Michelle Obama stands off to the side of her husband. It is four days after his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, and Barack Obama, U.S. Senate candidate, is giving yet another speech. As he often does during his speeches, he introduces her, half-jokingly, as his “no-nonsense wife.”
They are in Ottawa, the first stop on a post-convention tour that is taking them and their two daughters to 30 counties and 39 cities Downstate over five days.
From the national stage in Boston to backyard fundraisers in small Illinois towns, Michelle Obama, who directs community affairs for the University of Chicago Hospitals, is emerging as the pragmatic, smart woman who not only helps keep her husband’s ego in check, but also is there to remind him of what is important. She juggles it all because she always has been a woman with “a plan.”
Her own story illustrates, though, that plans are subject to change–and chance.
Always a disciplined and serious student, the former Michelle Robinson followed her plan from early on. It took her to Princeton University, to Harvard Law School, and on to a career at one of Chicago’s top law firms. Then she met Barack Obama, a smart, charismatic young lawyer who changed her plans forever.
Michelle was working at Sidley Austin Brown & Wood. Barack, who had just finished his first year at Harvard Law, was a summer associate there, and Michelle, only a few years out of law school herself, was his adviser.
The two had a lot in common, except when it came to this: He wanted to date her. She had other ideas.
“I was more focused on my plan,” she says while finishing a decidedly unhurried lunch at La Petite Folie, one of her favorite Hyde Park restaurants. “I had made this proclamation to my mother the summer I met Barack, ‘I’m not worrying about dating . . . I’m going to focus on me.'”
Considering him a “friend,” who was also “a great guy … cute, really smart,” she tried introducing him to other female friends.
He wasn’t interested.
“He wanted to take me out and I didn’t know that until he asked me out,” she says.
She resisted, telling him, “I’m your adviser. Certainly that’s going to look bad. That’s just way too predictable. [We are] the only two black people here, and [we’re] going to start dating?’
“I’m thinking, `No, that’s just tacky,'” she recalls.
Eventually, the planner was persuaded and the date took place.
Now, 12 years of married life later, the ardent, persistent suitor is running to become the junior U.S. senator from Illinois, and the planner, well, she’s adjusting to the uncertainties of political life. But, in this instance, she knows, the best-laid plans mean nothing until Election Day.
One way she has been able to manage the shifting sands of politics, she says, “is to know that I have to let go of the plan, which is my nature. And it’s driving me crazy, because I don’t have a plan. So I have to mentally let go of the plan and [say] `we’ll figure it out.'”
Also her nature: a calm, direct manner that comes through whether she’s in a crowded meeting hall or sitting alone with her husband. Those who know her say she has always been pragmatic, balanced.
“The poise that you see is genuine,” says her older brother Craig Robinson. “She is quite comfortable in all situations.”
David Mosena, who hired her to be his deputy chief of staff when he worked for Mayor Richard Daley in the early ’90s, says, “She has her feet solidly on the ground, both of them. There’s not a bone of superficiality in her. She is the real deal. … She is very comfortable with herself.”
Staying sane
As the countdown to Election Day enters a critical phase, and the prospect of making postelection plans becomes inevitable, Obama makes psychic and emotional space a priority for herself.
She has made a deal with herself: Remain sane.
“I cannot be crazy, because then I’m a crazy mother and I’m an angry wife.
“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.”
Staying healthy involves working out (at 5 a.m.) four days a week; keeping up with the regular activities of daughters Malia, 6, and Sasha, 3, so they “retain that family bond”; and not missing her Friday afternoon hair and manicure appointments. And, as much as possible, she and her husband still have regular date nights.
Barack Obama knows his wife is making sacrifices as she supports his run for the Senate.
“She’s been an enormous help, mainly by just keeping our family focused on family,” he says. He also knows she’s really not all that impressed with the hype that now surrounds his campaign. Sure, she “cares about her community and her country,” he says, but “she’s much more concerned with the kind of father I am, or the kind of husband I am than she is with whether I give a nice speech at the convention.”
Unlike his wife’s stable two-parent, South Side of Chicago-bungalow upbringing, his early years sound almost like a Horatio Alger tale. Raised by his mother and maternal grandparents, Barack Obama spent most of his youth in Hawaii with a few years in Indonesia after his mother remarried.
Where Michelle Obama sees herself as “the practical planner, common sense” one, her husband is a self-described “dreamer.”
“Barack is more comfortable without a plan,” Michelle Obama says. “His whole life wasn’t a plan.”
Although she now shares his dreams, Michelle Obama, 40, a 1981 Whitney Young High School graduate, clings tenaciously to her own.
“I’ve had to come to the point of figuring out how to carve out what kind of life I want for myself beyond who Barack is and what he wants,” she says during a back-seat interview on the way to a campaign rally in Oquawka, Ill.
“I like program development. I like cultures. I like team-building,” she says.
“If politics were my passion, I’d find out how to do it and make it work. But it’s not mine. It’s Barack’s and so it’s a good balance, because I have a bunch of different passions that don’t necessarily conflict [with his].”
One of her passions, public service work, led her to leave what could have been a lucrative career in law for public service. But making lots of money was never her goal.
Her wardrobe, usually simple and tasteful, is no-frills. Her shoes are sensible, her jewelry minimal. To manage their expenses while her husband campaigns, the couple took a second mortgage on their Hyde Park town home. And, she says, they have only recently finished paying off their school loans, which combined was more than their mortgage.
When she left Sidley Austin after three years, Michelle Obama took a job in city government working with Mosena, who now heads the Museum of Science and Industry.
A year later, she left City Hall to head up Public Allies Chicago, an organization designed to help young adults interested in pursuing careers in public service.
From Public Allies, she moved to the University of Chicago, becoming associate dean of student services, which gave her a chance, she says, to bring her work “closer to home on the South Side.”
A month after daughter Sasha was born, Obama got a call from the new president of the University of Chicago Hospitals, Michael Riordan. He wanted her to help build a vision for the hospital’s nascent community affairs effort. It was a critical time for her, personally and professionally.
She was struggling “with wanting to be a good mother and was on the verge of saying `I’m not sure what I want to do [professionally], so I’m going to do what I haven’t done before and stay home.'”
Like her husband had been, Riordan was a persistent suitor. He offered her “all the flexibility” she desired. She took the job.
That flexibility is allowing her the time she needs–and wants–to play a visible role in her husband’s campaign.
Bringing out the best
On a recent morning, Michelle Obama is back in the office after the convention and Downstate tours. Conducting a staff meeting, she sits in the middle of a long conference table surrounded by five staff members. Before hearing their reports, she seems more concerned about the welfare of an absent staffer who recently had a death in her family.
As the hospital’s director of volunteerism, Leif Elsmo reports to her. “She has the ability to bring the best out in people,” he says, “really tapping into what their strengths and gifts and talents are. It’s inspiring.”
That ability shows on the campaign trail. Whether greeting strangers or enthusiastic supporters who crowd around her at political meet and greets and fundraisers, she connects easily, bending to shake hands with diminutive older women, many longtime Republicans curious to meet the Democratic candidate who gave the much-talked-about keynote address at the DNC. They are quite intrigued by the wife too.
During the postconvention stop in Marengo, Terri Albright of South Elgin approaches Michelle Obama, telling her she could be a “future first lady.”
Those kinds of voter fantasies don’t seem to faze Obama. She brushes off such musings with a friendly smile or a polite pat on the back. Clearly, an adoring public is rushing ahead into a future she refuses to imagine before Election Night.
But then, she has always been levelheaded, her mother, Marian Robinson, says.
Michelle Obama’s mother and her father, Fraser Robinson, who died in 1991, stressed education and family to their daughter and son, Craig, who also graduated from Princeton, two years ahead of his sister. A former all-Ivy League basketball player, he is an assistant basketball coach at Northwestern University.
“I always say Michelle raised herself from about 9 years old,” her mother says. “She had her head on straight very early.”
And she has always been very competitive, her mother adds, laughing. “She always liked to win.”
No, she doesn’t like to lose, Michelle Obama herself will tell you. Although athletic and active growing up, she was, by her own admission, “too competitive to play sports in high school. My brother would say, `she never wanted to lose, so she never wanted to play.'”
When it comes to the soul mate whom she almost planned out of her life, Michelle Obama sees a man she hopes wins.
On those days when she wishes for a return to a less harried life, she clasps her hands, rubs them together as if to conjure up a genie, and slyly says, “If he loses, it might not be so bad.”
Deep down, you know, that’s just not part of the plan.
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E-mail cwest@tribune.com
