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Oh, come on,” Michelle said when she heard the news. “He’s got to be kidding.” It had been just twelve hours since her husband made history by accepting his party’s nomination. Now, on his seventy-second birthday, John McCain was making some history of his own by picking Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate—and the first woman ever to appear on a Republican ticket.
Michelle’s stunned reaction to Palin’s selection was shared by Barack, his senior staff, and a sizable chunk of the American public. In fact, McCain had wanted to pick Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, a lifelong Democrat and Al Gore’s running mate in 2000, but was stopped by party leaders who felt Lieberman was too liberal. Instead, McCain, known for taking political risks, hastily picked the virtually unknown Palin.
The feisty forty-four-year-old self-described “average hockey mom” did manage to energize the GOP’s conservative base—something that McCain had failed to accomplish thus far—and to pique the nation’s curiosity. Four days after McCain introduced Palin to the nation, it was revealed that her seventeen-year-old daughter, Bristol, was unwed and pregnant. Even conservatives acknowledged that this was an embarrassment for the candidate, whose appeal was based in part on upholding traditional Christian values.
Understandably, there were those on Barack’s team who delighted in Bristol’s predicament. Michelle was not one of them. Aware that Palin was also raising a four-month-old son suffering from Down syndrome, Michelle told Barack that she had “nothing but sympathy” for the Governor. Barack agreed, issuing a statement defending the Palin family’s right to privacy and warning his campaign staff not to make any comments about Bristol’s pregnancy.
Five days after Barack’s historic acceptance speech in Denver, Palin gave an acceptance speech of her own at the Republican Convention in Saint Paul, Minnesota. The Alaska Governor’s address, which electrified Republicans and engrossed a TV audience even larger than the one Barack had drawn, was aimed squarely at white working-class voters—some of whom had supported Hillary. Palin was not shy about praising Clinton and reminding Hillary’s supporters that there was still a woman they could vote for in the general election.
Palin managed to hold her own against Biden in the sole vice presidential debate on October 2, but a series of disastrous TV interviews chipped away at the public’s desire to put her a heartbeat away from the presidency. Palin would be the topic of several phone calls between Barack and Michelle, who admitted to being “fascinated by this woman.”
The presidential candidates themselves, meanwhile, went toe-to-toe in three debates. During the second debate, a town hall-style event in Nashville, McCain pointed to Barack and referred to him as “that one” to make a point. Later, McCain joked that he was simply taking a cue from Oprah. “She called him ‘the one.’ I just called him ‘that one.’ What’s the big deal?”
Michelle got the joke. For the foreseeable future, whenever she wanted to bring him down a peg, she took special pleasure in calling her husband “that one.”
For the remainder of the campaign, it often seemed as if both candidates would take a backseat to Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, a plumbing contractor who confronted Barack as he campaigned door-to-door in Ohio. When Wurzelbacher demanded to know if Barack’s tax plan would cost him as a small business owner, Obama replied offhandedly, “I think that when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”
The comment was captured on video, and soon Wurzelbacher—now simply known as “Joe the Plumber”—was being touted by Republicans as a working-class hero who had dared to expose Barack’s tax-and-spend, share-the-wealth agenda. During the final presidential debate, at Hofstra University in New York, McCain invoked Joe the Plumber’s name no fewer than nine times.
Away from reporters, Michelle and Barack joked about Joe the Plumber. While Barack had cautioned everyone associated with the campaign to avoid taking personal shots at McCain, Michelle could not disguise her contempt for Joe the Plumber—especially when it was revealed that he was not really a licensed plumber and he had actually not paid all his taxes. (In fairness, even McCain saw the humor in his Joe the Plumber rap when South Carolina’s Republican Senator Lindsey Graham started calling their old Senate pal “Joe the Biden.”)
While Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber seemed to be dominating the airwaves—along with a worsening economic crisis that looked increasingly impossible for the Republicans to overcome—an Obama family drama was unfolding half a world away. On the eve of the October 7 presidential debate in Tennessee, Barack’s grandmother had fallen in her Honolulu apartment and broken her hip. She was treated at Kaiser Permanente’s Moanalua Medical Center, and returned home.
Over the next two weeks, her condition deteriorated. On October 20, Barack’s sister Maya, who now taught at Honolulu’s La Pietra–Hawaii School for Girls and cared for their grandmother, called to tell him that Toot, who was also battling a recurrence of cancer, might die at any time.
“I never saw self-pity or fear,” Maya said of their grandmother. “She was clear about wanting to stay home, protective of us, dignified, and determined to be herself to the very end.” Toot kept her sense of humor, too. “Oh, my,” she told Maya as flowers flooded in from well-wishers. “With all this hullabaloo, it’s going to be embarrassing if I don’t die.”
Three days after Maya called, Barack broke away from his campaign, boarded a plane, and flew nine hours to be by his beloved Toot’s side.
For Barack, who had always regretted not being there when his mother died, it was important to say good-bye to the woman who raised him. “One of the things I wanted was to have a chance to sit down with her and talk to her,” he explained before departing for the islands. “She’s still alert and she still has all her faculties and I wanted to make sure that I don’t miss that opportunity right now.” He and Michelle decided that it would be best if Malia and Sasha stayed behind in Chicago with their mother.
As soon as he landed in Honolulu, he went by motorcade straight to her Beretania Street apartment building. That night, he stayed at the Hyatt Waikiki Hotel before returning the next morning at eight fifteen to spend the day with Toot.
At one point, Barack, wearing a T-shirt, went out for a stroll along Young Street—and, if he could avoid being spotted, a smoke. While the Secret Service kept a discreet distance, he got only so far as the Times Supermarket before a crowd began to gather. “Everybody was screaming and running,” recalled local resident Josef Werner. “Everybody was yelling, ‘Barack, Barack is here! Obama is here!’”
Two days later, he was back on the campaign trail in Nevada. “She’s gravely ill,” Barack told ABC’s Good Morning America. “We weren’t sure and I’m still not sure she’ll make it to Election Day. We’re all praying and we hope she does.”
It would not be long before another relative—this time on his father’s side of the family—was making news. On October 30, it was reported that Barack’s Auntie Zeituni, Barack Obama Sr.’s half sister Zeituni Onyango, was living in a Boston public housing project despite the fact that a federal judge had denied her political asylum from her native Kenya in 2002 and two years later ordered her to leave the country.
Barack had written extensively about his beloved Auntie Zeituni in Dreams from My Father, and she had even attended the swearing-in ceremonies when he became a U.S. Senator in 2005. But Auntie Zeituni’s nephew claimed he was unaware of her immigration problems.
Calling it “a family matter,” the McCain campaign chose not to pursue Auntie Zeituni’s illegal status as an election issue. In a bizarre twist, however, Homeland Security quietly issued a special directive requiring high-level approval before federal immigration agents arrested fugitives. Federal documents would later show that the Bush administration feared that arresting Obama’s aunt might generate “negative media or congressional interest”—that it would make it appear they were trying to influence the election.
By the same token, new accusations of widespread voter registration fraud by Obama-friendly ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) fizzled, as did a last-minute TV blitz featuring some of the more outrageous statements by Jeremiah Wright. Asked by a reporter to comment on the latest round of GOP ads concerning the Obamas and Wright, a top Obama official text-messaged his response: “Zzzzz.”
Just after 8 A.M. on November 3—election eve—Barack was in Florida when Michelle called from Chicago. “Toot passed yesterday, Barack,” she told him. “I am so so sorry.”
After he hung up, Barack went to the gym for his daily hour-long workout, then to a rally in Jacksonville. From there, he traveled to North Carolina. It was in Charlotte, standing before an afternoon crowd of twenty-five thousand, that he summoned the courage to talk about Toot. “She has gone home,” Barack said, his voice beginning to crack. “I’m not going to talk about it too long because it’s hard, a little, to talk about it,” he said. In contrast to the Clintons or the Bushes or so many other politicians who were prone to choking up or crying, Barack rarely indulged in public displays of emotion. But today, he pulled out a handkerchief and wiped away the tears that glistened on his cheeks.
On Election Day, Michelle and Barack voted at 7:35 A.M. at their usual polling place, Chicago’s Beulah Shoesmith Elementary School. Michelle lingered so long in the voting booth, savoring the moment, that her husband joked, “I had to check out to see who she was voting for.”
Malia and Sasha went to school as they normally would, and then got their hair done at a local beauty parlor for the night ahead. Daddy, meanwhile, flew off to Indiana for some last-minute campaigning. “Hey, guys!” he said as he dropped into a voter canvassing center. Then he picked up a phone and began talking to voters, who stammered in disbelief.
That night the Obamas had a steak dinner at home in Chicago before the family hied away to a suite at the Hyatt Regency Hotel. There they were joined by the people who had been with Barack from the beginning—Valerie Jarrett, David Axelrod, Robert Gibbs, and Obama campaign manager David Plouffe. While they watched the returns on television, a stream of children that included Malia and Sasha, Craig Robinson’s son and daughter, Gibbs’s son, and Biden’s grandchildren scurried about.
Ohio had been a toss-up, so when it looked as if Barack had locked it up, he turned to Axelrod. “So it looks like we’re gonna win this thing, huh?” he asked Axelrod. “It looks like it, yeah,” Axelrod said cautiously.
Around 9:45 P.M., the family repaired to a smaller suite upstairs. Barack plopped onto a sofa next to his mother-in-law and held her hand as they continued watching the returns. Michelle’s uncle, Steve Robinson, had declared Barack the winner early in the evening, so when it began to look as if that victory was in reach, Robinson blurted, “I told you.”
“We had our little laugh when he said it,” Marian recalled of her brother’s remark. “It was like, okay, that means it’s true.”
When Barack was officially declared the winner at 11 P.M., the mood was oddly solemn. “Everybody was quiet,” Marian said. “I can’t tell you how subdued it was. We weren’t like the people in the stands—you know, yelling and screaming.” As she continued holding Barack’s hand, she turned to him and said, “I was thinking about what a journey you have to come…” Then she fell silent. “It was almost like,” she said of that moment, “there weren’t any words.”
Of that moment, Michelle would later say, “I was proud as a wife, amazed as a citizen. I felt a sense of relief, a sense of calm that the country I lived in was the country I thought I lived in.”
Not far away, in Chicago’s Grant Park, a crowd of more than two hundred thousand erupted in whoops and shrieks. Strangers embraced, weeping at the realization that history had been made with the election of the nation’s first African American President. The achievement seemed even more staggering given that Barack had been on the national political scene just four years and, at forty-seven, stood to be the third youngest (behind Theodore Roosevelt and JFK) President in history.
The euphoria continued unabated, reaching a fever pitch when Barack, Michelle, and the children appeared onstage at Grant Park. They had dressed entirely in red and black—Barack in black suit and red tie, Malia in a red dress, Sasha in a black dress, and Michelle in a red-and-black silk Narciso Rodriguez outfit. (She would later be criticized for spoiling her appearance by wearing a plain black cardigan over the designer dress, but Michelle was unapologetic. “Hey, I was cold,” she said. “I needed that sweater!”)
Among the faces in the crowd were Jesse Jackson and Oprah, crying openly as Barack delivered his victory speech behind eight-foot-high plates of bulletproof glass. “I know my grandmother is watching,” he said at one point, “along with the family that made me who I am.”
Back in Hawaii, Barack’s sister was sitting in the apartment where he had spent his high school years with his grandparents. “I was too tired to grieve in front of millions,” Maya said of her decision not to accept her brother’s invitation to join him in Chicago. That very day, the koa urn containing Toot’s ashes was delivered to the apartment, and Maya placed pictures of their mother, Ann, and Toot’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren around it. Then she sat back with her husband and their five-year-old daughter, Suhaila, and watched the returns on television. Like many of those in Grant Park that night, Maya wept as she watched her brother give his victory speech.
Barack reserved his most lavish praise for Michelle. “And I would not be standing here tonight,” he told the cheering throng, “without the unyielding support of my best friend for the last sixteen years—the rock of our family, the love of my life, the nation’s next First Lady, Michelle Obama.” As they threw their arms around each other once again, Barack pulled her to him and whispered, “I love you.”
Afterward, Michelle and Barack finally let loose, celebrating with friends and supporters. “They’re big huggers,” said one aide, “so there’s a lot of hugs, a lot of thank-yous, a lot of warmth.”
Since the girls were allowed to stay up past midnight, Marian Robinson was convinced their mother would cut them a little slack. “Well,” she told the girls, “surely your mother’s not going to make you go to school tomorrow after being up this late at night. That would be cruel. Just don’t set your alarm clocks.” Malia and Sasha were allowed a little extra time in bed the next morning, but then they were shipped off to school as usual.
Before holding his first press conference as President-Elect on November 7, Barack, properly attired in a dark suit, joined a baseball-capped, jeans-clad Michelle for a parent-teacher conference at the University of Chicago Lab School. When they returned to their waiting SUV, Michelle was cradling a flower arrangement—a congratulatory gift from the girls’ teachers. The next day, the Obamas resumed their old date-night routine with an intimate dinner at one of their favorite Italian restaurants, Spiaggia.
On November 10, the Bushes welcomed the Obamas to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. While Laura took Michelle on a tour of the upstairs family quarters and the two women talked about their children, Presidents number forty-three and forty-four conferred in the Oval Office. As he walked down the colonnade outside the Oval Office, Barack slapped his hand on Bush’s shoulder as they went back inside—as if, said a Bush aide, “he was the host and President Bush was his guest.”
Even as the country faced its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, both the outgoing and incoming administrations worked together to make the transition as seamless as possible. Toward that end, Barack named as his new chief of staff the famously temperamental Rahm Emanuel. The Chicago Congressman had once mailed a dead fish to one of his enemies, and his penchant for purple-veined tantrums laced with profanity was legendary. (Barack liked to talk about how, while working as a teenager at Arby’s, Rahm had accidentally sliced off a piece of his right middle finger—“which,” Obama said, “rendered him virtually mute.”)
There were those within the party who wondered if Emanuel was temperamentally suited to the Chief of Staff job, and, as he often did when faced with a tough choice, Barack asked for Michelle’s input. Michelle reaffirmed what Barack had known all along—that there was no one more loyal than Rahm, and no one would pursue the President’s agenda with more tenacity. “He doesn’t quit,” Michelle said, “until he gets it done.”
That December, the Obamas returned to Hawaii to celebrate the holidays and take care of some unfinished family business. Two days before Christmas, they attended an hour-long memorial service for Toot at a modest two-story house in Honolulu’s working-class Nuuanu neighborhood that now served as home to Honolulu’s First Unitarian Church.
Following the afternoon service, Barack’s motorcade drove along the coast and pulled over at a spot called Lanai Lookout. It was here that Barack had come four months earlier to toss a lei into the surf in memory of his mother. Now, as the wind whipped up the surf along the shoreline, Barack, wearing khakis, a dark blue Hawaiian shirt, and sunglasses, climbed over a stone wall and made his way over the rocks toward the water. Michelle, Malia, Sasha, Barack’s sister Maya, and more than a dozen friends followed close behind. Then Barack and Maya, who had removed Toot’s ashes from the koa urn, scattered them in the Pacific.
When they returned to Washington, Barack and Michelle were eager to see Malia and Sasha settled in at Sidwell Friends School, Chelsea Clinton’s alma mater. However, it was unclear where the Obamas would be living during the few weeks prior to the inauguration. When they asked if they could move into Blair House, the President’s official guesthouse, the Obamas were told by Bush administration officials that they would have to wait until just five days before the swearing-in ceremony. Blair House, it seemed, had already been promised to former Australian Prime Minister John Howard.
Forced to look for a hotel, the Obamas settled on the historic Hay-Adams. Situated around the corner from Blair House, it offered unobstructed views of the White House directly across Lafayette Square Park.
“Do you see our new house?” Michelle asked her friend André Leon Talley as she drew back the curtains of the Obamas’ Hay-Adams suite. From this vantage point, Michelle and Talley could see security officers dressed in black perched on the White House roof. “They tell me they do that a lot,” Michelle said matter-of-factly.
On January 5, 2009, the Obamas had breakfast in their Hay-Adams suite, and then Daddy said good-bye to his daughters as they headed off at 7:10 A.M. with Mommy for their first day at their new school. Making new friends would not be a problem. Joe Biden’s grandchildren, with whom fifth grader Malia and second grader Sasha had already bonded over pizza and popcorn during several sleepovers, attended Sidwell Friends.
The motorcade suddenly appeared from under a security tent that had been put up outside the Hay-Adams, and sped off to Sidwell’s middle school on Wisconsin Avenue. They arrived at 7:30—a half hour before school started—and within minutes after depositing Malia, Michelle emerged from the school and slipped back into the White House SUV. Then it was off with Sasha, yawning away in the backseat of the SUV, to Sidwell’s lower school campus just outside DC in Bethesda, Maryland. Since Sasha’s school day ended at 3:00 P.M. and Malia’s at 3:20, from now on the motorcade would pick up Sasha first and stop off for Malia on the way home to the White House. “I’ll try to bring them to school and pick them up every day,” Michelle vowed, but then admitted that “there’s also a measure of independence. And obviously there will be times I won’t be able to drop them off at all. I like to be a presence in my kids’ school. I want to know the teachers; I want to know the other parents.”
Not long after that first day of school, Barack and Michelle took the girls to see the Lincoln Memorial. After looking up at Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, which is carved onto one of the monument’s walls, Sasha said, “Looks long.” Malia looked at her father. “First African American President,” she said. “Better be good.”
For weeks since the election, Grandma had been mulling over whether or not to accept the Obamas’ invitation to live with them in the White House. Multigenerational White Houses did not always work out. Harry Truman’s mother-in-law publicly disparaged him and frequently questioned his policies. Dwight Eisenhower’s domineering mother-in-law nagged constantly and bossed around the White House staff.
But Marian Robinson had already proved herself to be a valuable part of her grandchildren’s lives. For twenty-two months, when their mother wasn’t around, she drew the girls’ baths, supervised their homework, took them to dentist appointments, and chauffeured them to and from ballet lessons and soccer practice.
Grandma had also made only a fainthearted effort to adhere to Michelle’s strict rules governing bedtime (eight thirty), TV (one hour maximum), and food (organic whenever possible). “I have candy, they stay up late—come to my house, they watch TV as long as they want to, we’ll play games until the wee hours,” Marian said. “I do everything grandmothers do that they’re not supposed to.”
Indeed, whenever Michelle caught her mother bending the rules, Marian had a hard time concealing her feelings. “Mom, what are you rolling your eyes at?” Michelle asked at one point. “You made us do the same thing.”
“I don’t remember being that bad,” she told Michelle. “I think you’re just going overboard.”
Now Marian was balking at what many would consider the ultimate invitation—to live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. “I love those people,” she mused, “but I love my own house. The White House reminds me of a museum. How do you sleep in a museum?”
Her son-in-law understood. “She doesn’t like a lot of fuss around her,” Barack said, “and like it or not, there is some fuss in the White House.”
Just as important to Marian was the fear that she might be intruding on her daughter’s marriage—a marriage that just a few years before had gone through a decidedly rocky patch. “That, I can do without,” she said of being around whenever her daughter and her son-in-law might be in the middle of a spat. “When you move in, you just hear a little bit too much.” But isn’t the White House big enough for that not to be a problem? she was asked. “It’s never,” Grandma replied, “big enough for that.”
In the end, Marian decided to move into a guest room on the third floor of the White House—a floor above the rooms occupied by her son-in-law and his family. She made it clear that the move was to be on a trial basis, and that she had no intention of giving up her Chicago apartment. “They’re going to need me,” Grandma said, “so I’m going to be there.”
Marian was on board when, three days before the inauguration, the “Obama Express” retraced Lincoln’s 137-mile whistle-stop tour from Philadelphia to Washington. In Wilmington, Delaware, the Obamas stopped to pick up Joe Biden. “I like him. I love her,” Biden said of the Obamas. “She is the most impressive person I’ve met in thirty-five years.”
Since January 17 also happened to be Michelle’s forty-fifth birthday, when the adults got off in Baltimore to give speeches, Malia and Sasha used the time to decorate the interior of the blue 1939 vintage rail car with streamers, balloons, and banners.
Later, when the train was under way, the girls and a few of their friends went through the other cars distributing noisemakers, party hats, and Hawaiian leis. After they sang “Happy Birthday” to Mommy, she then got up and led all the kids in a stomp dance. “Nice,” Michelle said as she settled back down in her seat. Then she turned to her husband. “They’ve got to clean up!” she told Barack. “We can’t leave this mess for Amtrak.”
Finally settled with his family in Blair House, Barack started out on January 18 by joining Biden to place a wreath at Arlington Cemetery’s Tomb of the Unknowns. Later that day, the Obamas had front-row seats at the star-studded “We Are One” concert in front of the Lincoln Memorial. An estimated three hundred thousand people flanked the reflecting pools on the National Mall to hear such superstars as Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, Beyoncé, Mary J. Blige, and Bono perform. For two hours Malia, who had been diligently taking snapshots with her new digital camera, huddled with her sister against near-freezing temperatures as Mom and Dad bounced, bobbed, and clapped to the rhythm in their seats—clearly oblivious to the numbing cold.
There were a few mortifying moments proving that no dad—not even Barack Obama—could really be cool in the eyes of his own children. When Beyoncé was telling the President-Elect about her new hit, “Single Ladies’ Dance,” he replied, “Oh, I’m trying to learn that.” Malia and Sasha winced in embarrassment (there is no “single ladies’ dance”). “Oh, Dad,” they groaned in unison.
That night, Barack and Michelle threw a private party for ninety family members and friends, including Oprah and Michelle’s mom. Dining on a simple menu of chicken, fish, and rice, guests laughed and toasted their hosts as children ricocheted from room to room—“just kids being kids,” said one of the guests, Charles Fishman. “It was a very warm, informal evening—a little sendoff party.”
On the morning of January 19, Barack traveled by motorcade to the Sasha Bruce House, a shelter for teens, and helped paint a wall to promote his Day of Service program. “Now that I know he can do this,” Michelle cracked after watching her husband paint, “it’s another thing he can do at home.”
At the “Kids’ Inaugural: We Are the Future” inauguration eve concert in Washington’s Verizon Center, Malia and Sasha clapped and swayed and bounced in their seats as they and fourteen thousand others sang along with teen stars the Jonas Brothers. Then Joe Jonas led the girls onstage to dance with the Jonases and fellow teen sensations Miley Cyrus, Keke Palmer, and Demi Lovato.
Just hours away from taking the oath of office, Barack stayed up past midnight practicing the inaugural address he had been working on for seven weeks with Axelrod and twenty-seven-year-old chief speechwriter, Jon Favreau. Up until the previous day, Favreau had spent hours tinkering with the speech at a local Starbucks.
In addition to running through his address, Barack rehearsed taking the oath itself. There was one other thing he was determined to get right: after consulting a military aide about the proper form, the new President practiced snapping off a few crisp salutes in front of a mirror. Michelle, ever the perfectionist, asked him to do it a couple of more times before nodding in approval. “Sharp,” she said.
The next morning—January 20, Inauguration Day—Michelle and Barack got up at six and squeezed in their customary early-morning workout. (“I can go for days without going into a gym,” Michelle said. “He really can’t.”)
Then, while Grandma helped the girls get ready for the big day, Dad donned a black suit and red tie. A sobering reminder of the times, Barack’s suit was reportedly the creation of Colombian designer Miguel Caballero, who specialized in making bullet-resistant clothing.
The President-Elect then waited anxiously in the Blair House foyer as Mom finished dressing in her Isabel Toledo–designed lemongrass-colored Swiss wool lace coat and sheath, J. Crew jade leather gloves, $585 green Jimmy Choo pumps, and twenty-thousand-dollar two-carat diamond stud earrings. “Barack puts on his suit, tie, and he’s out the door,” the compulsively punctual Michelle had said of this ritual. “I’m getting my hair, makeup, the kids…and he’s asking, ‘What’s the problem?’”
The couple emerged from Blair House at 8:46 A.M. and Barack held the door of their limousine open for Michelle as she slid into the backseat. Their motorcade then turned the corner and within two minutes arrived at historic yellow-and-white Saint John’s Episcopal Church for an Inauguration Day prayer service.
Joined by their J. Crew-outfitted daughters—Malia in violet-blue and Sasha in pastel shades of pink and orange—as well as the President-Elect’s sister Maya (whose daughter, Suhaila, called Barack “Uncle Rocky”) and Michelle’s brother, Craig, the Obamas settled into the front-row pew next to Joe Biden and his family. Saint John’s Church rector Luis Leon welcomed the new First Family—a tradition he had now upheld through ten inaugurations. After a brief invocation by Bishop Charles E. Blake, the choir sang a rafter-rattling rendition of “This Little Light of Mine.”
An hour later, George W. Bush greeted Barack with a spirited “Sir!” at the North Portico of the White House, then led the new occupants inside for coffee. Later, President Obama would read the personal note his predecessor had, according to tradition, left inside the top drawer of his Oval Office desk. While the rest of the note would remain secret, Bush had written that Barack’s term signified a “fabulous new chapter” in American history. For now, however, it was Michelle who presented Laura with a gift—a white leather journal and pen to encourage the outgoing First Lady, who had just signed a seven-figure book deal, to get to work on her memoirs.
At 11:01, the 1.5 million people who had come to the nation’s capital to witness history being made roared as the Obamas took their places among the dignitaries at the West Front of the Capitol. Only moments before, in a Capitol holding room, Barack had rehearsed the presidential oath with Michelle while her mother watched from the sidelines. Once outside, Malia, still determined to record everything on her new camera, clicked away; later, when her angle was obscured, Malia handed her camera to Vice President Joe Biden and asked if he’d take a few shots for her.
After the Reverend Rick Warren delivered the invocation and Aretha Franklin belted out a stirring rendition of “America,” Biden handed the camera back to Malia and stood to be sworn in as Vice President at 11:48 A.M. Twelve minutes later, Michelle lifted up the burgundy velvet–covered Bible Abraham Lincoln had used for his 1861 inauguration and carefully held it out to her husband with two gloved hands. Dad placed his left hand on the volume and, as Malia and Sasha stood by grinning, Chief Justice John Roberts administered the oath of office.
It would not go smoothly. Unlike previous Chief Justices, Roberts was not reading the thirty-five-word oath from a card, and misplaced the word faithfully—as in “faithfully execute the office of President”—in the second phrase. When the Chief Justice botched it yet again, Barack arched an eyebrow ever so slightly. (Later, Michelle joked with her husband, “That’s what you get for not voting for his confirmation.”)
Still, when the oath seemed to have been completed, cannons sounded, the multitudes cheered, and a smiling Sasha gave Dad an orange-gloved thumbs-up—the first of several. A hush fell over the throng as the new President proclaimed, “Today we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.”
Punctuated with cheers and applause, the nineteen-minute speech ended with a vow. “Let it be said by our children’s children that when we were tested, we refused to let this journey end,” Barack said, “that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God’s grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.” Afterward, the President enveloped his predecessor in a warm hug.
Moments later, the Obamas and the Bidens were on the other side of the Capitol, saying good-bye to George and Laura Bush. To underscore the amicable nature of the succession, W hugged Barack yet again before the Bushes boarded the marine helicopter that would carry them off to Andrews Air Force Base and a plane bound for Midland, Texas.
For Barack and Michelle, the day’s drama continued at the congressional luncheon for some two hundred dignitaries in National Statuary Hall. No sooner had Chief Justice Roberts sidled up to the President to sheepishly whisper, “It’s my fault,” than Senator Ted Kennedy cried out in pain. Collapsing to the floor in a full-throttle seizure, Kennedy, who had been battling brain cancer, was rushed by ambulance to nearby Washington Hospital Center.
Like everyone else at the luncheon, Barack and Michelle were visibly upset. “I would be lying to you if I did not say that right now a part of me is with him,” the President later said. “And I think that’s true for all of us. It’s a joyous time but also a sobering time.” (Less than an hour later, the President was informed that the Senator was chatting with relatives and friends and resting comfortably.)
Memories of her husband practicing in the mirror were still fresh when Barack saluted a military color guard gathered in his honor. Then the First Couple climbed into “The Beast,” the hermetically sealed presidential Cadillac limousine that, among other things, weighs fourteen thousand pounds and boasts five-inch-thick armor plating.
Secret Service agents scrambled as Barack and Michelle emerged from their car near Pennsylvania Avenue and Sixth Street Northwest and strolled hand in hand down the avenue. The Obamas arrived at the White House at 4:40 P.M., freshened up, and then reemerged with Malia and Sasha to walk down the North Driveway toward the enclosed, bulletproof Inaugural Parade reviewing stand. As they walked up to the stand, Michelle yelled to the crowd, “We’re here. We’re home!”
After the 1.7-mile-long parade—the most telling moment of which may have been when Barack gave the “hang loose” sign to the Punahou Academy Marching Band—the President and First Lady dashed back into the White House to dress for that evening’s ten inaugural balls.
Running more than an hour late, Michelle quickly changed out of the size 10 Isabel Toledo outfit and into her gown. “Miche, you look beautiful,” Barack said as she emerged in flowing white silk chiffon embellished with organza flowers and glittering Swarovski crystals. “I wanted the dress to reflect hope, fantasy, a dream,” said twenty-six-year-old Tapei-born designer Jason Wu. “Because this is a pretty surreal moment.” To top it off, Michelle wore rose-cut diamond drop earrings totaling sixty-one carats, white-gold-and-diamond bangle bracelets, and a thirteen-carat diamond signet ring—all of which were lent by the designer, Loree Rodkin, and later donated to the Smithsonian.
With Joe and Jill Biden in tow, the Obamas made the rounds of all ten balls. At the first stop of the evening, the Neighborhood Inaugural Ball, Barack and Michelle were greeted with wild cheers as they stepped onto a dance floor emblazoned with the Great Seal of the United States. Barack was wearing white tie—and his first new tuxedo in fifteen years. “First of all, how good-looking is my wife?” he said proudly.
Michelle allowed that her husband was “a pretty good dancer—but not as good as he thinks he is.” Tonight, however, as Beyoncé sang Etta James’s signature hit At Last, Barack and Michelle glided effortlessly across the dance floor as cameras clicked away. “You could tell that he was a black President,” said Academy Award–winning actor Jamie Foxx, “from the way he was moving.”
It was a scene the Obamas would repeat ten times—and that included Barack doing a frisky hip bump with fourteen-year-old Victoria Lucas. Among the revelers at one inaugural ball being held in the Mayflower Hotel: Zeituni Onyango. Now living in Cleveland, Barack’s Auntie Zeituni was getting ready to fight the government’s long-standing order to deport her.
Finally, the Obamas took their last spin around the dance floor and returned to the White House around twelve forty. There, with trumpeter Wynton Marsalis supplying the music, they hosted one final get-together with a few of their closest pals from Chicago.
As the First Couple took their friends on an impromptu tour of their new home, Barack stopped to point out some of the masterpieces on the walls—including works by Claude Monet, Mary Cassatt, Childe Hassam, and Paul Cézanne. While Valerie Jarrett and the others “gasped,” Michelle said coolly, “Pretty nice art, dontcha think?”
“It looked as though,” Jarrett said of her old friend, “she was right where she belonged.”
While all this was going on, Malia and Sasha hosted their own kids’ party, watching Bolt and High School Musical 3 in the White House theater before topping off the evening with a visit from the Jonas Brothers. This time Mom would not make the first daughters go to school the next day.
The White House they woke up to the next morning bore the unmistakable stamp of its new occupants—a style that, given the fact that they, too, were moving in with two young children, in some ways reflected that of Jack and Jackie Kennedy. In the Oval Office, Barack decided to keep the historic desk carved from the timbers of the British warship HMS Resolute—the same desk where FDR sat to give his famous fireside chats and that JFK Jr. (“John-John”) loved to hide beneath as a child. Barack also kept the pale yellow sunburst carpet in the Oval Office that Laura designed to convey a “sense of optimism.” He also kept a bust of Lincoln and a portrait of George Washington that hung over the fireplace mantel, but gone were four large paintings by Texas artists and a bust of Winston Churchill.
Since they wanted to maintain their Hyde Park residence as a home away from home (“The South Side of Chicago is our Kennebunkport,” Michelle said), the Obamas brought no furniture at all—just framed photographs, clothes, and personal items like Tiger, the stuffed animal Malia had not parted with since age three.
No matter. Like First Ladies before her, Michelle soon discovered she enjoyed shuffling antiques from room to room, having walls repainted, and unearthing hidden treasures locked away in storage. She was also determined to create a relaxed, homey look—and, since the country was in the middle of a deepening economic crisis, do it for under a hundred thousand dollars.
With that budget in mind, she called on Los Angeles designer Michael Smith, who numbered among his celebrity clients Steven Spielberg, Dustin Hoffman, and Cher. “Michael shares my vision for creating a family-friendly feel for our new home,” Michelle said, “and incorporating new perspectives from some of America’s greatest artists and designers.” She also urged Smith to enlist some of her favorite American retailers to create a new look for the White House—namely, Target, Pottery Barn, Crate and Barrel, and Restoration Hardware.
That first full day in office, it became clear that more than just the White House decor was in need of a redo. To quiet constitutional scholars who were claiming that the oath had been read incorrectly and therefore was invalid, Chief Justice Roberts read-ministered the oath at 7:35 P.M. in the White House Map Room.
“Are you ready to take the oath?” Roberts asked Barack.
“I am,” he answered. “And we’re going to do it very slowly.”
Only nine people were in the Map Room to witness the do-over—four aides, four reporters, and a White House photographer. This time, Barack raised his right hand but did not use a Bible.
“Congratulations again,” Roberts said.
“Thank you, sir,” the now duly-sworn President replied.
Sensitive to Roberts’s feelings, Barack became visibly angry when Vice President Biden poked fun at the Chief Justice during a White House ceremony. Biden later apologized. “He is always in control,” Abner Mikva said of Obama, “but you can tell when the President is angry. He clenches his fist. I’ve certainly seen him clench his fist on occasion.”
Over the next few weeks, America’s new First Family would settle into the kind of comfortable family routine that in the past they had enjoyed only sporadically. Now Barack and Michelle exercised together in the Executive Mansion’s private gym, and then had breakfast with the kids.
Like Laura Bush—and unlike Hillary, who as First Lady operated alongside her husband in the West Wing—Michelle followed tradition by maintaining her offices in the residential East Wing. Rather than texting her husband—the Obamas have two BlackBerrys each—during the day, Michelle would stroll over to the Oval Office to share news about her day.
Now they were having dinners together as a family nearly every night, and for the first time in recent memory, Dad was actually tucking the girls into bed. “We haven’t had that kind of time together for years,” Michelle said, “so that explains a lot why we all feel so good in this space.”
Realizing that hers was the youngest family in the White House since the Kennedys, Michelle borrowed a page from Jackie when it came to child rearing. Like Jackie, who asked the White House staff not to spoil her children and even told Secret Service agents to back off when she took the kids to the beach (“Drowning is my responsibility,” Jackie told them), Michelle also instructed the staff to step back a little.
According to Mrs. Obama, the staff wants “to make your life easy”—but “when you have small kids…they don’t need their lives to be easy. They’re kids.” So Malia and Sasha would have the same chores they always had—tidying up their rooms, clearing their dishes from the table, making their beds (“Doesn’t have to look good—just throw the sheet over it,” Mom said). So that the girls would feel right at home, their parents told them they had the run of the White House—including the right to drop in to the Oval Office to see Dad. The novelty wore off quickly. When Michelle asked the girls if they wanted to go outside and see Dad’s helicopter land on the South Lawn, Malia shrugged, “We’ve already seen it.”
The first daughters were more interested in the new thirty-five-hundred-dollar cedar-and-redwood swing set their parents had installed for them on the lawn just outside the Oval Office. While sharpshooters watched from their perch atop the White House roof and Secret Service agents kept a watchful eye from various positions on the grounds of the Executive Mansion, Malia, Sasha, and a handful of new friends from school laughed and screamed as they tried out the set’s four swings, slide, fort, and climbing wall. One detail distinguished theirs from other swing sets: a picnic table featuring brass plates engraved with the names of all forty-four Presidents—including Dad.
As much fun as their new made-to-order playground equipment was, it did not succeed in taking the girls’ eyes off the ultimate prize: a new puppy. After what amounted to a national poll on what constituted the proper breed for a new First Dog, the Obamas would eventually settle on a spirited six-month-old black-and-white curly-haired Portuguese water dog distantly related to Ted Kennedy’s dog, Splash. Malia and Sasha promptly changed their new dog’s name from Charlie to Bo.
Within days of moving into the Executive Mansion, Michelle reached out to the surrounding community just as she had in Chicago. Visiting a primary school with her husband, she announced, “They’ve let us out!” Later, she dropped in at the Interior Department to meet with Native Americans, read to children at a Washington day care center, and brought a magnolia tree seedling to USDA workers at the Department of Agriculture. Quietly, she got to know her children’s schoolmates and teachers.
At dinner every night in the family quarters of the White House, Barack and Michelle kicked off the conversation with a little game they had played for years. It was called Roses and Thorns, and involved each member sharing the rose and thorn they had experienced that day. Aware of the mounting crises the President was facing, Malia said, “Dad, you seem to have a pretty thorny job.”
Her parents laughed. “Yes,” Barack allowed, “you could say that.” Michelle, on the other hand, felt her days were overwhelmingly “rosy.” Ironically enough, winning the presidency had also meant winning something akin to the genuine family life Michelle had always craved. And while she no longer badgered Barack about chores, he was expected to walk Bo at 10:00 P.M., just as she was expected to walk the dog first thing in the morning.
Of course, none of their lives would ever really be normal again. Among other things, from now on they would be constantly shadowed by the Secret Service. Curiously, the Obamas’ romantic-sounding Secret Service code names faintly echoed those given to the Kennedys. Where the Kennedys were Lancer (for JFK), Lace ( Jackie), Lyric (Caroline), and Lark ( John junior), the Obamas were Renegade (the President), Renaissance (Michelle), Radiance (Malia), and Rosebud (Sasha).
The comparisons with that other first family would persist, although Barack and Michelle both chafed at the notion that they were ushering in a new Camelot. “Jackie Kennedy was wonderful and I admire her greatly,” Michelle said, “but believe me, I’m no Jackie Kennedy.”
To be sure, at forty-five Michelle was fully fourteen years older than Jackie when she became First Lady in 1961. Still, more than any First Lady in recent memory, the tall, leggy, well-put-together Michelle had already established herself as a new kind of style icon—one whose tastes ran from the trendiest designers to clothes plucked off the rack at Target and J. Crew. “She’s always loved clothes,” said her friend Cheryl Rucker-Whitaker. “She loves purses, she loves getting a manicure, getting her hair done. She really is a girly girl.” Michelle’s favorite drink (Jackie’s, too): champagne.
Quick to deny that she was a “fashionista,” Michelle, who routinely showed off her well-toned arms in sleeveless dresses and tops, nevertheless confessed that she liked dressing up in evening gowns and “feeling pretty for [her] husband.” Her decision to pose for the cover of Vogue even before her husband took office was motivated by a desire to set an example for her “daughters and little girls just like them, who haven’t seen themselves represented in these magazines.”
At her first formal function at the White House, the annual ball honoring the nation’s governors, Michelle asked her mother’s help in selecting the menu, making sure that they served Barack’s favorite dessert—huckleberry cobbler. Michelle also decided to break with tradition by mixing and matching pieces from various sets of china used by previous administrations.
“We laugh at ourselves a lot. We laugh at just the amazement that we’re here,” conceded Valerie Jarrett, who as Senior Adviser and Assistant to the President now occupied the second-floor office in the West Wing that once belonged to Hillary Clinton and later to George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove. “Like, can’t you just pinch yourself?” (Not all of the Obamas’ old friends were welcome at the White House. Jeremiah Wright complained that “them Jews” allegedly surrounding the new President were keeping the two men apart. Wright later apologized, explaining that he really should have used the word “Zionists” instead.)
With her husband away on his first official trip to Canada in February, Michelle invited Jarrett and other female staff members to a girls-only screening of the romantic comedy He’s Just Not That Into You. “She just kicked off her shoes and curled up with popcorn and drooled over Ben Affleck like the rest of us,” said one of the guests. “She has this big, wonderful laugh.”
The Obamas got the chance to unwind with old friends at Camp David, the presidential retreat seventy miles northwest of Washington in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains, where they continued their spring-break tradition of competing in a talent show. Michelle showed off her ability to keep two hula hoops going more or less indefinitely; the President joined with several buddies to belt out a passable rendition of Stevie Wonder’s “You Are the Sunshine of My Life.”
Michelle was equally at ease when, during the Obamas’ first official trip to Europe in April of 2009, Queen Elizabeth II shattered precedent by putting her arm around America’s First Lady—and then lingered while Michelle reciprocated with a warm hug. Given the fact that the Queen had never been seen indulging in a single display of public affection—not even with members of her immediate family—the embrace between Her Majesty and Michelle set off a media frenzy in Britain.
While several tabloids decried what they viewed as a shocking breach of protocol, the Times of London called the royal hug a singularly “touching moment.” Buckingham Palace concurred. “This was,” a palace spokesman said, “a mutual and spontaneous display of affection and appreciation between the Queen and Michelle Obama.” The two women would actually forge a bond of friendship in the coming months, sharing their thoughts on everything from child rearing to organic gardening via written correspondence, e-mails, and the occasional phone call. The following June, Michelle, Malia, and Sasha would join the Queen for a private tea at Buckingham Palace.
Over the next several days, Michelle was hailed in the press as “the new Jackie Kennedy” as she and Barack traveled from England to France and then on to Germany. By the time they reached the Czech Republic, Barack decided to forgo an official meeting with that country’s leaders—who strongly opposed his economic policies—in favor of a “quiet, romantic dinner with my wife.”
Back at the White House, the President proved to be no less attentive. At least once a day, he took a break and returned to the residence for what he called “Michelle time.”
As comfortable as Michelle now seemed in her new role as First Lady, even she had to admit that she was “amazed” at her husband’s “level of calm…. I see him thriving in this; I don’t see the weight.” Amazed indeed, since for starters Barack faced a mind-numbing multitude of issues ranging from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to skyrocketing unemployment, proliferating corporate bankruptcies, and the threatened collapse of the world banking system.
Publicly Michelle now insisted that she no longer sought to influence her husband’s decisions as she once did. “We’ll have conversations, and we’ll share our opinions over the course of the conversation,” she told Time. “But I don’t want to have a say.”
Yet, according to one of the President’s oldest confidants, Michelle “was one of the strongest voices” arguing for the appointment of federal appeals judge Sonia Sotomayor to replace retiring Associate Justice David Souter on the Supreme Court. Once the field had been narrowed down to two women—Sotomayor and the Obamas’ old Chicago friend, federal judge Diane Wood—Michelle came down on the side of picking Sotomayor as the Supreme Court’s first Hispanic judge. “The First Lady thought Sotomayor had all those warm empathetic qualities her husband was looking for in an appointee,” the confidant said. “Barack has always listened to what she has to say. Regardless of what she says in the press, Michelle has strong opinions and she lets the President know what she thinks. She is still his most important adviser.”
Even if the stress of the job was not plainly visible—beyond the fact that Barack’s longtime barber now claimed his hair was turning progressively grayer—the President relied more heavily than ever on proven routines to help him cope. In addition to his compulsive need for at least ninety minutes of concentrated exercise every day, Barack had fallen off the wagon and was sneaking cigarettes. Since he had promised repeatedly that he would not break the smoking ban in force at the White House, Barack sidestepped the issue with reporters. Asked during an interview in February 2009 with CNN’s Anderson Cooper whether he had had a cigarette since becoming President, Barack said that he hadn’t smoked “on these grounds,” and then smiled coyly.
By the summer of 2009, President Obama was, in fact, smoking wherever he could away from the White House and relying on Secret Service agents to keep him covered—either while traveling or at Camp David. Happy that her husband was at least sticking to his pledge not to smoke inside the White House, Michelle gave a tentative thumbs-up whenever she was asked if her husband had managed to quit. “She’s just happy,” an old acquaintance from Chicago observed, “that he’s not setting a bad example by smoking around the girls.”
Personal foibles aside, the first African American First Family seemed almost too perfect for even their most devoted friends to comprehend. Whatever one thought of Barack’s liberal philosophy, his sometimes questionable past associations and the lingering taint of Chicago politics, his experience or lack thereof, no one could dispute that his family appeared to be a clear reflection of an American ideal.
Like Franklin Roosevelt, who led the nation through a depression and a war, Barack Obama was called upon to prevent one and end the other. Neither man could do it alone; FDR had Eleanor, Barack turned to Michelle.
Where one was firmly rooted in Chicago’s South Side, the other was virtually rootless. Where one had known the safety and security of a close-knit working-class family, the other had been abandoned by one parent and seldom saw the other. Where one eschewed politics, the other set out at an early age to acquire political power—and ultimately to win the greatest political prize of all.
They did have one important thing in common. Keenly aware of the sacrifices that had been made so that they could make something of their lives, both sought to change the world around them. Michelle gave up her lucrative law career to build bridges between communities; Barack drew on his biracial, multicultural background to tap into the American consciousness in an altogether new way. Together, they shattered a barrier older than the Republic itself—and stunned the world in the process.
Unlike Franklin and Eleanor, Jack and Jackie, or Bill and Hillary—all of whom begged the question—it scarcely seems worth asking whether Barack and Michelle really love each other. They have, since that day Michelle realized that the skinny young law student with the big ears and crazy name was something extraordinary.
For all their style and substance—for all the history they have already made—the President and His Lady seem anything but regal. They have dealt with tensions in their marriage that at one point threatened it. They have grappled with financial problems, remaining deeply in debt well into their forties. They have fretted about infertility and faced a medical emergency that might have taken the life of their baby girl. They have delighted in their daughters as children, and worried about the world they would inherit as adults.
Barack and Michelle have proved themselves to be remarkable—as man and woman, as husband and wife, as father and mother. But it is in those things that make them so accessible, so human, that we recognize ourselves—and, if even for a fleeting moment, like what we see. Theirs is, in every way, an American marriage.