7

He had been too busy honing his speech to concentrate…

He had been too busy honing his speech to concentrate on all that was hanging in the balance. Now, as her husband was about to step onto the national stage for the first time, Michelle could tell that he was showing unmistakable signs of stage fright. Was he okay? she asked.

“I’m just feeling a little queasy,” he confessed.

Then Michelle leaned in, gave her husband a reassuring hug, and said sweetly, “Just don’t screw it up, buddy!”

They both laughed and, with the tension broken, waited for Illinois Senator Dick Durbin to introduce him to the crowd. Then Barack calmly walked up to the podium to deliver the speech that would make or break his political career.

“Tonight is a particular honor for me because, let’s face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely,” he began. “My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack…. While studying here, my father met my mother. She was born in a town on the other side of the world, in Kansas.”

Over the next seventeen minutes, cheering delegates jumped to their feet again and again as Barack exhorted them to join in the crusade to elect John Kerry President. Attacking the “spinmasters and negative ad peddlers” and the pundits who “like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states,” Barack insisted that “there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America—there’s a United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America!”

As he wound up his speech, Barack turned to the words of Jeremiah Wright to invoke hope as an underlying theme: “the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores; the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes America has a place for him, too. The audacity of hope!”

Michelle, elegant in a white satin suit and pearls, watched from the wings. Struggling to maintain her composure, she reached up at one point to wipe the tears from her eyes. When it was over, she joined Barack onstage and, arm in arm, the couple waved to the rapturous crowd.

Barack knew he had electrified the crowd—a point that would be driven home with hyperbolic glee by the very pundits he had accused of dividing the nation. Literally overnight, Barack’s stirring keynote address propelled him from relatively obscure state legislator to political megastar. During the next few days, he was mobbed wherever he went at the convention, upstaging everyone—including Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards.

When he returned to Illinois to resume his Senate campaign, Barack was now mobbed wherever he went. Women, not surprisingly, continued to be his most enthusiastic fans. They pushed their bodies up against his, slipped phone numbers into his pockets, and on rare occasions whispered untoward suggestions in his ear as if none of the surrounding multitude could hear.

For the first time on the campaign trail, Barack now found himself the victim of groping by some of his more ardent female admirers. On more than one occasion, Barack tried not to look startled when some random woman in the crowd would grasp him firmly by the derriere—and sometimes try hard to hold on.

“Jesus,” he said after sliding into the back of his SUV after an appearance in Peoria, “I wish they’d stop grabbing my ass!”

At an Illinois Dental Society dinner, one comely guest sidled up to the Senator. “If you were my husband,” she purred, “I wouldn’t let you go around alone.”

Michelle, understandably, was not amused. Now that her husband’s career was in overdrive, his would-be groupies were becoming more aggressive—a fact that had not gone unnoticed by her friends or by the press. Political cartoons already poked fun at Barack’s obvious sex appeal, depicting starry-eyed female delegates swooning over him at the convention. As for the women who insisted on what amounted to full-body contact with her husband, Michelle was in no mood to be charitable. “I want to tell these women, ‘Back off. Get a life,’” Michelle admitted. “It’s just embarrassing, that’s all.”

Moreover, Michelle knew that all this unseemly fawning nourished Barack’s admittedly already oversize ego. “He’s loving it,” she muttered at one point. “He’s a man, isn’t he?” Once again, she resorted to giving him the silent treatment. He in turn complained that she was being “unfair” and had no appreciation of the “incredible stress” he was under. “The tension between Michelle and her husband,” said Chicago Tribune reporter David Mendell, “was palpable.”

There were, in fact, rumors afoot that it was more than just the random flirting from strangers that was getting to Michelle. Her husband, it would later be reported, had grown close to an attractive young African American member of his campaign named Vera Baker.

Born and raised in San Francisco, Baker attended tony Mills College for Women, where she received dual bachelor’s degrees in political, legal, and economic analysis and African American studies. She later earned her master’s in political science from Howard University and her master’s in African American studies from Columbia.

In 2000 Baker teamed up with another Howard alum, Muthoni Wambu, to start Baker Wambu & Associates, a firm that would go on to raise over three million dollars for the congressional campaigns of African American candidates. While Wambu would later become an adviser to Delaware Senator Joe Biden, Baker allied herself with Barack’s Senate campaign.

According to Federal Election Commission records, Baker was paid a hefty fee for her services as Finance Director for the Obama Senate campaign. But in fact, Claire Serdiuk was officially and repeatedly referred to as Obama’s Finance Director throughout the campaign.

When Baker suddenly and inexplicably vanished from the campaign and resurfaced on the Caribbean island of Martinique, tongues reportedly began wagging. A jealous Michelle, it was suggested, had engineered Baker’s departure.

“No,” Baker would later insist. “Nothing happened. I just left…at the end of the campaign.” If Michelle had complained that she and Barack were getting too cozy, Baker wasn’t saying. “I have no comment on anything,” she told writer Sharon Churcher. “I switched careers. That’s it. I’m a Democrat and I support Senator Obama. I don’t have anything to say.” Baker did add, however, that it was love that had brought her to the Caribbean in the first place—she moved there, she said, to live with the man she had fallen in love with. (In a strange twist, Baker later went to work for Alta Capital Group, a municipal bond brokerage founded by Michelle’s longtime friend Adela Cepeda.)

Rumors aside, tensions between Barack and Michelle ran especially high during a five-day, sixteen-hundred-mile, thirty-three-county campaign tour the Obamas embarked on right after the convention. The whirlwind tour was originally designed as a leisurely SUV trip with the family, including stops in small downstate communities where voters would get a chance to see Barack, Michelle, Malia, and Sasha up close and personal. There would, Barack and Michelle were told, be plenty of time for ice cream, picnics, visits to zoos and country fairs, swimming, boating, and even some fishing.

Instead, the campaign staffer who organized the tour, Jeremiah Posedel, had loaded up the schedule with an average of seven campaign stops per day. With Barack’s newfound fame, hundreds of people flocked to see him at every appearance, making it impossible for him to spend any quality time with his family. “Like an idiot,” Posedel conceded, “I neglected to plan for the huge crowds.”

So while the girls were whisked off to local amusement parks by staffers and her husband shook thousands of hands and signed countless autographs, Michelle spent much of her time alone in the SUV.

Some of her time was spent reassuring Posedel that Barack, despite his grumblings to the contrary, would not hold it against him for devising such a punishing campaign schedule.

Back at the very beginning of the Senate campaign, Posedel had hosted several Obama events in his living room. “People would say, ‘Are you crazy? This guy hasn’t got a chance.’ I’d have to scour twenty-six counties to find twenty-five people who were willing to come and listen to him.” Ever since, the two men had enjoyed an easy rapport—until now. “We would normally be joking around with each other,” Posedel said, “but now he spoke to me only when he had to. I knew he was angry.”

What Barack could not forgive Posedel for was the fact that he was spending virtually no time with Malia and Sasha—family time that he had been looking forward to for weeks. While he gave Posedel the silent treatment, Michelle would occasionally sneak away with Posedel to grab a Big Mac. “Barack would never, ever eat at McDonald’s or any fast-food place,” Posedel said, “unless maybe it was some veggie sandwich at Subway. He was incredibly careful about what he ate.”

Michelle, on the other hand, enjoyed the occasional hamburger. “He’s not around!” she told Posedel at one point during the tour. “We can eat what we want!” At a later stop, Michelle took Posedel to celebrate his birthday at a nearby Friday’s. “It was just nachos and a couple of drinks,” he said, “but she was so upbeat and nice that I almost forgot her husband was still mad at me.”

When it was all over, Barack took Posedel aside and thanked him for all the hard work he had put into the tour. Then, without ever raising his voice, Barack added, “Now, don’t ever do that to me again. Understand?”

Incredibly, Barack was once again campaigning unopposed. Because he had not faced a strong opponent since the 2000 congressional primary race against Bobby Rush, Barack had never really been the victim of anything approaching a political attack. Nor, conversely, had he had to come out swinging against a political foe.

All that changed that August when, with only three months left before the election, former radio talk show host and two-time presidential candidate Alan Keyes agreed to replace Jack Ryan on the Illinois ballot. A flamboyantly outspoken African American conservative with a taste for the jugular, Keyes did not actually live in Illinois. A longtime Maryland resident, he established his Illinois residency by moving into the upper story of a Calumet City “two-flat” (duplex).

No sooner had he set foot in the Land of Lincoln than Keyes blasted Barack for his “anti-Christian” support of abortion rights. Employing his trademark hellfire-and-brimstone technique, Keyes kept hammering away at his opponent, accusing him of advocating policies that condemned thousands of unborn black babies to death every year.

“My God,” Barack complained to Michelle, “have you heard the stuff he’s saying about me?”

She was not surprised; Keyes was merely living up to his hard-line reputation. When Barack, who was confident that he could win over anyone, told her that he was going to try to reason with Keyes, she laughed. “Yep, okay,” she cracked. “You just go ahead and do that thing.”

If anything, Barack’s overtures provoked even stronger attacks from Keyes. Not that it mattered. Keyes was widely viewed as both a token and a carpetbagger—certainly no match for the promising young man who had captivated the nation with his soaring rhetoric and the beautiful Michelle at his side.

What Barack hadn’t expected was persistent criticism from radical factions that saw him as a traitor to the African American cause. After he gave a speech at Liberty Baptist Church on the South Side, Michelle walked out the back door and into what former Black Panther Party associate Ron Carter called “a bunch of hoodlum thugs.”

Michelle, who at five eleven towered over most of them, put her hand on her hip and glared at the men. “Y’all got a problem or something?” she asked.

“They all froze,” Carter recalled, “guys who would slap the mayor, who would slap Jesse Jackson in the face, even.” In that moment, Carter said, Michelle proved herself to be “a very strong woman. She knows how to stand up for herself, to put on her street face. I was very impressed.”

On November 2, 2004, the Obamas were ensconced with friends and family members in a suite at the Chicago Hyatt Regency watching election results on television. While Barack coasted to a comfortable 70 percent to 27 percent victory over Keyes—the largest margin for a statewide race in Illinois history—he and Michelle posed for photos with Malia and Sasha.

As TV camera crews and photographers trooped in for the inevitable photo op with the family, the girls grew more and more impatient. “Can we stop taking pictures now?” Sasha asked as she fidgeted in Daddy’s lap. “I want to go home.”

The smiles, like the enthusiasm for a victory that had been all but assured for months, were forced. That night, Barack’s uncharacteristically low-key acceptance speech reflected the reality of his situation: while he had been elected to the U.S. Senate, the Kerry-Edwards ticket had gone down to defeat.

The next day, reporters asked Barack if he intended to make a run for the White House in 2008. “I can unequivocally say,” he replied, “I will not be running for national office in four years.” Later, Michelle sidled up to him. “I will hold you to that,” she said.

As he was sworn in, with a third of the Senate, as a member of the 109th Congress—Barack had already been told he would be assigned the same Senate desk used by Robert F. Kennedy—the Illinois freshman marveled at what he would call “my almost spooky good fortune.” Having won every one of his State Senate primary contests (and even the 2002 general election) unopposed, Barack had sat back during the U.S. Senate race and watched as one formidable opponent after another self-destructed. Then he was handed the opportunity of a lifetime—the chance to deliver the keynote address at his party’s convention before a TV audience of millions. “It seemed like a fluke,” Barack had to concede. On his arrival at the Capitol, he felt like a rookie in a spotless uniform surrounded by “mud-splattered” players who “tended their wounds.”

Michelle would have none of it. After they took the children to watch Daddy replay the swearing-in ceremony with Vice President Dick Cheney for the cameras—six-year-old Malia shook his hand properly, but Sasha, three, slapped the veep’s palms—Michelle reminded her husband that he had worked hard to get here. As they walked out of the Capitol toward a reception at the Library of Congress, Michelle grabbed Barack’s hand and kissed him on the lips. “Congratulations, Mr. Senator,” she said.

“Congratulations, Madame Senator.”

Not to be outdone, Malia blurted out, “Daddy, are you going to be President?”

Careful not to answer his daughter in front of the reporters who were trailing them, Barack merely smiled. Michelle’s usual poker face was set firmly in place.

At the reception, Barack and Michelle greeted family members and friends from Africa, England, Hawaii, Illinois, Boston, and New York. All the Jacksons—Jesse, Jesse junior, and Santita—were there, as were Valerie Jarrett, Marty Nesbitt and his wife, Dr. Anita Blanchard, Emil Jones, and the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Toot, who was suffering from a variety of medical problems at age eighty-four, couldn’t travel from Hawaii, but Barack’s sister Maya made the trip with her husband of two years, University of Hawaii Assistant Professor of Creative Media Dr. Konrad Ng. A half-dozen relatives from Kenya were also on hand, celebrating the fact that one of their own had become only the second black man (after Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke) elected to the United States Senate since Reconstruction.

After the hugs and handshakes were over, Barack had to face the sobering fact that his family would be returning to Chicago without him. “I want you and the girls to move with me to Washington,” he had told Michelle. “I’ve been apart from Malia and Sasha for too long as it is. I’ll just miss you all too much.”

But his longtime pal Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel was among the many who urged him to leave his family behind. Michelle remained close to her mother, who still lived in the same tiny apartment where Michelle and Craig grew up. Besides Marian Robinson and the built-in support network of relatives and friends that Chicago offered, Michelle still had her job at the University of Chicago hospitals. While Emanuel tried to convince Barack that it would be best for him to simply divide his time between Washington and Chicago, Rahm’s wife, Amy, told Michelle that she knew from experience that such a plan was workable.

What eventually persuaded Michelle to remain in Chicago was the fact that her children were already enrolled in school there—both at the Lab School, a private school affiliated with the University of Chicago. The girls were also extremely close to their grandmother, who often took care of them when Michelle was working, on the campaign trail with her husband, or standing in for him. “With all the crazy stuff going on,” she said, “the best thing right now is not to disrupt their lives.”

Reluctantly, Barack rented a one-bedroom apartment in a high-rise complex not far from Georgetown Law School. He stayed there from Tuesday night through Thursday night before flying back to Chicago on Friday afternoon. Saturdays were taken up with meetings and other business, leaving all day Sunday to catch up with his wife and their little girls. In between, Michelle kept a journal of the girls’ activities that she e-mailed him each day.

Trying to adjust to the proverbial joys of bachelorhood—take-out food, hours watching sports on TV, settling in with a good book—Barack soon found himself calling home several times a day just to hear the sound of his wife’s and daughters’ voices. He also admitted that he was so “domesticated, soft, and helpless” that he forgot to buy a shower curtain.

At age forty-five, Senator Obama was in the throes of separation anxiety. “I am just lonely as hell for my wife and kids,” he told a Senate colleague after just a few weeks. “It’s really getting to me.”

Not that he had that much time to himself. With an eye toward positioning Barack for either a vice presidential or presidential run as early as 2008, his team had devised a plan—actually referred to by Axelrod and Gibbs as “the Plan”—to keep him front and center on the national scene and build his reputation as a potential leader.

Toward that end, the freshman Senator’s agenda in Washington was packed with meetings—he promptly landed a plum assignment on the career-burnishing Foreign Relations Committee—and he was soon planning tours to Eastern Europe, Russia, and the Middle East. Back home in Illinois, Barack conducted at least one town hall meeting a week as part of an ongoing effort to shore up grassroots support. When he wasn’t there, Michelle took up the slack. “There is no better stand-in for Barack,” said an aide, “than Michelle. Frankly, they can connect with her in a way that they can’t connect with him. And she can sing his praises until the cows come home, and everybody accepts it because she’s his wife.”

In addition to their elevated public profile, the Obamas were discovering that Barack’s meteoric rise was having a substantial impact on their family finances. When Barack was selected to give the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention, his loyal agent and friend, Jane Dystel, looked into reclaiming the rights to Dreams from My Father and selling it to a new publisher. But Random House’s Crown division, which still owned the book, had moved quickly to reissue it in paperback.

Obama’s convention speech and the frenzy of interest it spawned propelled Dreams from My Father onto the New York Times Best Seller List; eventually, it would sell an estimated two million copies in the United States and earn Barack more than two million dollars in royalties.

Following his election to the Senate, Barack signed a new two-book deal with Crown for more than two million dollars. But this time, Michelle urged Barack to repay Dystel’s loyalty by replacing her with high-powered Washington lawyer Robert Barnett. According to former Times Books publisher Peter Osnos, who signed up Dreams back when Obama was a law student, the reason was obvious. “Whereas agents take a flat percentage of all the client’s earnings—usually fifteen percent these days,” Osnos said, “Barnett charges by the hour, which means that the bill is substantially smaller.”

Dystel, whom Osnos described as “a feisty sort,” was furious. “I have no idea about the details of the interaction between Barnett, Dystel, and Obama,” he said, “but I would bet it was not warm and fuzzy.”

The entire episode left a sour taste in Osnos’s mouth. “I just wish that this virtuous symbol…did not move quite so smoothly into a system of riches as a reward for service,” he said, “especially before it has actually been rendered.”

In the immediate wake of her husband’s Senate victory, Michelle reaped a financial windfall of her own. She returned to full-time work at the University of Chicago hospitals—and a promotion to Vice President for External Affairs that nearly tripled her salary to $316,962, from $121,910.

In justifying the dramatic and curiously timed pay hike, hospital officials pointed out that over two years Michelle had transformed a two-person part-time office into a full-time staff of seventeen and quadrupled the total number of volunteers to nearly eighteen hundred. “I wanted to send a strong message to our community that I was committed to it,” said Michelle’s boss Michael Riordan, “so I wanted to make this a vice presidential position.”

Riordan laughed off the suggestion that Michelle’s promotion was aimed at currying favor in Washington. “She was hired before Barack was Barack,” he insisted. “Michelle is the real deal and really earned every bit of her promotion on her own.” In what was probably an unfortunate choice of words, Riordan added, “She is worth her weight in gold, and she is just terrific.” (Conflict-of-interest allegations would arise months later when Senator Obama tried and failed to earmark one million dollars in federal funds for a new pavilion at the hospital.)

Michelle’s fortunes would improve even further in early 2005, when she began searching for companies eager to increase minority representation on their boards. By June, she was appointed to the board of TreeHouse Foods, one of Wal-Mart’s principal suppliers. For attending a few meetings a year, she was paid forty-five thousand dollars, with stock options that after the first full year would total sixty thousand.

Now able to pay off those college loans and settle their other long-standing debts, Michelle and Barack were in the market to move up to a nicer home. In the spring of 2005, Barack’s controversial low-income housing developer friend, Tony Rezko, called with the news that the doctor who lived across the street from Rezko in the South Side’s tony Kenwood enclave had put his home on the market.

When real estate agent Donna Schwan of MetroPro Corporation and Rezko took Michelle to see the property, she could not conceal her enthusiasm. The sixty-four-hundred-square-foot, ninety-six-year-old redbrick Georgian Revival occupied a double lot on the corner of South Greenwood Drive and East Hyde Park Boulevard. The house stood not far from the home of Muhammad Ali and directly across the street from the Byzantine KAM Isaiah Israel Temple, with its immense dome and tiled minaret.

The three-story structure at 5046 South Greenwood Drive boasted six bedrooms, six bathrooms, four fireplaces, and a wine cellar capable of storing more than a thousand bottles. The price for the house: $1.95 million. To complicate matters further, the doctor was insisting on selling the separately listed $625,000 building lot at the same time.

Michelle called her husband in DC and told him about Rezko’s find. “So, Tony really thinks it would be great for us,” Barack said. “What do you think?”

“I’m in,” Michelle told him. “I love this house. But,” she quickly added, “it’s more than we were talking about paying for, but I really think it’s a great house, you should go take a look at it.”

A few days later, Rezko took Barack on a tour of the house. Barack was as “blown away” as Michelle had been, but he told Rezko that at nearly two million dollars, the asking price was just beyond the range he could afford.

Rezko, who had pumped some $250,000 into Barack’s various campaigns, was already working on a plan to bring the house within his friends’ reach. If his wife, Rita, bought the vacant lot for the full $625,000 asking price, that would give the Obamas the leverage they needed to negotiate a better deal on the house.

It was already widely known that Rezko was under investigation by the FBI for corrupt business dealings (he would eventually be convicted on sixteen counts of paying—and taking—kickbacks). Barack asked his most trusted adviser—Michelle—if she thought Rezko’s plan might at least have the appearance of impropriety.

Michelle was indignant. “He’s a good friend,” she told him. “There’s nothing wrong with what he’s suggesting.” Michelle, who now owned a mink coat, several designer dresses, and more than one pair of five-hundred-dollar Jimmy Choo shoes, knew that money and the trappings of success meant little to her husband. But she also felt they deserved a Chicago residence befitting the family of a U.S. Senator. More to the point, Michelle wanted their girls to grow up in a house with a big backyard where they could play with their friends.

“Barack wanted his family to be comfortable,” said a friend, “but he would have been satisfied with three spoons, a fork, and a dish. It was an issue for her.” The bottom line, Barack would later say, was that Michelle was “determined to have that house.”

Barack called Rezko up and told him that Michelle was on board with his plan. With Rita Rezko agreeing to purchase the “garden lot,” the Obamas were able to shave $300,000 off the asking price and buy the house for $1.65 million. Rita Rezko and the Obamas closed both deals on the same day in June 2005.

Not long after the Obamas moved into their new house, they inexplicably decided to buy a ten-foot-wide strip of the adjacent lot from Rita Rezko for $25,000, or $84,500 above the $40,500 appraisal. The purchase aided the Obamas because it rendered the adjacent lot unbuildable. (Later, when he was being pilloried in the Chicago press for dealing with a notorious slumlord who was headed for federal prison, Obama confessed that the property purchases had been “a bonehead move…. I consider this a mistake on my part,” he added, “and I regret it.”)

Consumed with town meetings, working on his new book, and making campaign appearances for fellow Democrats around the country, Barack had little opportunity to enjoy his spacious new digs. But when he was home, he did what he could to please his wife. “I try to be more thoughtful,” he said of this period in their marriage. “Sometimes it is just the little gestures that make a big difference. Just me putting the dishes in the dishwasher. Making sure I come home for dinner, even if I have to go back out.”

Barack also boasted that he would occasionally do the laundry—but without folding it. “Which is pretty useless,” Michelle hastened to point out. What Barack’s wife appreciated most was that he was her “biggest cheerleader, as a mother, as a wife and as a career person. He’s always telling me how great I’m doing. That helps keep you going when you realize that you have someone who appreciates all the hard work that you are doing—even if they don’t do enough to help!”

Michelle was equally insistent that he make time for the children—no matter what. “You’ll be there,” she often told him when there was a school pageant or a game that was too important for him to skip. “You’re doing this. Period.”

On those occasions when she did not prevail, Michelle made her displeasure known. When Barack missed one of Malia’s basketball games to campaign for New Jersey Governor John Corzine on a Sunday—the one day they had agreed to reserve strictly for the family—Michelle, in the words of one aide, “blasted him.” Later, Michelle facetiously remarked, “It’s a tough choice between ‘Do you stay for Malia’s basketball game on Sunday or do you go to New Jersey and campaign for Corzine?’ Corzine got it this time around, but it’s a constant pull to say, ‘Hey, guys, you have a family here.’”

Still, Barack attended parent-teacher conferences and, at Michelle’s insistence, always played some role in putting together the children’s birthday parties. On the eve of Sasha’s June birthday, Barack was instructed to go to the store and bring back pizza, ice, and balloons. When he volunteered to get goody bags for the twenty-odd party guests, Michelle pulled him back from the brink.

“You can’t handle goody bags,” she said, imitating Jack Nicholson’s marine colonel character on the stand in A Few Good Men. “You have to go into the party store and choose the bags. Then you have to choose what to put in the bags, and what is in the boys’ bags has to be different from what is in the girls’ bags.” After he had wandered around the store for an hour, Michelle told him, his “head would explode.”

The girls’ birthday slumber parties had become, in Daddy’s words, such “big productions” over the years that Barack and Michelle made it clear there would be no birthday presents from Mommy and Daddy. “We spend hundreds on their parties,” Daddy explained, “and we want to teach some limits.”

The same went for Christmas: none of the presents under the tree were officially from Mommy and Daddy. “I know there is a Santa,” Malia once told them, “because there’s no way you’d buy me all that stuff.”

That Halloween, Malia and Sasha both dressed up as witches, and Barack took them trick-or-treating around their Kenwood and Hyde Park neighborhoods. During the holidays, when Michelle noted that Barack’s staff had scheduled him for a Democratic Party fund-raiser in Florida on the same day as Malia’s Nutcracker recital, she glowered at her husband. “You don’t miss it,” she said pointedly. Somehow he managed to catch Malia’s afternoon performance, dash to a private plane that waited for him at Chicago’s Midway Airport, and arrive in Tampa just in time for the fund-raiser.

Not even the Obamas’ annual holiday in Hawaii was sacrosanct. Instead of flying out with the family the week before Christmas, the Senator stayed behind in Washington. He was to join them later, but the idea that Michelle and the girls had headed west without him hit Barack hard. In the middle of a meeting, he looked at his watch, gazed out the window, and sighed. “We’d be over the Pacific now,” he said.

When he did join them in Hawaii, Barack turned off his ever-present BlackBerry and returned, however briefly, to the soul-recharging business of being a full-time dad. He and Michelle swam and snorkled with the girls at Sandy Beach Park, bodysurfed at Kailua Beach, and spent long hours visiting Toot.

On this particular visit, Barack was even more concerned than usual with his grandmother’s deteriorating physical condition. The woman who had for all intents and purposes raised him was now suffering from a wide range of medical problems, from osteoporosis to cancer. Yet she continued to drink more than the family would have liked—and to smoke. Whatever damage he might have thought the latter was doing to the health of his beloved grandmother, Barack was in no position to lecture her. In fact, in Hawaii the two often unwound at the end of the day by sharing a smoke together as Michelle watched disapprovingly.

By 2006, The Plan to bolster Barack’s credentials as a national leader was in full swing. In April he appeared with actor and activist George Clooney at the National Press Club to speak about the ongoing conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan.

While photographers at the Press Club event swarmed around Clooney, no one paid much attention to AP photographer Mannie Garcia as he crouched down, snapping photos of the junior Senator from Illinois. Later, artist Shepard Fairey would transform the photo into a Warholesque portrait that would become an icon of the 2008 campaign. Later, when they noticed the image popping up again and again at events, Michelle wondered aloud when the photo was taken. Barack didn’t know. Besides, he said, he wasn’t quite sure yet if he liked it.

That summer, he and Michelle embarked on a fifteen-day trip to Africa with a small army of reporters and photographers trailing behind them. “I offered him a ride,” his new friend Oprah Winfrey would later reveal. “He wouldn’t take it on my plane.” Instead, Barack and his entourage flew commercial.

In South Africa, Obama struck a pose for photographers inside the cell where Nelson Mandela had spent eighteen of his twenty-seven years in prison. Barack condemned the genocidal violence in Darfur, and in Kenya, where he joined Michelle and the girls, he spoke to the cheering thousands who clogged the streets just to catch a glimpse of the man they regarded as a native son.

With an eye toward bolstering both Barack’s standing abroad and his image as an inspiring, almost messianic figure at home, Axelrod, Gibbs, and the rest of Obama’s team were thrilled by the worshipful crowds that materialized wherever they went in Kenya. Barack, as self-possessed as ever, appeared to accept this undiluted adulation as his due. “He has a regal bearing, don’t you think?” said a top adviser with a self-satisfied grin. “Make that ‘presidential.’”

But there were moments, if only fleeting, that brought Barack down to earth. As he began to speak to a crowd gathered at the statehouse in Nairobi, Malia pleaded loudly, “Daddy, Daddy! Look at me!”

Michelle, who had already confessed to being “totally freaked out” by the crowds her husband could attract back in the United States, was nonplussed by their reception in Kenya. “What was that?” she asked when the crowd waiting outside their hotel roared their approval as Barack stepped into view. “I mean,” she said with a look of dismay on her face, “do they know him?”

Over the next two years, Michelle would take it upon herself to remind the adoring multitudes back in the United States that her husband was all too human. But for now, in Kenya, she was willing to do whatever was asked of her. When Barack wanted to draw attention to Africa’s AIDS epidemic by taking an HIV blood test, Michelle volunteered to take one, too. “It’s really a couples issue,” she explained, “so it doesn’t matter if one half of the couple is tested and the other isn’t.”

The same logic would apply to their next challenge. With his new book, The Audacity of Hope, climbing up the New York Times Best Seller List and the Democratic Party poised for sweeping victory in the 2006 congressional elections, Barack now admitted to Tim Russert on NBC’s Meet the Press that he was no longer ruling out a run for the White House in 2008. “I don’t want to be coy about this,” Barack said. “Given the responses I’ve been getting over the past several months, I have thought about the possibility, but I have not thought about it with the seriousness and the depth that is required.” If Barack did decide to run, he said, “I will make a public announcement and everybody will be able to go at me.”

Far more important than that television appearance—or for that matter, any TV interview that year—was the Obamas’ joint October 19, 2006, appearance on Oprah. Oprah, who had shared a pew with Barack at Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church back in the 1990s, was now an outspoken supporter.

Winfrey had actually begun to see Barack as something more than just another politician back in 2004 when he gave his convention keynote address. When she decided to interview him a few months later for the November 2004 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine, her friends asked the usually apolitical Winfrey, “What’s happened to you?” She replied that in Barack she saw “something above and beyond politics. It feels like something new.”

On September 25, 2006, Oprah said on Larry King Live that she hoped Obama would run for President. Now, three weeks later, she was chatting with Michelle and Barack about whether Michelle sometimes felt like a single mother (“You know, you always feel that way…. That’s always the nature of the beast”) and the fact that once when he called home to report that he was working on an important nuclear nonproliferation bill, Michelle asked him to buy ant traps on the way home.

“She says we have ants,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Ants?’ She said, ‘Yes, we have ants and I need ant traps. We have ants in the bathroom and ants in the kitchen. So on your way home, can you pick up some ant traps, please?’ You know, so I’m thinking, you know, ‘Is John McCain stopping by Walgreens to grab ant traps on the way home?’”

“If he’s not,” Michelle shot back, “he should be.”

Oprah asked Barack to consider running for President, but he declined to discuss it. With good reason. He might have had the backing of the most powerful woman in the country, but he had not yet persuaded the only woman whose opinion really mattered.

In the immediate wake of their Oprah appearance, The Audacity of Hope rocketed to number one on the New York Times Best Seller List. It, too, would go on to sell more than two million copies, boosting the Obamas’ household income in 2007 alone to $4.2 million. (In the meantime, his audio book recording of Dreams from My Father had earned him a spoken word Grammy.) The week following the Obamas’ bow on Oprah, Barack was on the cover of Time magazine with the heading “Why Barack Obama Could Be the Next President.”

Despite the groundswell of support for a presidential run, Michelle was not yet ready to hop aboard the Obama bandwagon. When his former State Senate rival Dan Hynes, now a friend and backer, urged him to run, Barack replied, “Well, Dan, I’m flattered—but Michelle will never forgive you.” He said much the same thing to Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Connie Schultz. “You know,” he confided to Schultz in late 2006, “Michelle really does not want me to do this.” And without her blessing, he told Schultz, there would be no run for the presidency.

It was part of a larger tug-of-war between Barack and Michelle that had gone on ever since he pleaded with her to let him run for the U.S. Senate. “We haven’t had a lot of peace and quiet over the last four years,” he conceded. “Michelle’s always had veto power, and always will, over decisions that have a direct impact on her.”

Michelle’s first concern, recalled Axelrod, was that running shouldn’t be “a crazy, harebrained idea. Because she’s not into crazy, harebrained ideas.” Michelle, who like everyone else believed that Hillary Clinton had the inside track, wanted reassurance that they could really defeat the powerful Clinton machine. She also wanted details on how the campaign was going to be funded. “Where’s the money going to come from?” she asked point-blank. “She didn’t want Barack,” Axelrod added, “to launch some kind of empty effort here.”

During a series of marathon meetings—two of which lasted over four hours—her husband’s team of advisers and trusted longtime friends like Valerie Jarrett, Abner Mikva, and Newton Minow gradually persuaded Michelle that victory was achievable. “Granted, it was a long shot,” said a participant in several of the meetings, “but we showed her how, if all the pieces fell into place, Barack could win enough delegates to secure the nomination.”

Not surprisingly, a major concern was her husband’s safety. “It only takes one person and it only takes one incident,” Michelle told writer David Mendell. “I mean, I know history, too.”

Ever since the keynote address in Boston, Michelle had commented on some of the odd characters who seemed to be among the faces in the crowds that engulfed her husband. She wondered about the obsessed “crazies” who, like John Lennon’s assassin, Mark David Chapman, might seek to harm the very person they idolized.

Like Alma Powell, whose concern for her husband’s safety led Colin Powell not to seek the Republican presidential nomination, Michelle faced the added realization that as an African American her husband made a particularly attractive target. Conversely, she would also use her husband’s race to banish her fears. “I don’t lose sleep over it,” she would say when asked if she worried about the danger to her husband. “Because the realities are that as a black man Barack can get shot going to the gas station, you know, so you—you know, you can’t make decisions based on fear and the possibility of what might happen.”

In any event, Axelrod brought in security experts to go over the plans they had for protecting Barack during a campaign that would take him back and forth across the country for two years. “Mrs. Obama was very realistic,” said one. “She knew there were no guarantees, but she wanted to know precisely what it was we could do to keep her husband safe.”

As for the children, Michelle wanted to make sure that their lives would not be disrupted any more than they already were. Daddy’s absences were inevitable, but Michelle promised herself that she would be home every night by six—to make sure they did their homework, eat dinner with them, tuck them into bed, and be there when they woke up the following morning.

Not that Michelle actually woke Malia and Sasha up in the mornings. Like her mother, Michelle supplied the girls with their own alarm clocks with the understanding that they were responsible for getting themselves ready for school, making their beds, and being down in the kitchen in time for breakfast. Mom was there. So was the Obamas’ full-time “family caregiver,” Marlease Bushnell, and a full-time housekeeper charged with “things I don’t fully enjoy,” Michelle said, “like cleaning, laundry, and cooking.”

Marian Robinson—the person Michelle unhesitatingly referred to as “my best friend”—had already proven herself to be the family’s indispensable backstop. Michelle’s mother, who ran a senior marathon at age sixty and was strongly in favor of her son-in-law’s presidential aspirations, reassured Michelle that she would continue to take care of Malia and Sasha whenever Mommy and Daddy were on the stump.

Michelle had even come up with a new way for the candidate to keep in touch with his family during the campaign. She purchased webcams for Barack and the girls, so that each evening they could connect via their respective Macs and recap the day’s events.

In making her own list of needs for the coming campaign, she made one demand nonnegotiable—that she be allowed to spend Saturdays with Malia and Sasha. For years, Michelle had taken the girls to spend Saturdays with her friends Yvonne Davila and Sandy Matthews and their daughters. The drill was usually the same: ballet, then soccer practice or perhaps tennis lessons, lunch at California Pizza Kitchen or Pizza Capri, and then a movie—something along the lines of Harry Potter or the latest offering from Disney. If there was time, they might take the kids to browse the children’s stacks at 57th Street Books. Even if it meant dodging reporters and traveling with a phalanx of bodyguards—which it eventually would—Michelle insisted on preserving the family’s Saturday routine.

At the time, polls showed that New York Senator Hillary Clinton was the overwhelming favorite to win her party’s nomination for President. Given the quixotic nature of her husband’s candidacy, the next question Michelle asked embarrassed even her. “I know it’s crazy, guys,” she asked, “but what happens if we win?”

Michelle and the girls had remained behind during the nearly two years since her husband was elected to the U.S. Senate. They would obviously be living in the White House if he somehow managed to emerge victorious in 2008, but where would the girls go to school? Would they be able to have anything approaching “normal” lives in the White House? How could they make the prospect of leaving their family and friends in Chicago less wrenching for Malia and Sasha?

“It will be a hard transition for these little girls,” she said in one of the meetings. “They’ll be leaving the only home that they’ve known. Someone’s got to be the steward of that transition. And it can’t be the President of the United States. It will be me.”

Barack, meanwhile, had agonized about what a presidential run might mean for him as a father. Indeed, at one of the many book parties celebrating the publication of The Audacity of Hope, Barack broke down while apologizing for all of the time he had spent away from his children. He was crying so hard, Valerie Jarrett recalled, “he couldn’t continue.”

In December, Barack met with Newton Minow and Abner Mikva in Minow’s offices at Sidley Austin. “I just don’t want to be away from my little girls,” he told them. “They need their father to be there for them now.”

“Look,” Minow replied, “I’m no psychologist, but if you’re going to be away from your girls, now is the time to do it—when they’re small and adaptable. It’s far more important to be around them when they’re teenagers—that’s when you’ll have the most impact.”

Barack was skeptical.

“Abner and I have raised six daughters between us—three each,” Minow continued. “We were away a lot when they were little, and they all turned out great.”

By the time Barack left his office, Minow said, “I think he was looking at things differently. We helped ease his concerns enough so that he felt free to move forward. But of course it still all hinged on whether Michelle was willing to go along.”

As he had done so many times before during their Christmas holidays, Barack used this time together to convince his wife to let him make just one more run. There were long walks on the beach and “we just talked it through,” Barack recalled. “It wasn’t as if it was a slam-dunk for me.”

It was during this quiet family time away from the pressures of their public lives that Michelle seriously considered whether this was a quest they could afford to embark upon. She decided it was. “When you’re in Hawaii, on a beach,” Michelle explained, “everything looks possible.”

The fact that her husband had delivered on so many impossible-sounding promises in the past had a lot to do with her decision to give Barack the green light. “Look, he’s done everything he said he would,” she told a friend. “He’s written bestselling books, he’s built this successful political career…. I need to get on board.”

“I think part of the reason she agreed to do it,” Barack said, “was that she knew that she had veto power, that she and the girls ultimately mattered more than my own ambitions…and if she said no we would be okay.”

Michelle’s about-face also had much to do with her own sense of mission. She had long felt—even more strongly than her husband—that it was time to wrest power from the “trust fund brats” and “people with the right daddies” she had had to deal with at Princeton and Harvard.

“To me, it’s now or never,” she said. “We’re not going to keep running and running and running, because at some point you do get the life beaten out of you. It hasn’t been beaten out of us yet. We need to be in there now, while we’re still fresh and open and fearless and bold.”

In the coming weeks and months Michelle would admonish Barack and his inner circle to “not forget what we’re fighting for.” For Michelle, Axelrod recalled, it was important that any campaign remain “consistent with what he is and what he thinks, and we wouldn’t distort that.”

Michelle’s blessing came with two caveats. First, she made her husband vow that he would follow through on the pledge that he had never managed to keep in all the years of their marriage: that at long last he would quit smoking. While they were still on vacation, he began chewing Nicorette gum.

Michelle made it clear that she was willing to put herself and their children on the line “once and only once. This is it,” she told Barack. “If it doesn’t work this time, don’t think we’re doing this again in another four years.”

The next step: explaining it all to the girls. Barack and Michelle sat their daughters down and, as plainly as they could, told them that Daddy was going to be away even more than usual—and that, while Mommy was going to help him out, she would still be there for them most of the time.

While they stressed that becoming President was a great honor, and that as President Daddy could do a great deal of good for a great many people, Michelle and Barack knew what it would take to seal the deal.

Ever since they had seen President Bush’s pet Scottie Barney scampering around the South Lawn during a visit to the White House (“They were so bored until Barney showed up,” Michelle said, “and they started running with him”), the Obama children had been lobbying for a puppy. But Malia’s asthma—which, incidentally, occasionally flared up when Daddy smoked inside the house—made her parents reluctant to bring a dog into their home. Now the girls were so adamant about getting a dog that Michelle decided it was time to begin researching hypoallergenic breeds. “They’re such good girls,” she said. “I can’t deny them this one thing that they want so badly.”

“Win or lose,” Michelle told them, “when the election is over—and if you’ve been good—we’re getting a dog.”

“Promise?” Malia asked.

“Promise,” her father answered.

Malia wanted to know one more thing. “Are you going to try to be President?” she asked. “Shouldn’t you be Vice President first?”

It was enough for Malia to hit the Internet and begin her own thorough search of breeds that are considered hypoallergenic. Over the course of the next two years, she and Sasha would periodically bring up a candidate so the family could weigh the pros and cons of that particular breed. “At this point I think they know more about dogs,” said a Hyde Park neighbor, “than your average vet.”

In January, Barack announced on his Web site that he was forming a presidential exploratory committee. Around this time, Michelle suggested that, by way of heading off any future criticism, Barack pay $375 to clear up the delinquent parking tickets he had racked up years earlier while a law student at Harvard.

Of more concern to Barack’s advisers were the rumors that Obama was Muslim. The campaign issued a statement that Barack had “never been a practicing Muslim.” Yet the candidate himself saw no problem with making known his affection for Muslim culture, and no need to disguise the fact that it was part of his life as a child in Indonesia. During an interview with Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, Barack suddenly began reciting the opening lines of the Arabic call to prayer—Allah-u Akbar, Allah-u Akbar(“God is the greatest, God is the greatest”)—with what Kristof called a “first-rate Arabic accent.” Barack described the Muslim call to prayer as “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.”

A few weeks later, Michelle would pull back to a part-time position at the University of Chicago Hospitals so that she could campaign for her husband. It was not the only career concession Michelle would make. In light of the fact that Barack was a vocal critic of Wal-Mart’s labor practices, Michelle’s position on the board of Wal-Mart supplier TreeHouse Foods became problematic. After TreeHouse closed its pickle plant in La Junta, Colorado, displacing 150 Hispanic workers, pressure mounted on Michelle to resign. She resisted, in part because she felt she would need to be able to earn a living if “something unexpected or unfortunate” happened during the campaign.

If her husband were to fall victim to an assassin—something she had thought about long and hard—Michelle said, “I need to be able to take care of myself and my kids.” She allowed that any such tragedy would trigger “great sympathy and outpouring. But I have to maintain some level of professional credibility…. I need to be in a position for my kids where, if they lose their father, they don’t lose everything.”

On February 10, 2007, fifteen thousand people waited in the cold outside the flag-draped Old State Capitol Building in Springfield. It was here where, in 1858, Abraham Lincoln issued his famous warning that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”

Barack had wanted the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who was still railing against America as “a Eurocentric wasteland of lilywhite lies,” to give the invocation. His advisers, fearful that the slumbering press would soon latch onto Wright’s incendiary opinions, wanted Barack to withdraw the invitation to speak.

For the Obamas, who gave $22,500 to Wright’s church in 2006 alone, it was a tough call. “Barack got the title for his book from Pastor Wright talking about the ‘Audacity of Hope’ in his sermons,” said a church member. “But it was Michelle who really wanted him to give the blessing when Barack announced for President. She didn’t like it when they kind of ‘disinvited’ the reverend, but I guess there wasn’t a whole lot she could do about it.”

That frigid morning in Springfield, Barack and Michelle, both clad in long black overcoats, strode hand in hand to the wooden podium that had been set up on the capitol steps. Against the backdrop of the pillar-ringed statehouse rotunda and with Michelle looking on, Barack drew parallels between himself and the Great Emancipator. “As Lincoln organized the forces arrayed against slavery, he was heard to say: ‘Of strange, discordant, and even hostile elements, we gathered from the four winds, and formed and fought to battle through,’” Barack told the crowd. “That is our purpose here today. That’s why I’m in this race. Not just to hold an office, but to gather with you and transform a nation.”

Michelle nodded in agreement. “And that is why,” he continued, “in the shadow of the Old State Capitol, where Lincoln once called on a divided house to stand together, where common hopes and common dreams still live, I stand before you today to announce my candidacy for the presidency of the United States.”

With that, the crowd exploded in chants of “Obama! Obama!” as the handsome couple and their beautiful children, wrapped in wool caps and scarves, waved from the capitol steps. After the speech, Barack headed straight for Iowa, where the first votes in the Democratic primary process would be cast a year later. By this time, he had adopted a new greeting as he shook the hands of voters that was as cloying as it was awkward. “I,” he would say with conviction, “appreciate you.”

The day after Barack formally announced his candidacy, the Obamas’ joint interview with Steve Croft aired on CBS’s 60 Minutes. Michelle and Barack, both mindful of the fact that it was Croft whose questions back in 1992 about Bill Clinton’s alleged infidelity prompted Hillary Clinton to say she wasn’t “some Tammy Wynette standin’ by her man,” waited for a gotcha moment that never came.

Instead, Michelle reiterated that one of the prerequisites for the race was that Barack “couldn’t be a smoking President. Please, America, watch,” she joked into the camera. “Keep an eye on him and call me if you see him smoking.”

It was in this role as the great leveler that Michelle found her groove. That March, at a fund-raiser in New York, Michelle rolled out the crowd-pleasing shtick that would serve as her mantra throughout the campaign. Just as Barack could be guaranteed a laugh when he claimed that people usually referred to him as “Alabama” or “Yo Mama,” Michelle riffed on his shortcomings as a husband.

“He’s a man who’s just awesome,” she began, “but he’s still a man…. There’s Barack Obama the phenomenon, Barack Obama the genius, the editor of the Harvard Law Review, the constitutional law scholar, the civil rights attorney, the community organizer, the bestselling author, the Grammy winner. This Barack Obama guy’s pretty impressive.

“Then,” she added with a wry smirk, “there’s the Barack Obama that lives in my house. That guy’s not so impressive. He still has trouble putting the bread up and putting his socks actually in the dirty clothes and he still doesn’t do a better job than our five-year-old daughter, Sasha, making his bed. So you have to forgive me if I’m a little stunned by this whole Barack Obama thing.”

Often, Barack was there to take Michelle’s good-natured needling. “Hey, you left the butter on the counter this morning,” she would say as he shook his head and grinned sheepishly. “You’re just asking for it. You know I’m giving a speech about you today.”

Barack loved it. “I’m often reminded by events, if not by my wife,” he would say, “that I’m not a perfect man.”

Soon she was drawing crowds almost as big as her husband’s—in some cases ten thousand or more. More important, after each appearance she collected more signed commitment cards than Barack. When Axelrod and others complimented Michelle on her speech-making ability, she was taken aback. “Why,” she asked indignantly, “is everybody so surprised?”

Soon Barack’s staff had a new nickname for Michelle. They called her “The Closer.”

On the national stage, however, stories of Barack’s failings—his snoring, his morning breath, his odd penchant for leaving his underwear on the kitchen floor—did not play quite so well. Some critics believed that Michelle’s good-natured ribbing diminished the first black man seeking to occupy the White House.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd went further, accusing Michelle of making “emasculating” remarks about her husband that only served to make him look like an “undisciplined child.” Dowd began calling Barack “Obambi.”

When asked to comment, Michelle shrugged off Dowd’s comments. “She obviously,” the candidate’s wife said, “doesn’t know who I am.” But privately, Michelle expressed anger at what she saw as an attempt to cast her as “just another angry, castrating black woman beating up on her husband. That’s the stereotype, right? The mold I’m supposed to fit?”

Later, with Barack’s blessing, she addressed the issue head-on. “Somehow I’ve been caricatured as his emasculating wife,” she said at one point. “Barack and I laugh about that. It’s just sort of like, do you think anyone could emasculate Barack Obama? Really now.”

As for toning down her remarks: “I know who I need to be,” Michelle declared in answer to her critics. “I’m a grown-up. I’ve seen it up and I’ve seen it down, and I know who I need to be to stay true to who I am.”

During the campaign, Michelle, who never resorted to notes, would seldom deviate from her standard forty-five-minute script. In addition to pointing out her husband’s accomplishments and his harmless, endearing foibles, Michelle spoke of her Chicago roots. “Ozzie and Harriet—South Side working-class version,” she said of her childhood. “My favorite mental images are of family. Summertime images of barbecues and folks sitting around, kids playing. Of just being with the people you’ve loved your entire life, and feeling a sense of security and comfort and safety—the feelings and emotions, for me, of what it means to be an African American.”

For Michelle, life on the road—even though she was never away from Sasha and Malia for long—quickly took its toll. On the hustings, she devoted part of her spiel to talking about how she still managed to juggle campaigning and motherhood. “I get them to a neighbor’s if I can’t get them to school,” she said of her children. “I get on a plane. I come to a city. I do several events. I get on a plane. I get home before bedtime. And by doing that, yeah, I’m a little tired at the end of the day, but the girls, they just think Mommy was at work. They don’t know I was in New Hampshire. Quite frankly, they don’t care.”

Marian Robinson’s decision to retire in the summer of 2007 so she could pitch in more with the grandchildren would prove to be a “godsend” for Michelle. Robinson, in turn, had nothing but “total admiration” for her daughter’s commitment to the campaign. “I think supporting her husband is what is necessary,” Robinson said. “For her to dive into it the way she does is just the way she does everything.” But, Michelle confided to a small group of women volunteers in Las Vegas, “This is hard. This is really a hard thing. This isn’t a natural choice to be made in your life. It’s strange, all this.”

Then why do it? she was asked. “I took myself down every dark road you could go on, just to prepare myself before we jumped out there,” she said. “The bottom line is, man, the little sacrifice we have to make is nothing compared to the possibility of what we could do if this catches on.”

Besides, she admitted that Barack made it hard for her to complain. “It’s harder for him, being on the road,” she said. “I’ve got my girls and our routine. I am feeling their love. He is missing that.”

Through it all, Michelle tried to maintain something resembling a normal home life for her children. After returning from a campaign event in Minnesota, she squeezed in a workout and then stopped off at Target in her gym clothes to buy toilet paper. The next day she was off again—this time to give speeches in New York and Connecticut before heading home to take Malia and Sasha to ballet classes and a performance of Disney on Ice. In the few moments she could spare for herself, Michelle might sit back and watch reruns of two of her favorite TV programs—Sex and the City and The Dick Van Dyke Show.

Whenever Barack managed to break away from the campaign for a few days and return to Chicago, Michelle insisted “that he be part of this life, real life. He doesn’t come home,” she insisted, “as the grand poohbah.”

Even when he did manage to steal a day or two to spend with his family, Barack was distracted by endless phone calls, text messages, and e-mails. Axelrod was accustomed to getting midnight calls from his boss; he always knew when Obama was calling by his ring tone—“Signed, Sealed, Delivered” by Stevie Wonder.

Increasingly, Michelle would wake up in the middle of the night to discover that her husband had sneaked out of bed and into the study, where he was frantically scribbling notes. That is how, Michelle told a friend, she could tell Barack was “really stressed out. When he is writing small notes late at night. When he’s really sort of brooding about something, it’s late at night, and there’s a lot of little note writing going on. That’s when I know.”

That’s also when Michelle would put on her robe and join him in the study. “What’s happened?” she would find herself asking again and again. “What’s going on?” Barack never hesitated to share his problems with her. “Michelle is his sounding board,” Valerie Jarrett said. “There is not a problem he would hesitate to share with her, because he knows she’ll never hold back.” Unlike other advisers who might be less than forthcoming, Michelle is “very direct. She’d tell him exactly what she’s thinking” before returning to bed.

Much later, Barack would join her and fall fast asleep, only to be jostled by Sasha and Malia as they climbed under the covers with their parents just after dawn. Michelle would turn on the lights: “So we’re sort of waking up. And we talk. We talk about Daddy being President, about adolescence, about the questions they have.” Through it all, Daddy would lie there, motionless. “A dead body,” sniffed Michelle. Eventually, the girls stopped joining them in bed if Barack was there because, said Michelle, “Daddy is too snorey and stinky.”

Such lines drew the expected laughs when Michelle delivered them on the stump. But many people were surprised to discover that the overall tone of her message was decidedly downbeat. While Barack traveled the country spreading his generally optimistic message of hope and change, his wife seemed to relish the role of bad cop—especially when talking to African American audiences.

Black church ladies made up Michelle’s most receptive audiences, and she took great care to speak to them in their language. “On behalf of my church home and my pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright,” she invariably began, “I bring greetings.”

Then, to establish her working-class African American credentials, she spoke of the Robinson family’s South Carolina roots, of her South Side girlhood, and the relatives who saved up enough money to buy nice furniture just to wrap it in plastic. To those who feared for Barack’s life were he to be elected—following a series of threats, he had already been assigned Secret Service protection—Michelle implored audiences not to “wrap us in plastic just because you’re afraid.”

Relaxing into the black vernacular, Michelle instructed her listeners to get “ten other triflin’ people in your life” to volunteer for her husband or to contribute to his campaign. She wanted them to do this now, she said, because America under George W. Bush was a divided nation “guided by fear,” a country that is “downright mean.” We are “cynical” and “lazy…. We just don’t care about each other anymore.”

Health care? “Let me tell you,” she warned, “don’t get sick in America.” College? “Who can afford it? We just got out of debt ourselves.” Retirement? “Pensions are drying up. People have to work longer than they ever thought they’d have to.” The bottom line, according to Michelle: “We have become a nation of struggling folks who are barely making it every day. Folks are just jammed up, and it’s gotten worse over my lifetime. And, doggone it, I’m young!”

Michelle’s unremittingly bleak view of America actually played well in these venues. But once again, on the larger national stage, Michelle’s caustic observations made her look…bitter.

Indeed, once she was no longer playing to an audience, Michelle seemed oddly detached. “Her bearing is less royal than military: brisk, often stone-faced…mordant,” commented the New Yorker’s Lauren Collins. “Her winningly chipmunk-cheeked smile is doled out sparingly, a privilege to be earned, rather than an icebreaker or an entreaty.”

Barack’s minders considered Michelle’s candor to be something of a double-edged sword. “Occasionally it gives campaign people heartburn,” allowed Axelrod, who complained to Barack that his wife’s comments might alienate white voters. “She’s fundamentally honest—goes out there, speaks her mind, jokes. She doesn’t parse her words or select them with an antenna for political correctness.”

It was a problem shared by at least one of the seven other Democrats running for President at the time. When asked in February 2007 what he thought about newcomer Barack Obama, longtime Delaware Senator Joe Biden said, “I mean, you got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s storybook, man.”

No sooner had African American leaders expressed indignation over Biden’s use of the word clean to describe Barack than Biden called Barack to apologize. He also issued a statement and spoke to reporters trying to clarify what he meant. “My mother has an expression: clean as a whistle, sharp as a tack,” he explained. “That’s all I was trying to say.”

Barack brushed it off. “He was very gracious,” he said of his fellow Senator. “I have no problem with Joe Biden.”

But Michelle did. “‘The first African American who is articulate and bright and clean,’” she said as she read Biden’s comments in the New York Times. “Gee, go figure. He’s black and he’s articulate and he’s clean. So typical—I’ve heard things like that all my life. ‘My, you’re so well-spoken—you sound just like a white girl!’” According to one acquaintance, “Michelle was furious with Joe Biden. It rolled off Barack’s back, but not hers.”

Ignoring her critics, Michelle crisscrossed the country with her “something’s wrong with America” message. “We are our own evil,” she said at one campaign event, claiming at another that, because of its inherent racism, the United States was the only country “on the planet” where “a man with the credentials and the commitment and the ability of Barack Obama” would have difficulty being elected President. To supporters in Iowa, she stated flatly that, while her husband was prepared to be President, it remained to be seen if Americans were worthy of him. “Barack cannot lead a nation,” she said, “that is not ready to be led.”

To be sure, the Obama campaign faced an uphill battle. Despite a state-of-the-art Internet operation devised in part by twenty-four-year-old Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes, and a hit “Yes We Can” YouTube video by hiphop artist will.i.am, Barack lagged far behind Hillary in the polls.

The situation only got worse in April, when Barack squared off against Clinton, Biden, former North Carolina Senator John Edwards, Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, and former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel in the first of seventeen nationally televised Democratic primary debates. When asked how he would respond to a surprise terrorist attack, Barack waffled. In comparison with Hillary, who promised to “move as swiftly as is prudent to retaliate,” Obama stammered a vague response that made him sound, said Time’s Karen Tumulty, “like a candidate to head the volunteer fire department.”

From the outset, Hillary did not hesitate to charge that Barack’s inexperience and immaturity made him “unelectable.” Barack, however, was reluctant to strike back. “I am not interested in tearing into Hillary Clinton,” he replied when asked why he wasn’t taking a more forceful stand. “I think she is an admirable person, a capable Senator.”

In an attempt to offset criticism that Barack appeared “detached” and “aloof” during the first debate, the Obamas hauled out their biggest gun. On May 2, 2007, Oprah appeared on CNN’s Larry King Live to announce that, for the first time, she was endorsing a candidate for President. “What he stands for,” she told King, “is worth me going out on a limb for.” Her endorsement of Barack, she added, “doesn’t mean I’m against Hillary. I haven’t got anything negative to say about Hillary Clinton.”

Like her husband and Oprah, Michelle had also long admired the Clintons. Bill had been so popular in the African American community that he was often affectionately referred to as the country’s “first black President,” and it seemed only fitting that, after leaving the White House, he would establish his postpresidential headquarters in Harlem.

Yet, after Hillary sniped that Barack had done nothing to prove he was worthy of the nomination, Michelle, in the words of a friend, “lost respect for the Clintons.” She now joined with Obama’s inner circle of advisers—whom Gibbs described as “panicked”—in urging Barack to “punch harder.”

Barack resisted. “That’s not,” he said, “who I am.”

After he stumbled during the second debate, Michelle told him point-blank that he was going down to defeat if he did not “take off the gloves.”

Chimed in Axelrod: “Michelle is right: you have got to engage.”

The Hillary juggernaut continued through the summer months. As late as September 2007, polls put her 23 points ahead of Barack; 37 percent of voters did not even know who Obama was.

It was then that Barack finally decided to strike back. During the subsequent debates and in interview after interview, he charged that it was Hillary who was unelectable. She was a polarizing figure, a symbol of politics as usual, and, Barack pointed out repeatedly, an early supporter of the war in Iraq—a war that he had opposed from the beginning.

“I am not convinced the Obamas have any sense of how hard the Clintons fight,” said Al Gore’s former presidential campaign manager Donna Brazile, “when they feel their birthright is being challenged.”

Even though his wife boasted a double-digit lead in the polls, Bill Clinton was telling friends in Arkansas that he feared Obama would be able to run away with the nomination. One reason for this was the complicated new Clinton-endorsed system of delegates and “superdelegates”—elected officials and party bigwigs—that made it possible for a candidate to lose the popular vote and still walk away with the nomination.

Now Bill jumped into the fray. Over the next nine months he would accuse the Obama campaign of everything from playing the race card to personal attacks on his wife’s character to using union members to intimidate voters. When the former President claimed that Obama was exaggerating his opposition to the war—Clinton called Barack’s account of his position “a fairy tale”—Michelle called her husband’s advisers and demanded that the campaign fire back. “You can’t let him get away with that,” she told them. “Barack opposed the war when they went right along with Bush. How dare they.”

For the most part, Michelle refrained from publicly lashing out against her husband’s adversaries. But now her speeches seemed to be salted with not-so-subtle references to the Clintons’ marital troubles (“Our view is that if you can’t run your own house, you certainly can’t run the White House”) and sly remarks about people who had simply been in power too long.

Michelle let her guard down one afternoon when someone asked what she thought about the broadsides Bill Clinton was leveling against her husband. “I want to rip his eyes out!” she said, clawing with her fingernails. When a campaign staffer cast a disapproving look in her direction, she demurred. “Kidding!” she said. “See, this is what gets me into trouble.”

That summer of 2007, all the Obamas were out in force in Iowa. While the girls ran across the green grass in their summer dresses, Michelle kicked off her shoes and told a few dozen Iowans gathered for a garden party in Sioux City why they should vote for her husband. On her ninth birthday, a poised Malia was warmly applauded when she gave a speech about the meaning of freedom to a small Fourth of July crowd. A few weeks later, she and Sasha were screaming as they rode alongside Dad on Big Ben, one of the scarier rides at the Iowa State Fair. Then Sasha and Dad teamed up against Malia and her mom playing several carnival games.

Michelle was more irreverent than other aspiring First Ladies who had had to make the requisite pilgrimage to Iowa in primary season. “We’re here for the state fair,” Michelle would tell crowds with a straight face. “I just want some stuff on a stick—a corn dog, a Snickers bar…doesn’t matter what it is. Just has to be on a stick.”

The Obamas did not always have the media coverage to themselves; in several instances on the stump, they found themselves looking on as Daddy shared a platform that included Hillary. At this time, as Daddy’s battle with his archrival was building to a fever pitch, Malia suddenly turned serious. “You know, this is a pretty big deal,” the ten-year-old said. “If Daddy wins, he’d be the first African American to be a nominee.”

Michelle was surprised at her daughter’s out-of-the-blue comment, and pleased. “Do you realize how important that is, how significant?”

“Oh, yeah,” Malia answered confidently. “Because there was slavery, and there were people who couldn’t do things because of their race.” Then she paused. “But it would also be a big deal if a woman won. Because there was also the time when women couldn’t vote. So it would be a big deal either way.”

“This,” Michelle said when later recounting the exchange, “is her talking…. Amazing.”

While the more free-spirited Sasha provided much of the comic relief, spinning around until she dizzily plopped to the ground and giving everyone from the Vice President on down high fives, Malia proved time and again that she was one of the more thoughtful members of the family. When asked what it felt like to appear in front of large crowds with her parents, Malia replied, “Well, I realize the people aren’t here to see me. I’m just a kid.

“I can do my part,” Malia continued. “I can recycle. I can pick up the trash. But I can’t pass any laws to make anybody do anything. They just think I’m cute. I just wave and I smile and I’m outa there.” Barack’s nickname for his elder daughter: “Little Miss Articulate.”

Sasha, on the other hand, managed to throw Mommy with her questions about a particular video that was suddenly causing a sensation on the Internet. In the less-than-completely-wholesome “I Got a Crush…On Obama,” bikini-clad self-proclaimed “Obama Girl” Amber Lee Ettinger sang of her love for Michelle’s husband against the backdrop of Barack running on the beach.

“Wow,” Michelle said when she first clicked on to the video. “That’s weird…but I guess nobody’s really gonna hear about that.” But in June, Sasha declared, “Daddy has a girlfriend. It’s you, Mommy.”

Michelle suddenly realized that Sasha was talking about Obama Girl, but for some reason had confused Ettinger with Mommy. “Oh, shhhii…. Yeah,” Michelle replied, stopping just short of uttering an expletive. “Yeah, Mommy is Daddy’s girlfriend, all right.” (Ettinger would later make a video in which she pleaded with Hillary Clinton to “stop the attacks.”)

As kind as Malia had been about Hillary Clinton, one high-profile member of the Obamas’ inner circle proved to be considerably less charitable. “Barack knows what it means to be a black man in a country and a process that is controlled by rich white men,” said the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, apparently not imbued with the spirit of the holidays, during his Christmas sermon. “Hillary can never know that, Hillary ain’t never been called a nigger!”

On January 3, 2008, nearly one year after his first campaign stop in Iowa, Barack scored a decisive victory in that state’s caucuses. On election night in Des Moines, Michelle, wearing a black dress and jawbreaker-sized pearls, stood by her husband and their two daughters and waved to the cheering crowd. “It was,” wrote Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, “one of those moments that give you goose bumps.”

“They said this day would never come,” Barack said, adding that his victory was a “defining moment in history.” Perhaps. But just five days later, Hillary rebounded with an upset win in New Hampshire. The polls had predicted that Barack would ride a wave of momentum to victory in the Granite State. Instead, women who felt Hillary had been unfairly treated by the media—a sentiment that was reinforced when Hillary choked back tears during a discussion in a Portsmouth, New Hampshire, coffee shop—turned out in force to support her.

Over the next few weeks, the lead seesawed between Hillary and Barack as she won in Michigan and Nevada and he scored an impressive victory in South Carolina. Announcing his endorsement of Obama in late January, Senator Ted Kennedy compared Barack to his brother John and even drew parallels between Bill Clinton’s sniping at Barack and former President Harry Truman’s early criticism of JFK’s candidacy. “And John Kennedy replied: ‘The world is changing. The old ways will not do. It is time for a new generation of leadership,’” Ted boomed. “So it is with Barack Obama!”

A few days later, on the eve of the February 5, 2008, Super Tuesday contest, when voters in more than twenty states and protectorates cast their ballots, Michelle was joined onstage at a rally in Los Angeles by Caroline Kennedy, Kennedy cousin Maria Shriver, and Oprah. Beneath her cool exterior, Michelle later confessed to being “completely starstruck. I mean, Caroline Kennedy—come on! She’s part of history.”

Even when the inevitable comparisons were made between the tall, stylish, immaculately tailored Michelle and Jacqueline Kennedy, Michelle was more impressed with Jackie’s abilities as a parent than her status as legendary style icon. “If you botch raising your children,” Jackie had famously said, “nothing else you do matters very much.” Michelle agreed. Given the media microscope Caroline and John junior grew up under—not to mention the assassinations of their father and their beloved uncle Bobby—the two Kennedy children wound up as “wonderful, well-balanced adults. That doesn’t happen by accident,” Michelle said. “Jackie was obviously an incredible mom.”

If the Clintons justifiably felt betrayed by their longtime political allies the Kennedys, Hillary got some modicum of revenge on Super Tuesday. Although Barack won thirteen states, Hillary’s eight wins included the Kennedys’ home state of Massachusetts and the biggest prize of all—California.

Five days later, Barack won his second spoken word Grammy, this time for The Audacity of Hope. “I’m almost more impressed by that,” Michelle cracked to a friend, “than by this whole running-for-President thing.”

Wisecracks aside, Michelle took each victory—and each defeat—to heart. As tensions mounted, she became increasingly irritable. When a TV reporter physically brushed aside her press secretary, Michelle asked angrily, “Did you place your hand on my staff? You do not touch my team.”

Barack was feeling the pressure, too. But he turned increasingly to the one thing that had helped him stay calm in times of crisis: cigarettes. Despite Michelle’s tongue-in-cheek plea for Americans to report to her if they caught him smoking, Barack was lighting up more than ever in restrooms, stairwells, and the back of his SUV. The only difference from earlier in the campaign was that he indulged his habit under the watchful eyes of the Secret Service agents assigned to protect him.

Still, the rigors of the campaign seemed to be taking a greater toll on Michelle than on the candidate himself. “Barack will say she’s more driven than he is,” a campaign staffer observed, “and in the sense that she does not really let things roll off her back as easily as he does, he’s right.” As the momentum shifted from her husband to Hillary Clinton and back again, Michelle was perhaps most responsible for insisting that her husband “not equivocate. When he was weighing his words carefully, she told him to come out swinging.”

During a conference call before a debate in early February, Michelle had dialed in to listen as he brainstormed with his advisers. Exasperated with all the varying opinions being offered, Michelle finally cut in. “Barack,” she told him, “feel—don’t think! You’ve been overthinking, and Hillary just cuts right to the point. Don’t get caught in the weeds. Be visceral. Use your heart—and your head.”

Silence. Michelle had spoken. “Nobody’s opinion matters more to Barack,” said one participant in the conference call. “And of course, she was absolutely right.”

Unfortunately, no one was minding Michelle on February 18 when she told Obama supporters in Madison, Wisconsin, that “for the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is making a comeback.” Later that same day at a rally in Milwaukee, she said it again. Only this time, there were TV cameras there to record her remarks.

Understandably, Michelle’s claim that in her entire adult life she had never been proud of America unleashed a torrent of criticism. While Cindy McCain, the wife of presumptive Republican nominee Senator John McCain, proclaimed that she had always been proud of her country, Laura Bush unexpectedly sprang to Michelle’s defense. What Michelle meant to say, the First Lady suggested, was that she was “more proud” of her country now that an African American was within striking distance of the presidency.

Touched by these unsolicited words, Michelle dashed off a note of thanks to Laura. “There’s a reason people like her,” Michelle later said. “She doesn’t add fuel to the fire.”

Good intentions aside, Laura’s interpretation of what Michelle “meant to say” wasn’t entirely accurate, either. “What she meant was,” Barack told an interviewer, “this is the first time she’s been proud of the politics of America. Because she’s pretty cynical about the political process, and with good reason, and she’s not alone.”

Cast in the classic “angry black woman” mold, Michelle would draw fire for months. But as a campaign issue, Michelle’s comments would be all but totally eclipsed by another, potentially far more damaging controversy.

For over a year, David Axelrod and his senior staff had been wringing their hands in anticipation of the moment when the press would wake up to Jeremiah Wright and his offensive rhetoric. In March of 2008, that moment arrived when ABC News aired excerpts from Wright’s more provocative rants.

The ensuing outrage over the reverend’s racist and blatantly anti-American rhetoric (“God bless America? No, no, no. God damn America!”) threatened to capsize the Obama campaign. (Wright also had choice words for the Clintons during the campaign: “Hillary is married to Bill and Bill has been good to us. No, he ain’t! Bill did us, just like he did Monica Lewinsky. He was riding dirty.”)

Frantic, Axelrod and Barack’s other staff advisers unanimously urged him to get out in front of the issue and disavow Wright in unequivocal terms.

Mrs. Obama thought otherwise. “Pastor Wright is like a father to us,” Michelle told her husband. “You are not going to turn your back on him just because some people don’t like what he has to say.”

In reality, Barack did not need much coaxing. Instead of denouncing Wright, he seized the opportunity to address the divisive issue of race at a televised news conference in Philadelphia on March 18. In a moving and wide-ranging speech, Barack condemned Wright’s comments. But, he went on, “as imperfect as he may be, Reverend Wright has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated at my wedding, and baptized my children.” And, he neglected to mention, helped save his marriage.

“I can no more disown him,” Obama continued, “than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother…a woman who loves me as much as anything in this world, but who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”

Like others in the audience that day, Michelle grew visibly emotional as her husband spoke movingly of America’s legacy of slavery and the wounds that still needed to be healed. After he was finished, Barack found Michelle backstage, weeping. While others tried to look away, they shared a quiet, intensely difficult moment together. Once his wife seemed comforted, he turned to no one in particular. “What’s next?” he asked.

The speech would be lavishly praised by Democrats and Republicans alike, although Barack was roundly criticized in some quarters for, in the words of more than one commentator, “throwing Grandma under the bus.”

Apparently neither Barack nor Michelle, who had been given an advance copy of the speech, considered the possibility that Toot would be hurt by his comments. He had, after all, written about his grandmother’s prejudices years before in Dreams from My Father. At Michelle’s suggestion, Barack called his grandmother to smooth things over. “It’s okay,” she told him. “Do what you have to do. It’s okay.”

It would not be the last time Barack and Michelle would have to deal with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. In the meantime, Barack’s own unguarded words would threaten to cost him the election. Talking to fund-raisers in San Francisco, he spoke of bitter whites whose frustrations caused them to “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them…as a way to express their frustrations.”

The remarks, widely condemned on both sides of the aisle as elitist, did not play well in the working-class neighborhoods of Pennsylvania. Once again, Barack’s advisers scrambled to find a way to get out the message that Barack had not lost touch with the common man.

Michelle had the answer. She urged her husband not to back down or “be all wishy-washy.” He took her advice. “No, I’m in touch,” he said at a rally in Pennsylvania. “I know exactly what’s going on. People are fed up, they’re angry, they’re frustrated.”

It was too little, too late. On April 22, Pennsylvania voters handed Hillary Clinton a decisive win. But once again, because of the new delegate rules that had been promulgated by the Clintons, she would receive only a few more delegates than Barack.

For all the flak Barack drew for what many perceived as his disparaging remarks about working-class whites, there were still elements in the black community that insisted he was really not one of them. This was one thing Michelle, who was now usually more cautious about the statements she made, was not willing to let slide. “We’re still playing around with the question of ‘Is he black enough?’” Michelle told a Women for Obama group. “That’s nonsense. Stop it! If a man like Barack isn’t black enough, then who is?”

The Obamas were still licking their wounds from the Pennsylvania defeat when their old friend and mentor Jeremiah Wright resurfaced unexpectedly. This time Wright, who had retired as pastor of Trinity United, was delivering a speech at the National Press Club in Washington. “This is not an attack on Jeremiah Wright,” Wright said of his critics, “this is an attack on the black church.”

Wright then went on to defend his earlier comments blaming the United States for starting the AIDS epidemic and for 9/11, and to defend his friend Louis Farrakhan. As for Barack’s speech condemning some of the minister’s comments, Wright argued that Obama “had to distance himself because he’s a politician…. Politicians say what they say and do what they do because of electability.”

This time, Barack’s advisers implored him to publicly denounce Wright and resign from Trinity United Church. Wright had betrayed their friendship, they argued, and handed Obama’s political enemies a weapon that could end his candidacy.

But when Barack talked it over with Michelle, she defended Wright. “Your pastor is like your grandfather, right?” she said. “There are plenty of things he says that I don’t agree with, that Barack doesn’t agree with…. You can’t disown yourself from your family because they’ve got things wrong.”

Now Barack and Michelle were meeting with Wright’s successor at Trinity United, the Reverend Otis Moss III, and, in Obama’s words, “praying on what to do.” In these discussions, Michelle’s opinion prevailed. “You stand by your family, the people you love, no matter what,” she insisted, “and Reverend Wright is family.”

It would be another month before the Obamas finally resigned from the church, and then only after Father Michael Pfleger, a visiting Catholic priest, gave a sermon at Trinity United that mocked Hillary Clinton. “I really believe she always thought,” Pfleger said, “‘This is mine. I’m Bill’s wife. I’m white, and this is mine.’…Then out of nowhere came, “Hey, I’m Barack Obama,” and she said, “Oh, damn! Where did you come from? I’m white! I’m entitled! There’s a black man stealing my show!’” Then Pfleger, who is white, pretended to wipe tears from his face, mimicking Hillary’s emotion-charged remarks before the New Hampshire primary. “She wasn’t the only one crying,” Pfleger said. “There was a whole lot of white people crying.”

Once again, Barack and Michelle talked over what to do about Trinity United. This time, since the culprit was not Jeremiah Wright but a white priest, they agreed that they could leave the church without appearing to turn their backs on their pastor and the black community.

“I am deeply disappointed in Father Pfleger’s divisive, backward-looking rhetoric,” Barack said, making no reference to Wright’s similarly inflammatory statements. Submitting the Obamas’ formal letter of resignation from the church, Barack said, “This is not a decision I come to lightly. We do it with some sadness…. We don’t want to have the church subjected to the scrutiny that a presidential campaign legitimately undergoes.”

In the end, Barack and Michelle never repudiated or abandoned Wright per se—only certain sentiments he expressed, sentiments they insisted they had never actually heard him express in church. According to an acquaintance of the reverend, “Since they left the church, both Barack and Michelle have spoken to Reverend Wright several times. He is still a part of their lives.”

In the meantime, Barack and Hillary continued to battle it out for the nomination. On May 6, Hillary won in Indiana but lost the all-important North Carolina primary to Barack. “You did it,” Michelle told Barack as the results came in, assuring his nomination. “You did it.”

As she had for every victory and defeat, Michelle, this time clad in a pumpkin-colored dress and her trademark pearls, clasped hands with Barack and joined him onstage in North Carolina. “This fall, we intend to march forward as one Democratic Party, united by a common vision for this country,” he told the cheering crowd. “Because we all agree at this defining moment in history…we can’t afford to give John McCain the chance to serve out George Bush’s third term.”

Hillary, however, was not about to concede. Obama maintained his usual cool, but behind the scenes Michelle was seething. “Why doesn’t she just do the right thing and bow out gracefully?” Michelle asked. “There’s no reason for her to keep hangin’ on.”

It would be a month before Barack’s June 3 win in the Montana primary would trigger a mass migration of superdelegates to Obama’s camp, formally clinching the nomination for Barack. Even then, Hillary would refuse to admit defeat until her supporters told her the race was over in a conference call. Two days later, Hillary conceded via e-mail.

Now faced with defeating John McCain, Barack joked with Michelle about his chances. “Oh, great,” he said about how the matchup would be touted in the press, “war hero against snot-nosed rookie.”

In truth, Barack had been treated with kid gloves by the mainstream press—and he knew it. Over the course of the campaign, Barack—either with or without Michelle—would wind up on countless magazine covers, from Time (no fewer than fifteen times before the end of 2008), Newsweek, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, and the Atlantic to People, GQ, Men’s Vogue, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Men’s Health to Vibe, Parade, Esquire, Ebony, Rolling Stone, and Tiger Beat. With the rare exception, nearly every article portrayed him in glowing, almost messianic terms.

Michelle was not so fortunate. While her coverage was overwhelmingly positive, she came in for far more criticism than her husband. Columnist Michelle Malkin called Michelle “Barack’s bitter half,” while the conservative National Review ran a picture of a scowling Michelle on the cover under the heading “Mrs. Grievance.”

Even Obama-friendly Time, in an article titled “The War over Michelle Obama,” speculated that Barack’s wife “could be a liability as well as an asset. Her speeches can sound stark and stern compared with her husband’s roof raisers. He’s all about the promise; she’s more about the problem.”

None of this came as a surprise to Michelle’s brother, Craig, now the head basketball coach at Oregon State University. “When you get to the Final Four,” he said, “you aren’t going to run up against guys who say, ‘Well, we are happy to have gotten this far; you can have it.’”

Craig had no qualms about his sister’s ability to weather the storm. “In a funny way, she was raised to be in this position,” he said. “To be political, you have to care about what people think about you. We were raised the complete opposite.”

Still, it hardly helped matters when Fox News anchor E. D. Hill jokingly referred to the fist-pound greeting the Obamas used—taught to them by some of their younger staffers—as some sort of “terrorist fist-jab.” In the context of the lighthearted piece Hill was doing on the candidate’s body language, the offhand comment was clearly meant to be funny. Essentially an updated version of the high five, the fist-pound (also known as the “bump” or “dap”) was a staple on softball and soccer fields as well as basketball courts across the country.

Nevertheless, the “terrorist fist-jab” line gained traction, and soon the Internet was abuzz with rumors that videotape existed of Michelle railing against “whitey.” Michelle’s reaction to this particular fable was predictable. “Whitey? ‘Whitey’?” she said, utterly dumbfounded. “What is this, the seventies? I mean, come on. It’s not a word I would ever use.”

Barack was incensed. “If they think they’re going to make Michelle an issue in this campaign,” he said, “they should be careful because I find that unacceptable, the notion that you start attacking my wife or my family. These folks should lay off my wife.”

Righteous indignation aside, by June the campaign was casting about for new ways to make over Michelle’s image. Six months earlier, Michelle had turned down an invitation to appear on ABC’s popular daytime talk show The View because she would not cross a picket line during a lengthy writers’ strike. After Cindy McCain cohosted The View in April, Michelle told the show’s executive producer, Bill Geddie, that she wanted to do the same.

Now, two months after McCain’s appearance, Michelle needed the kind of exposure to a largely women’s audience that only a show like The View could provide. On June 18—the same day the New York Times ran a front-page story on Mrs. Obama’s perceived gaffes and ongoing efforts to “soften” her image—Michelle appeared on the show. Just as she had kidded with her husband not to “screw it up” right before his 2004 convention keynote speech, Barack called her up to offer words of advice before her debut on The View. “Be good,” he said.

No sooner had she been greeted with a standing ovation from the studio audience in New York than Michelle abruptly halted the proceedings. “I have to be greeted properly,” she said with a straight face. “Fist-bump, please.” She then pressed knuckles with cohosts Barbara Walters, Whoopi Goldberg, Elizabeth Hasselbeck, Joy Behar, and Sherri Shepherd.

When Walters asked her to address her critics, Michelle was eager to set the record straight about her claim that for the first time in her adult life she was proud of her country. “I am proud of my country, without a doubt,” she said. “I’m a girl who grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Chicago, and let me tell you, of course I’m proud. Nowhere but in America could my story be possible.”

Asked why she thought there were as many negative stories about her in the press as there were positive stories about her husband, Michelle replied, “I wear my heart on my sleeve. There’s a level of passion there…that’s the risk that you take.” Another reason for all the controversy, she said, was the media’s appetite for controversy. “I fill up some space,” she said.

For the remainder of the hour-long show, a charming and relaxed Michelle talked about her marriage and her children, her fashion sense (“I stopped wearing panty hose a long time ago—it’s painful…put ’em on, rip ’em, it’s inconvenient”), and the many comparisons to Jackie Kennedy. She conceded that Hillary had been the victim of sexism (“People aren’t used to strong women. We don’t even know how to talk about ’em”), and even praised Hasselbeck, an outspoken supporter of John McCain, as “solid. She has great kids, she’s funny.”

Members of Barack’s staff who were watching the show live as it aired in New York burst into applause. If poll numbers were any indication, her View appearance and the mountain of press it received did much to improve the public’s perception of the woman who aspired to be America’s first black First Lady. Michelle’s turn on The View was also a boost for New York designer Donna Ricco. Even before the show was over, women were rushing out to buy Michelle’s off-the-rack sleeveless black-and-white print Ricco sundress. The price: $148.

For the next few weeks, Michelle, now sensitive to the fact that any verbal misstep could cost her husband support in a tight election, tossed aside her usual doom-and-gloom script. It wasn’t long, however, before the intemperate remarks of another Obama supporter were making headlines.

On July 8, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, unaware that his microphone was on as he waited to do a TV interview, whispered to his fellow guest that he was fed up with Barack “talkin’ down to black people. I wanna,” he added, “cut his nuts off.” To drive home his point, he clenched his teeth and made a slashing gesture with his right hand.

Jackson’s tasteless remark ignited a firestorm of controversy, and the reverend immediately called a televised news conference to apologize for what he conceded were his “hurtful” comments. His daughter Santita also apologized to her pal Michelle, although it was hardly necessary. “Hey,” Michelle cracked to another friend, “it’s not something I haven’t considered doing myself.”

As it turned out, that July both Barack and Michelle would find themselves taking more friendly fire. As her husband was about to depart on a long-planned tour of Europe and the Middle East designed to bolster his foreign policy credentials, Michelle’s favorite magazine—the New Yorker—ran a cover story on the Obamas that would unintentionally revive some of the old fears about them.

On the cover of the magazine’s July 21, 2008, issue, a cartoon by Barry Blitt depicted an Afro-topped, camouflage-wearing, AK-47-toting Michelle and her turbaned husband fist-bumping in the Oval Office while the American flag burned in the fireplace. Above the mantel: a portrait of Osama Bin Laden.

Although it was clearly a satirical swipe at some of the strange rumors that had swirled around the Obamas throughout the campaign, many failed to get the joke. Outraged readers of the liberal publication wrote in saying they were canceling their subscriptions. Both the Obama and McCain camps condemned the cover, claiming that most readers would find the cartoon “tasteless and offensive.”

For their part, Barack and Michelle could only shrug their shoulders. “Why would they do this?” asked Michelle, who knew that many would mistakenly interpret the cover as an endorsement of the charges of anti-Americanism that had been leveled against them in some quarters. “Unbelievable.” Still, it was not nearly as offensive as a Web site posting—also by someone who was apparently sympathetic to the Obamas—that showed Michelle being lynched. Under pressure, the Web site took it down.

Leaving Michelle and the kids at home, Barack headed off on his whirlwind five-day international tour, which included meetings with Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of Iraq, King Abdullah II of Jordan, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The climax of the tour was Barack’s speech to a cheering crowd of two hundred thousand at the Victory Column in Berlin. The comparisons to JFK’s stirring “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech were inevitable.

Back in Chicago for a couple of days, Barack made the most of this sliver of time he could carve out for his wife and children. He and Michelle clapped as the girls reenacted Kung Fu Panda on the living room floor, and listened patiently as seven-year-old Sasha practiced “Li’l Liza Jane” on the piano.

They ate a take-out lunch from Subway, played a quick game of Uno, and took time out of the day to pose for pictures on the living room couch. (When Sasha teased him about his thinning hair, Daddy shot back, “Well, you have no teeth!”) This was also the time when the kids would hit Daddy up for their one-dollar weekly allowance. “I’m out of town,” Barack explained, “so Malia will say, ‘Hey, you owe me ten weeks!’”

Of course, things were not entirely as they once were at 5046 South Greenwood Drive, where a discreet blue-and-white Obama for President sign had been placed on the front lawn. As a barefoot Sasha scampered outside, a Secret Service agent watching unobtrusively from the dining room whispered into the tiny walkie-talkie on his wrist: “Front porch.”

Barack had appointed his vice presidential search committee two days after clinching the nomination in June. But now, in the final few weeks leading up to the Democratic Convention in Denver, the most pressing question was: Would Barack pick Hillary to be his running mate?

Michelle, who had long insisted she was no policy wonk (“Please, I don’t have the time”), publicly insisted that she would have “nothing to do with” picking her husband’s running mate. “I don’t want it. A nominee gets to pick who he thinks will best complement him.”

In fact, according to a New York State Democratic Party official who was close to the selection process, “Michelle certainly played a role” in selecting her husband’s Vice President.

For all the talk of party unity, there were those in the Obama camp who still did not entirely trust the Clintons. But there was also a feeling that, given the fact that her husband would certainly be one of her chief counselors, Hillary could bring experience and no small degree of foreign policy credibility to the table.

The same could be said for thirty-five-year Senate veteran Joe Biden, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. Although the names of Indiana Senator Evan Bayh, Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, and Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius were floated as possible VP picks, Hillary and Biden were always at the top of the list. At one point, the Obama camp mulled over the idea of Hillary as Vice President with Biden as Secretary of State. When asked what he thought of such an arrangement, Biden made it clear that he was interested only in the vice presidential slot. Hillary, on the other hand, let it be known that she would rule nothing out.

In what may have been the deciding factor, Michelle sided with those who felt Hillary would make a better Secretary of State than a Vice President in an Obama administration. “Do you,” Michelle asked her husband at one point, “really want Bill and Hillary just down the hall from you in the White House? Could you live with that?”

On August 23, 2008, Barack announced his selection of Biden as his running mate via text message, e-mail, and on his Web site. Five days later at Denver’s Invesco Field football stadium, against a stylized Grecian temple backdrop (instantly dubbed “the Temple of Obama” by the McCain camp), Barack accepted the nomination before eighty-four thousand screaming supporters and a record-breaking television audience of forty million.

When he was finished, Michelle, dressed in a red and black shift, leaped onstage with Malia and Sasha. While the girls smiled and waved in their pink dresses, Michelle wrapped her arms around her husband. And, while the crowd roared, Barack nuzzled her cheek and kissed her.

I can’t believe you pulled this off.

—Michelle to Barack

Michelle is my chief counsel and adviser.

I would never make a big decision without asking her opinion.

—Barack

Michelle is totally in control. She is friendly but very stern and sharp—stern is the only way I know how to say it—and she is very involved in his decision making.

—Kim Lightford,

Barack’s friend and former State Senate colleague

They don’t seem to be fazed by anything.

—Barack on Malia and Sasha

Our girls are just complete comic relief.

—Michelle