more timely. Her disarming blend of
glamour and authenticity – using words such as “doggone” and “Jeez” – is
integral to her continuing project of softening the president’s professorial
image. Her photograph on last month’s issue of Vogue magazine restored
further lustre.
Sarah Baxter, the Sunday Times Washington correspondent, said: “The election
was a bit of a walkover, which tended to conceal the fact that Obama’s
problem was he never quite connected with people. Now that’s coming back
again and Michelle is shoring him up. People are proud of what she has
achieved and instinctively like her. They love her two daughters, who are
very cute.”
The relatively strict upbringing of the Obama girls, Malia, 10, and Sasha, 8,
and their mother’s planting of a vegetable garden in the White House suggest
that Michelle has imposed her own style in quick order. Creating these
positive perceptions, Baxter believes, is typical of a woman “who has had to
navigate difficult circumstances”.
There is little talk now of Michelle as the “angry black woman” whose habit of
bumping knuckles with her husband was characterised as a “terrorist jab” and
who was ferociously attacked by right-wing opponents for lack of patriotism
after telling a Milwaukee campaign rally last year: “For the first time in
my adult life, I am proud of my country.” When it became clear that her
quote had been taken out of context, the fuss deflated.
It has been no cakewalk for Michelle to make the transition from well-paid
career woman to an adjunct to her husband’s ambitions. Early in their
marriage she was often furious with him. By the time their second child was
born, he reported in his bestseller The Audacity of Hope: “My wife’s anger
towards me seems barely contained. ‘You only think of yourself’, she would
tell me. ‘I never thought I’d have to raise a family alone’.”
The sacrifices began soon after Obama ran for the US Senate in 2004 and won a
landslide victory. While he spent the week in Washington, Michelle and the
girls remained at their family “support base” in Chicago, leading to strain
in their marriage. Then Obama dropped a bombshell – he was going to
fast-forward his plan to make a run for the presidency in 2008. “I thought:
uhhh, you’re kidding,” Michelle recalled. “It was like: no, not right now.
Can we take a break, please?”
On the campaign trail her sardonic sense of humour and tart remarks sometimes
shocked people. The media pounced on her admission that her husband could be
“snorey and stinky” in the morning and her wry complaint that he once rushed
out of the house and left her to deal with an overflowing toilet.
All that changed last August when she gave the keynote address on the first
night of the Democratic national convention. In a virtuoso speech she
portrayed herself and her family as the embodiment of the American dream and
emphasised her love of country. Andrew Sullivan, the Sunday Times US
columnist, described it as “one of the best, most moving, intimate, rousing,
humble and beautiful speeches I’ve heard from a convention platform”.
Michelle was on her way to becoming America’s sweetheart.
She was born on January 17, 1964, to Fraser and Marian Robinson, a
working-class couple from Chicago. Her father, who suffered from multiple
sclerosis and worked as a pump operator for the city’s water company, was
descended from a family of slaves in South Carolina who had joined the black
migration north.
Money was scarce but sufficient and Fraser took pride in providing for his
family. “If something broke and we didn’t have money to have it fixed, we
could buy another on a charge card as long as we paid the bills on time,”
Marian said. Saturday nights were spent at home playing Chinese chequers and
Monopoly.
Michelle bore such a strong resemblance to her elder brother, Craig, that
people mistook them for twins. Their parents encouraged them to think
independently. “We told them, ‘Make sure you respect your teachers, but
don’t hesitate to question them’,” Marian said, admitting that as a result
her daughter became “very vocal”.
Craig, who became a school basketball star, said his sister “was sort of the
natural leader”. At Whitney M Young Magnet high school, she refused to play
varsity sports “just because she was tall and black and athletic”, he said.
When Craig was recruited to play basketball at Princeton University, Michelle
reasoned: “I’m smarter than him, I can get there too.” Which she did, but
Princeton in the early 1980s was not particularly welcoming to minorities.
Angela Acree, her roommate, said they could not afford furniture and made do
with “pillows on the floor and a stereo”. In her sociology thesis, Michelle
wrote that the racial attitudes of some students made her feel “like a
visitor on campus, as if I really didn’t belong”. However, she was accepted
to read law at Harvard before joining a Chicago law firm.
In 1989 Obama, possessing three suits and a rusty car, arrived as a summer
intern and Michelle was assigned to supervise him. She kept coolly
professional, informing him that she had no time for distractions. However,
he noted after their first lunch: “She knew how to laugh, brightly and
easily, and I noticed that she didn’t seem in too much hurry to get back to
the office.”
At a firm’s picnic, where they ate Baskin Robbins ice-cream, he asked if he
could kiss her and found “it tasted of chocolate”. Before the end of the
summer he persuaded her to go out for a movie, during which she allowed him
to touch her knee, by Obama’s account.
Obama recently credited Stevie Wonder’s music as a catalyst for his marriage,
but he was a reluctant suitor. While he havered, Michelle told him: “Look,
buddy, I’m not one of those who’ll just hang out for ever.” Eventually, he
sprang his proposal over dinner at a restaurant in Chicago. In Michelle’s
version, he was saying “Blah blah blah, and then the dessert comes out, the
tray comes, and there’s a ring!”.
The couple were married in 1992. Quitting corporate law for public service,
Michelle worked for Chicago’s mayor and then the city’s university
hospitals, where she earned a salary of $275,000 and a reputation for
solving problems quickly. Last year she could almost claim to voters, “We’re
a young couple just out of debt”, since the Obamas had large student loans
that were paid off only by the sales of Obama’s two books.
Michelle had helped to shape The Audacity of Hope and served as Obama’s
sounding board. Crucially, she conferred on Obama her family’s African and
slave heritage, which he manifestly lacked in the eyes of many black
Americans. By marrying a black woman, he gained merit in their eyes.
According to some political analysts, she won him more black votes than
anyone else.
The first lady’s latest strategy of “humanising” the president is to make a
virtue of his square tastes. She had learnt, she said in a recent interview,
not to wear a certain grey metallic belt when he is around: “Barack calls it
my Star Trek belt. He doesn’t understand fashion.” To his frequent question,
“Is that new?”, she is apt to reply: “Why don’t you mind your own business.
Solve world hunger.”
It’s a great double act. But nobody doubts who is boss – the one who has a
three-point lead over the president in the popularity polls.
