In the public imagination, has anyone undergone such a dramatic makeover in the last several months as Michelle Obama? Gone is the emasculating Harvard lawyer who publicly complained about her husband’s smelly feet and snoring. Gone are fears of a grudge-bearing black woman so ably caricatured by The New Yorker’s cartoon of a gun-toting radical with an Afro and combat boots. And so is the seemingly ungrateful Ivy Leaguer who seemed to suggest she was for the first time proud of her country because it was about to elect her husband president.
In her place is a perfectly buffed, toned and coiffed ever-smiling hostess who refers to the White House as “the people’s house”—and gives the impression of actually meaning it. A woman so attuned to the cultural moment that she serves up high glamour to a grateful populace but knows enough to leaven it with chain-store sweater sets and by planting a garden behind the White House to grow her own vegetables. And a mother who demands that the first daughters make their own beds, and makes sure the nation knows she has forbidden an army of butlers and maids from treating her kids “like princesses.”
George W. Bush installed a bright yellow sunburst rug in the oval office to keep himself optimistic; Barack Obama has his wife’s colourful plumage. Her fashion choices—from the sculpted arms she dared bare before a joint session of Congress to her brightly argyle sweater-over-dress ensemble at the London Opera House—are studied by everyone from the New York Times fashion critic to the website devoted to her style, www.mrs-o.org. The normally reserved Brits were so charmed when she and her husband visited for the G20 summit that newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic fretted over whether she had eclipsed the President.
But although she once described her White House role as “mom in chief,” she has slowly come to define a role outside the East Wing. She has taken an almost-professional approach to her status as global “role model,” particularly for African-American girls, with visits to schools for inner-city black kids and moving speeches about her rise from working-class roots. She has volunteered in soup kitchens and exemplified model behaviour in everything from academic excellence (Princeton, Harvard law) to proper nutrition—except, perhaps, for the time she hugged the Queen, but even Her Majesty hugged right back. She has made the rounds of federal government departments around Washington on a “thank you” tour to salute public servants, and has advocated more government support for families of American soldiers. She has announced plans to pay for redecorating the family’s living quarters in the White House.
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It’s worked. A Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted in late March showed that her favourability ratings had soared to 76 per cent—up 28 points since the summer. Before the inauguration, she had been less popular than her husband. Now, her approval ratings are higher than his—and her unfavourable ratings significantly lower. But despite her new-found status as international style icon, Obama is also a woman of ideas, a former attorney and hospital vice-president. Now that she has accumulated such a wealth of that elusive commodity—political capital—what will she do with it?
Michelle Obama has her own staff, her own policy director—and her own budding policy agenda. It arises from her background: for her, the personal is political. Her domestic experiences are the lens through which she sees policy. Both she and her husband have talked candidly about her struggles with balancing her career and the care of their two daughters while he was off politicking—and the strain that put on their marriage. “She’s the best mom I know, but she felt that, somehow, if she wasn’t there for everything, that somehow she wasn’t doing a good job,” candidate Obama explained on the campaign trail in New Hampshire in November 2007. “Then she’d get mad at me.”
At the White House, with a work-at-home husband, the balancing act is easier. Michelle Obama says she is able to prepare the girls for school and begin work around 10 a.m. She works until 3 or 4 in the afternoon when her daughters come home, and is able to help them with homework. But fresh in her mind are past scheduling struggles—such as carving out time to exercise at 4 a.m. Pressed to explain that regimen by Oprah Winfrey, she said: “Well, I just started thinking, if I had to get up to go to work, I’d get up and go to work. If I had to get up to take care of my kids, I’d get up to do that. But when it comes to yourself, then it’s suddenly, ‘Oh, I can’t get up at 4:30.’ So I had to change that.”
Those inner conflicts have now translated into one of her priorities as first lady. She calls the issue “work-life balance.” It is more than a slogan for efficient scheduling and organizing. It is code for a specific policy agenda—and it could amount to the most ambitious expansion of labour market regulation that America has seen in 16 years. To some critics the agenda is downright radical—and perhaps a step toward European-style “socialism.”
