An inside look at the First Couple’s life together.
- Christopher Andersen, BettyConfidential.com
Obamas Inauguration Day
Jackie Kennedy spoke for nearly every First Lady in recent memory when she reached for Arctic metaphors to describe her marriage to JFK. "We are like two icebergs," she said, "the public life above the water, the private life submerged." In the case of Barack and Michelle Obama, everything seems to be pretty much above the water line. From the moment they stepped on the national stage five short years ago, the Obamas have made the conscious decision to let us in on their troubles--both small (he snores, she nags) and big (Michelle calls their daughter Sasha's bout with meningitis as an infant "the nightmare that brought us closer together.") But there are still some things about the First Couple you may not know: When they met, Michelle was the one with the big career. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1988--three years before Barack--she went straight to work in the intellectual and copyright department of Chicago's Sidley Austin, one of the world's biggest law firms. By the time Barack arrived there as a summer intern assigned to Michelle ("Barack Obama? Who names their kid Barack Obama? He grew up in Hawaii! Who grows up in Hawaii?”), she was already handling the trademark interests of two of the firm's biggest clients: Barney the purple dinosaur of children's television fame, and Coors Beer.
For him, it was love at first sight. For her, not so much. Unimpressed with the rave reviews the young Harvard law student was getting from colleagues ("I've got nothing in common with this guy"), Michelle repeatedly refused to date Barack on the grounds that she was technically his boss. Besides, she told her brother Craig, "Barack and I are the only two black people in the department, and if we start dating it'll just look, well, tacky." Eventually, she relented--but only if they kept their date a secret. They went to see Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing--and there, standing in the lobby, was Michelle's boss Newton Minow, and Minow's wife, Jo. "They were like a couple of teenagers, both obviously flustered that they'd been spotted together," recalled Minow, who had served as head of the Federal Communications Commission under President John F. Kennedy. "It struck us as kind of sweet." Years later, Barack thanked Lee for making the movie. "It was the first time," he told the director, "Michelle let me touch her knee."
"I'm not the sort of girl who just hangs out forever..." Fed up over Barack's reluctance to commit after a nearly three-year courtship, Michelle was ready to call it quits when, over dinner at Gordon's in Chicago, the waiter arrived with the restaurant's signature dessert--flourless chocolate cake. On the plate was a small velvet box containing a one-carat diamond engagement ring. She looked up at Barack in stunned silence. "That," he said, "sort of shuts you up, doesn't it?"
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Michelle taught him how to talk to the African-American audiences in Chicago that would form his political base. Barack's friend and mentor Abner Mikva remembered being "surprised" at how "stiff and boring" Obama was the first time he heard him speak. "Sometimes you just sound snooty," Michelle told him bluntly. "You take too long to answer questions. Loosen up. You think too much!" The father of Santita Jackson, Michelle's best friend in high school, says Barack was smart to heed Michelle's advice at the time. "She knew what she was talking about," recalls the Rev. Jesse Jackson. "He's from Hawaii. Michelle's from the 'hood."
He may look good now, but Michelle has always been the fashion plate in the family. Until Michelle got hold of Barack, his wardrobe was, in her words, "kind of cruddy--I had to really tell him to get rid of the white jacket." Conversely, Michelle's appreciation for the finer things dates back to her girlhood on Chicago's South Side--when, at 15, she shocked her mother by spending $300 of her babysitting money on a Coach handbag. "She's always loved clothes," said her friend, Cheryl Rucker-Whitaker. "She loves purses, she loves getting her hair done. She really is a girly girl."
Read: How to Get Michelle Obama's Look for Less
They were almost derailed by his political ambition. Left alone to take care of two small children in Chicago while Barack spent four nights away each week serving in the Illinois State Senate in Springfield, Michelle grew increasingly desperate back in the late l990s. "I felt very much alone," she has said of this period. "Frankly, I was angry." When it became clear he wasn't about to change, it was Michelle who decided to do the adjusting. In late 2003, Michelle hired a full-time housekeeper, got her mom to help with the kids, and went to the gym every day at 4:30 a.m. "I had to stop depending on Barack to make me happy," she said. "I had to make myself happy." This moment she describes as "the epiphany."
For the first 12 years of their marriage, they fought over money. Left more than $200,000 in debt from student loans, Barack flew to Los Angeles to attend the 2000 Democratic National Convention--only to have his American Express Card declined when he tried to rent a car at the airport. All that changed four years later at another Democratic Convention--only this time he was the keynote speaker. His first book, Dreams From My Father , was rereleased nine years after its original publication, and the Obamas' annual income went from $250,000 to over $2 million. "It was like Jack and his magic beans," Michelle said of Barack's early promises to solve their financial problems. "He's like, 'Look, honey, I'm going to write these books and we'll be fine,' and I'm like, 'Yeah, sure, right.'" With the publication of The Audacity of Hope, the Obamas annual income topped $4.2 million by 2007. Yeah, right.
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She does not want to be 'co-president' like Hillary did, but Michelle has always been, says the President, "my chief counsel and advisor. I'd never make a big decision without asking her opinion." When Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod and the rest of his staff could not persuade their candidate to adopt a three-word slogan--"Yes We Can"-- that Barack initially felt was "childish," Michelle convinced him otherwise. And when it came time to choose between Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden as his running mate in 2008, Michelle merely asked her husband: "Do you really want Bill and Hillary just down the hall from you in the White House? Could you live with that?" Enough said.
They don’t like groupies. "I wish they'd stop grabbing my ass," Barack told aides after groping would-be groupies on the campaign trail left his backside bruised. Michelle says he has never given her cause to doubt him ("Not once"), but she has secretly wanted to tell some of his more ardent female fans to "back off, get a life. It's just embarrassing, that's all." Their friend Valerie Jarrett says there's something else working in favor of fidelity: "There's a subtle element of fear on his part," Jarrett says, "which is good."
His photo-op trips to fast food joints like Five Guys notwithstanding, Michelle--not the President--is the real fast food junkie in the First Family. "Barack would never, ever eat at McDonald's or any fast-food place," said former campaign aide Jeremiah Posedel, "unless maybe it was some veggie sandwich at Subway. He is incredibly careful about what he eats." Michelle, on the other hand, would sneak away for a hamburger whenever she could. "He's not around!" she would shout. "We can eat what we want!" The First Lady's "all-time favorite food": french fries.
He's the big softie when it comes to the girls--Mom's the tough one. One of the few times the famously cool Obama lost it was when he began his quest for the presidency and realized he would once again be away from his family for long stretches of time. At a signing for his book The Audacity of Hope, someone asked how Malia and Sasha were doing, and he burst into tears. "He was crying so hard," Valerie Jarrett said, "he couldn't continue." Mom is the parental whip-cracker, making sure the girls make their beds, tidy up their rooms, do their homework, walk the dog. But when Michelle made them go to school the day after Daddy was elected President, even Grandma, who lives upstairs, thought that was "just cruel." The Obamas also have an interesting approach to the girls' birthdays: No presents from Mommy and Daddy. "We spend hundreds [of dollars] on their parties," President Obama explains, "and we want to teach some limits." By the same token, none of the girls' Christmas presents come from their parents. "But a ton," Michelle allows, "come from Santa." But like all kids, they're hard to impress. After they'd been in the White House just a few days, Michelle asked Malia and Sasha if they wanted to go see Daddy land on the South Lawn in his helicopter. "Why?" Malia asked. "We've already seen it." Christopher Andersen is the author of twenty-eight books, including Jack and Jackie: Portrait of An American Marriage and Bill and Hillary.
To order Christopher Andersen’s book, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage, go to www.amazon.com.
To read more about the Obama family on BettyConfidential | Michelle Obama Hosts "Healthy Kids" Fair & Michelle Obama Talks French Fries, Fashion and Family Time
