She was always a straight shooter about the imbalance in relationships. In 2004, when her husband was in the race for the US Senate, she told the Chicago Tribune: “What I notice about men, all men, is that their order is me, my family, God is in there somewhere, but me is first. And for women, me is fourth, and that’s not healthy.”
Michele Norris reminded me of a 2007 Maureen Dowd New York Times column, “She’s Not Buttering Him Up,” that criticized Michelle Obama for ways that she tried to humanize her husband during their first presidential campaign. Dowd found fault with what she said at a fundraiser in New York when she teased her husband for not “putting his socks actually in the dirty clothes.”
“This princess of South Chicago,” Dowd wrote, “a formidable Princeton and Harvard Law School grad, wants us to know that she’s not polishing the pedestal.” That kind of hypercriticism is why, according to Norris, she had to be “superhuman” when she was first lady. Now, as a former first lady, she bends over backward to say she’s just like you.
Her straight talk is not surprising to the people who know her well. She has a famously close and loyal circle of female friends who keep her grounded. They include Jarrett and Norris, whose husband, Broderick Johnson, was assistant to the president and secretary of the cabinet under President Obama. She is also close with Chicago turned DC friend Kelly Dibble, and to the poet Elizabeth Alexander.
Obama talked candidly about race before she became first lady. She told 60 Minutes in 2007, when her husband was a presidential candidate: “As a Black man, you know, Barack can get shot going to the gas station.”
She admires the way Laura Bush approached being first lady with quiet restraint. But that was never really who Bush was, either. “After nearly eight years of hypervigilance, of watching for the next danger or tragedy that might be coming, I could at last exhale; I could simply be,” the former first lady wrote in her memoir, Spoken From the Heart, about the relief she felt leaving the White House. Obama could relate.
During debt ceiling negotiations last summer, a source says, Obama and Biden commiserated about the Groundhog Day nature of the battle. (Obama faced a similar crisis in 2011.) The phone conversation may have also allowed Obama to check on the octogenarian president. That day Biden had taken an embarrassing fall when he tripped on a sandbag onstage at the Air Force Academy commencement. Biden was going to need Obama to attest to his fitness for the office. Now, more than ever, “you need to strike at the right time for key surrogates to be useful,” a Biden aide told me, before the debate. “You don’t want to waste them, and a year is a lifetime in politics times five.”
Eric Lesser started working on Obama’s 2008 campaign before he graduated from college and went on to work as a West Wing aide. But he couldn’t win the Democratic nomination to be lieutenant governor of Massachusetts in 2022, even after scoring a photo op with the former president at the Obamas’ home in Martha’s Vineyard. Still, Lesser, who served four terms in the state Senate, says he believes that the Obamas’ combined star power is unmatched.
“[George W.] Bush left with his tail between his legs with a massive economic crisis and two disastrous wars,” he says. “By contrast there is an immense reservoir of goodwill for the Obamas. I was in barbershops and VFW halls and Fourth of July parades across the communities I campaigned in and visited, and over a long period of time—eight years—it was clear the admiration people have for him. And it’s transcended party identification. I had Republicans who admired how he raised his family and the character and the dignity that he brought to the office.”
So many presidential traditions—things that aren’t written in stone but have become quasi-sacred—were trashed the moment Trump stepped into the Oval Office. A fatal breach of the US Capitol, two impeachments, and countless “unprecedented” moments later—including Trump’s conviction on 34 felony charges—and the Obamas are holding firm to the idea that their brand of politics can thrive, even amid Trump’s brand of red-hot fury. “I’m still the hope guy,” Obama has said without a trace of cynicism.
On the rare occasion when Bill Clinton would stop by the Obama White House, Jeremy Bernard, who was the Obamas’ social secretary from 2011 to 2015, remembers Clinton giving him a hug and introducing himself to his staff, who were “amazed.”
Clinton once told Bernard that Obama wasn’t “good at the easy stuff, the mixing and mingling.” “Obama was more focused on the job and didn’t know who all was in the room. They haven’t changed, they have a close-knit group,” Bernard says. That includes pre-presidency friends from Chicago like Marty Nesbitt and his wife, Dr. Anita Blanchard, and DC pals like Dr. Sharon Malone, an ob-gyn who specializes in aging and menopause, and her husband, Eric Holder, who was attorney general in the Obama administration and the first African American person to hold the office.
Bernard was on the receiving end of complaints from high-dollar donors who wanted to know why they hadn’t received more invitations to the White House. “For me, President Obama is what I really want in a president, his policy and most of what he stands for are right in line with what I feel as a progressive Democrat.” But being his social secretary could be a “fucking nightmare.”