The tittle is misleading. read on about your and well as America's most favorite woman in politics today
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The loose cannon in Team Obama
Ben Macintyre | May 12, 2008
AS the tall, poised black woman takes the stage in the vast indoor sports stadium, an extraordinary wave of sound runs through the 8000-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 Democratic primary race, and for months Michelle Obama has criss-crossed the US as the warm-up act for her husband.
Yet for many in the crowd this night - 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.
She would be not only the first black first lady in history, but the youngest (at 44) and the tallest (at nearly 183cm, she has at least 2.5cm on her husband).
In one other, crucial, respect, Michelle Obama 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 Obama is her husband's greatest asset, she could also, potentially, become his biggest liability.
On stage 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 flat 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 20s, 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 control 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 she won the nomination, she could not hideher 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 home-made tarnish on the halo over her husband's head. She has spoken of his snoring, his bad breath in the morning and how he fails to put the butter back in the fridge.
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 risque, even disrespectful. First ladies tend to fall into one of two categories - policy-maker or homemaker.
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." Michelle 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 daughters, aged 6 and 9.
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 policy-making 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 won the race to the White House, her response was 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 ($290,000) a year; they live in a mansion worth pound stg. 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 her husband 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.
Michelle 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.
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. |
