Michelle Obama: a woman of humour and daring.
"Obama or McCain," I asked a veteran Washington politico this week? He shrugged; "I don't know. I really don't. What I do know is that we're going to see the racist underbelly of America like we've never seen it before - and it won't be pretty."
It isn't all that pretty now. The preliminary shots are being fired, but not at Barack. Instead, it is his wife Michelle who is on the frontline, for now. The campaign began in the blogosphere, progressed to YouTube via the Right-wing radio shockjocks and talk-show hosts. Now, what Time magazine describes as the "war over Michelle" is out in the open.
She stands accused of being unpatriotic because of a single remark taken out of context back in February. She is being called "Mrs Grievance" on account of what her critics claim is racial chippiness rooted in her disadvantaged background. And she is, of course, guilty of sharing a '"terrorist" fist-bump with her husband on the night he won the Democratic presidential nomination. (That's the same "terrorist" fist bump that Tiger Woods regularly exchanges with his caddy, and that Prince Charles and even the Dalai Lama have indulged in without attracting adverse comment.)
It's not much of a charge sheet, and none of it would matter except that it seems to be getting to Michelle - or rather to her husband's advisers. On a US chat show this week, widely seen as an attempt to "soften" her image, Mrs Obama claimed she wanted to emulate Laura Bush. Why? Mrs Bush, demure and gracious, has always been an admirable consort to the less than admirable Dubya. But for Mrs Obama, 17 years younger and a whole lot feistier and more interesting, to constrain herself in this way would be a betrayal of who she is.
Because Michelle Obama is the only real personality among the four protagonists in this spellbinding drama. Her husband is almost too good to be true, a Democratic spin doctor's fantasy candidate: the multicultural embodiment of hope, aspiration and America's future.
Republican opponent John McCain belongs to the past. In fact, he looks as if he's leapt straight from the embalming table, so shiny is the skin, pink-hued the cheeks and snowy the hair. He's 72 trying to be 52 and it doesn't work, while his heiress wife Cindy has a Stepford-air about her that is rather disturbing.
In contrast, the 44-year-old wife, mother and career woman has a vibrancy the others lack. She loves glamorous clothes and pearls, hates wearing tights, frequently goes shoeless, and occasionally speaks her mind. She has never been an adoring spouse and has no intention of becoming one.
Even her cookie recipe submitted for public appraisal - and on which the suitability of US presidential partners seems to rest - reveals a woman of some humour and daring. In her day, Hillary favoured chocolate chip oatmeal cookies; Laura Bush played safe with an oatmeal chocolate chunk variation, while Cindy went for oatmeal-butterscotch (although she's been accused of copying the recipe from elsewhere). Mrs Obama, meanwhile, prefers shortbread cookies with orange and lemon zest - and a cheeky dash of Amaretto. What's not to like about this woman? She's evaded the make-over thus far - and she doesn't need one now.
'I mean, "whitey"?'
Rightwing US commentators portray Michelle Obama as an 'Angry Black Woman' out to avenge her race. They couldn't be more wrong, she tells Michael Powell and Jodi Kantor
The Guardian, Saturday June 21, 2008
Michelle Robinson Obama's eyes flicker tentatively even as she offers a trained smile. As her campaign airplane arcs over the Flathead Range in Montana, she is asked to consider her complicated public image.
Conservative columnists accuse her of being unpatriotic and say she simmers with undigested racial anger. A blogger who supported Hillary Clinton circulates unfounded claims that Michelle Obama gave an accusatory speech in her church about the sins of "whitey". Obama shakes her head.
"You are amazed sometimes at how deep the lies can be," she says. Referring to a character in a 1970s sitcom, she adds: "I mean, 'whitey'? That's something that George Jefferson would say. Anyone who says that doesn't know me. They don't know the life I've lived. They don't know anything about me."
Now her husband's presidential campaign is giving her image a subtle makeover. On Wednesday, she appeared on The View, a daytime talkshow, with Barbara Walters and Whoopi Goldberg, with an eye toward softening her reputation.
Her problems seemed hard to imagine last autumn and winter. Michelle Obama, a Harvard-trained lawyer, appeared at ease with the tactile business of campaigning and drew praise for humanising, often with humour, a husband who could seem elusive. Then came some rhetorical stumbles. In February, she told voters that hope was sweeping America, adding: "For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country." Cable news shows replayed those 15 words in an endless loop of outrage [omitting the next line of her speech during that rally in Milwaukee. "And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change," she said].
The caricatures of Michelle Obama as the Angry Black Woman confound her, friends say. Her own family crosses racial boundaries and she has spent much of her adult life confronting and trying to address racial resentment. Obama was among a handful of black people at one of Chicago's most prestigious law firms, and she later ran a project that sought to defuse racial conflict.
But the 44-year-old, known to friends as the Taskmistress, sometimes speaks with a passion and an insistence unusual for a potential first lady. She tells voters, for example, that "Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual - uninvolved, uniformed."
She says she intends to evoke a John F Kennedy-like idealism and highlight her own journey, but in her commanding cadences, some people - and not just conservatives - hear a lecture. To appeal to voters who may be put off or not know of her biography, the campaign hopes to display Obama as an ordinary American mom. Shortly before her husband announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination, Michelle Obama confided in friends: "Barack and I will cut an unfamiliar figure to most of America, a loving, opinionated upper-middle-class black couple with children."
Michelle Robinson grew up in the black half of a divided Chicago. She and her brother, Craig, lived with their parents on the second floor of a two-storey house - "Two bedrooms, if you want to be generous," she says.
Her father, Frasier, was a pump operator for Chicago's water department and a precinct captain in the Democratic machine. Her mother, Marian, brought workbooks home to keep her children ahead of their classes. The working-class neighbourhood was filled with uncles and grandparents, block associations and overarching oak trees. "We knew the gang-bangers - my brother played basketball in the park," Obama says. "Home never feels dangerous."
In 1981, she left for Princeton, an overwhelmingly white institution that cherished its genteel traditions. She was one of 94 black freshmen in a class of over 1,100. The mother of Catherine Donnelly, a white student [and] one of her roommates, spent months pleading with Princeton to give her daughter a white roommate instead. Obama shrugs now. Some classmates resented black people; some resented affirmative action. "Diversity can't be taken care of with 10 kids," she says. "There is an isolation that comes with that" Black and white students rarely mixed socially. When Crystal Nix Hines became the first black editor of the student newspaper, the Daily Princetonian, some black students wondered why she wanted to run a "white" newspaper. Obama, however, was thrilled that a historic barrier had fallen.
In her senior Sociology thesis, she wrote, "My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'blackness' than ever before," and went on to ask, Does immersion in an elite white institution draw black people away from their community?
After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1988, Obama took a job at Sidley Austin, a corporate law firm. She had a handsome salary and the prospect of better to come. Then a close friend from college died. So did her father, who had long suffered from multiple sclerosis. "I looked out at my neighbourhood and sort of had an epiphany that I had to bring my skills to bear in the place that made me," she says. "I wanted to have a career motivated by passion and not just money."
Eventually, Obama started the Chicago chapter of a training programme called Public Allies.
She searched for young talent that could transform these rough neighbourhoods, preaching the gospel of the second and third chance. She insisted that the white [university students] work alongside the gang member or the young mother on welfare.
Every Friday, the young people would sprawl around Obama's office, swapping frustrations. Black people accused white people of being clueless. White members said black members masked insecurity with anger. Michelle Obama probed carefully, sometimes turning up the heat before turning it down.
"I hate diversity workshops," she says. "Real change comes from having enough comfort to be really honest and say something very uncomfortable."
By 2001, Obama, married for nine years and the mother of two daughters, had taken a job as vice-president of community affairs at the University of Chicago Medical Centre. She soon discovered just how acrimonious those affairs were.
Hospital brass had gathered to set the foundation stone for a children's wing when black protesters broke in with bullhorns, drowning out the proceedings with demands that the hospital award more contracts to minority firms. Obama strolled over and offered to meet later, if only the protesters would pipe down. She revised the contracting system, sending so much business to firms owned by women and minorities that the hospital won awards.
She also interceded to alter the hospital's research agenda. When the human papillomavirus vaccine, which can prevent cervical cancer, became available, researchers proposed approaching local school heads about enlisting black teenage girls as research subjects. Obama stopped that. The prospect of [such a trial] summoned the spectre of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment of the mid-20th century, when white doctors let hundreds of black men go untreated for decades to study the disease.
Rather than pulling Michelle Obama behind a curtain, her husband's campaign is pushing her farther out on stage. She remains a charismatic presence, and when she gives her husband a fist bump on stage or talks of him as a father, she is telling voters, this is a regular guy.
In coming weeks, Michelle Obama will unveil a new speech, emphasising her modest background and family ties.
As her airplane descends into a northern Montana valley, she sounds like a woman who wishes she could sit voters down for a long talk. "You know, if someone sat in a room with me for five minutes after hearing these rumours, they'd go 'huh'?" she says. "They'd realise it doesn't make sense."
She extends her long arms, her voice plaintive. "I will walk anyone through my life," she says. "Come on, let's go."
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