State of the Union

It is telling that Michelle Obama took the unusual step of registering her irritation with the book,with its use of dozens of interviews to put her private conversations in quote marks and even to insert thought bubbles. Their personal choices are not incidental to the Obamas’ public life,and from this flow Michelle’s advocacy in taking up the cause against childhood obesity and her winning pitch among children around the world that they need only scan her biography to know that hard work and study can alter lives. Indeed,the Obamas have been deeply conscious of the transformational power of being the first black First Couple in the US. In that sense,they have consistently retold and given out for retelling their life stories. And,in the absence of a dispute over facts,her publicly stated differences with the book highlight the tension implicit in this dynamic.

Barack and Michelle Obama began his bid for the White House,and certainly their residency too,with rather differing notions of the uses of political power. Obama,as Kantor puts it,“believed in his own talent and singularity; he felt sure that the usual rules would not apply.” His story was,in effect,the basis of his claim to the most powerful office in the world. It’s a story he kept making more capacious so that it invited more and more people to identify with him and his moral vision. His outreach to American voters and to the international community was based on his abilities to persuade and reconcile — and it is easy to see why he was bruised by the Republicans’ counterstrategy to obstruct his law-making agenda and the Tea Partiers’ attempt to mock him,with the net result that instead of being allowed to lead from the centre,he was painted as working from an ideological periphery.

The very singularity that made the fact of his election such a game-changer was used to attack him. Indeed,as the hurdles mounted and as,on his watch,the Democrats lost legislative strength,he worried that that fact of his election to the highest office could in fact be the biggest legacy. And the man who said he was willing to be a one-term president if it meant he could realise his agenda became won over to making a solid bid for re-election,for fear that a hostile administration would roll back his health-care reform.

Michelle started out with a distrust of political office: “she had little trust that government could create lasting change and fear that political life was inherently corrosive.” So: “If he was going to be a politician,his accomplishments were going to have to be weighty enough to justify the sacrifices.” Therefore,she militated against the improvisational nature of Obama’s West Wing (the part of the White House where the president and his staff sit) — she worried that his team was not galvanised enough to have a plan B and to stay on message. And even as she retreated into the domestic quarters in the upper floors,the over-symbolism of every appearance threatened to defeat her: could the First Lady redecorate her apartment when jobs were being lost,could she wear expensive clothes,could she go on a vacation to Spain with her daughter even if she paid for it herself? Was an ambitious,intelligent woman to cease to be her own person? Could they,in fact,really inhabit political office without being hollowed out as thinking individuals?

With his sense of “political powerlessness” overlapping with hers of “personal powerlessness”,what use was occupancy of the White House? There is a grating impression of a film-script-like momentum to Kantor’s writing as she chronicles how Michelle got her agency back,as she used her position to work directly doctors,manufacturers,parents and children on Let’s Move!,her programme to reduce childhood obesity — and as she weighed in,after the mid-term congressional polls debacle,to get the Obama team on message. But Kantor eventually gets past the he-said-she-felt frame of intrusiveness to present a profile of power and politics that is enlightening even beyond the Obamas’ context.