From: wsj.com
Dancing on Jimmy Fallon isn’t the source of the first lady’s popularity. It’s her upbringing in a one-bedroom apartment in Chicago.
In one of the first hires for her soon-to-be-official presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton recruited Kristina Schake, the communications consultant who is said to have encouraged First Lady Michelle Obama to take an undercover shopping trip at Target and dance on late-night television with Jimmy Fallon, moves aimed at making the first lady appear hip and down to earth. Ms. Schake may or may not remake Mrs. Clinton’s image, but “Michelle Obama: A Life,” by former Washington Post reporter Peter Slevin, makes a convincing case that Mrs. Obama’s popularity today has more to do with events that took place on the south side of Chicago decades ago than with the work of an image maker in the East Wing of the White House.
Long before she became Michelle Obama, Mr. Slevin tells us,Michelle Robinson spent her formative years in a one-bedroom apartment on the second story of a house in a mixed-race neighborhood on South Euclid Avenue in Chicago. The apartment’s one bedroom belonged to her parents. Her father used some paneling to divide the already narrow living area, half of which became a shared bedroom for Michelle and her brother (two years her senior). “Everything that I think about and do,” Mrs. Obama told a reporter during the 2008 campaign, “is shaped around the life that I lived in that little apartment.”
Her father, Fraser Robinson, worked at a water-filtration plant and made just enough money to provide for the family and allow Michelle’s mother to stay home and raise the kids. Mom was a taskmaster from the start, Mr. Slevin says, teaching her children to read before they set foot in kindergarten. The Robinson family didn’t have much in the way of material things, but they almost never missed dinner together and played board games on Saturday nights. Her brother, Craig, once called it “the Shangri-La of upbringings.” It was “understood in the Robinson household,” Mr. Slevin writes, “that no matter what obstacles Michelle or Craig faced because of their race or their working class roots, life possibilities were unbounded. Fulfillment of these possibilities was up to them. No excuses.”
MICHELLE OBAMA: A LIFE
By Peter Slevin
Knopf, 418 pages, $27.95
Knopf, 418 pages, $27.95
The strict parenting paid off—Craig was valedictorian of his high-school class, Michelle was salutatorian. Both went to Princeton. When Craig got into Princeton, he informed his parents that he intended to go to another school that offered a scholarship, making it about $3,000 a year cheaper. His father would have none of it. “I’d be awfully disappointed,” he told his son, “if I thought you were making a decision this important on the basis of what we could afford.”
“Michelle Obama: A Life” is an overwhelmingly positive portrayal of America’s first African-American first lady. Mr. Slevin is so admiring that the book can seem at times like an official or authorized biography. As it happens, neither Michelle Obama nor the president granted him an interview. He talked instead to members of her family, as well as former schoolmates and co-workers, and relies heavily on the reporting of others, piecing together a narrative that is especially detailed in the pre-Barack years. (Michelle met Mr. Obama in 1989, when he was hired as a summer associate at the Chicago law firm where she was working.) The book includes hardly any mention of controversial Obama friends from Chicago, like the former student radical Bill Ayers or Tony Rezko, the Democratic fundraiser who was convicted in 2011 of corruption. Even the Rev.Jeremiah Wright, who officiated at the Obamas’ wedding in 1992, is discussed only in relation to the uproar over his fiery videos that threatened to derail Mr. Obama’s 2008 campaign.
Advertisement
During that campaign, critics of Mr. Obama seemed intent on disliking his wife as well, portraying her as the more radical half of the couple and predicting that she would be an intensely political first lady. Instead, she has followed a path similar to that of her predecessors, championing mostly nonpolitical causes. When she makes the case for healthier school lunches, she sounds like a parent, not a politician: “When we send our kids to school, we have a right to expect they won’t be eating the kind of fatty, salty, sugary foods that we’re trying to keep from them when they’re at home.” And Mrs. Obama seems to have made a point of keeping family routine intact despite the pressures of life in the White House. She instructed her staff to avoid events after 5 p.m. so that she could have dinner with her daughters, just as she did with her own parents on South Euclid Avenue. None of this, of course, has shielded her from routine assaults from her husband’s political enemies, but then first ladies are natural targets, even when they are not, like Hillary Clinton, trying to act almost as a kind of co-president.
It wasn’t that long ago that Michelle was the more professionally successful of the two Obamas. After Harvard Law School, she worked as a lawyer, as an associate dean at the University of Chicago and, eventually, as a highly paid executive at the university’s hospital. In 2000, when Barack flew to Los Angeles to attend the Democratic National Convention, he was in debt after getting trounced in his first race for Congress. His credit card got turned down at the Hertz counter because he was over his credit limit, and Illinois’s party leaders told him that they didn’t have a floor pass for him at the convention. Michelle was the family’s breadwinner.
As her husband’s career took off, Mrs. Obama became a steadying force. Not long after Mr. Obama joined the U.S. Senate in 2005, he called Michelle to tell her he was co-sponsoring a bill with the Republican chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. “He launched into an exuberant explanation, but Michelle cut him off,” Mr. Slevin writes. “ ‘We have ants,’ she said. ‘I found ants in the kitchen. And in the bathroom upstairs.’ ” He may have been on the fast track to the political stratosphere, but first he had to buy ant traps on the way home.
Mr. Karl is chief White House correspondent for ABC News.
