The Obamas by Kantor Jodi

Author:Kantor, Jodi [Kantor, Jodi]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: FAM030000
ISBN: 9780316193474
Publisher: Hachette Book Group
Published: 2012-01-10T05:00:00+00:00

PERHAPS THE STRANGEST THING ABOUT the relationship between the president, the first lady, and the advisers was the sheer expansion it measured in the Obama union. That was the singular quality of presidential marriages: the way a once wholly private relationship between two people could stretch out, accordionlike, until public events and policy decisions and parts of the federal government were contained within its span. The back-and-forth between Barack and Michelle, their debates and differences in approach, had once played out within the span of a not very large condo apartment in Hyde Park, with consequences that did not extend much beyond the two of them. Now their date nights and home redecoration were matters of public debate, their different philosophies about government had resulted in two separate approaches to fixing health care problems, and they differed over not neglected household chores but a neglected Senate race.

The first lady’s complaints about the president’s team in the White House tended to sound a lot like Michelle’s personal complaints about her husband over the years. Not planning, not keeping her informed, focusing on his own needs, taking on risky projects without seeing their potential for failure—these were all charges she had leveled against him since the beginning of their union. Some of her objections to her husband’s advisers—to Rahm’s dealmaking, Gibbs’s reminders of what the public would think—sounded like they were really objections to her husband’s choice of career. The differences in power between the East and West wings had institutionalized the equality issues Michelle had been struggling with for so long. The official launch of Let’s Move! took place a few weeks after the Massachusetts loss, on a snowy, chaotic morning when the president was attending an important bipartisan meeting on health care that would include a televised statement. East Wing aides realized, almost by accident, that the president and first lady were scheduled to speak at nearly the same time, colliding awkwardly on cable television, and called their counterparts in the West Wing, who seemed annoyed that they had to adjust his schedule. The East Wing aides took the whole thing as more evidence their counterparts were not paying attention to what they were doing. By March, the situation was bad enough that the East Wing held a strategic planning retreat at Blair House, across the street from the White House, led by Patricia McGinnis, an expert on leadership and government, to discuss what they perceived as lack of coordination and respect from the president’s staff. Equality had been an issue in the Obama marriage from the beginning; now daylong retreats and leadership experts were involved.

Likewise, the president’s advisers said things about Michelle that her husband would not. Though Barack Obama liked to joke about his wife’s intensity, almost as if he wanted to let people know what he was dealing with, the comments were always accompanied by a chuckle; he never breathed a word of protest about her in public. But his advisers’ grumblings about Michelle being overcritical mirrored the few he had expressed over the years.

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