Michelle Obama Interview: Her Father's Daughter

The wife of Democratic President Barack Obama and her mother talk about her childhood, family, the campaign and more.

See a slideshow of Michelle Obama and her family

Before I met Michelle Obama, her brother, Craig Robinson, told me that to really understand her, I'd have to know a little bit about their father. Fraser Robinson worked swing shifts for the city of Chicago, tending the boilers at a water-filtration plant. "My father was not college-educated,'' said Craig, head basketball coach for Oregon State University, but was "full of integrity,'' the "gold standard'' of husbands, and "a hardworking man who raised two kids when he had multiple sclerosis.''

When I sit down with the potential first lady at her husband's Chicago campaign headquarters, I see what her brother was getting at. In nearly an hour with Michelle and her 70-year-old mother, Marian Robinson, nothing comes across more clearly than the extent to which 44-year-old Michelle was molded by the years she spent watching her father, whose determination defined strength for Michelle. She came to see complaining as a moral failing and a show of self-indulgence.

"Seeing a parent with a disability moving through the world and living life as if that disability didn't matter," Michelle says, "always made us think, What do we have to complain about? We wake up, we bound out of bed, we are healthy, we're happy, and our father is struggling to get out of bed. But he never missed a day of work, never talked about being sick. So it made it hard to wake up and say, 'I don't want to go to school.'"

Michelle is candid, yes, sometimes to her detriment, and can come across as overconfident in a way a man similarly lacking in self-doubt might not. But victimhood is not her style. On the contrary, she's disinclined to take political jabs personally and so disinterested in dissecting or answering them that when I invite her to take umbrage, she practically yawns. She's a big girl, she says, and sees that those attacks are not about her, not at all.




Here in the Midwest, the highest compliment that can be paid someone who has done well in life is that he or she is "still so normal.'' Michelle Obama easily qualifies for the participant ribbon in that event, turning up at Obama headquarters on time to the minute, in a simple black-and-white cotton skirt and sleeveless blouse, with one arm around her mom. (Marian, who is on her way to pick up her grandkids at camp and agreed to come only because her daughter promised her that she wouldn't have to have her picture taken, has never given an interview with her daughter before.) Because campaign spouses tend to keep a wary eye on the political mercenaries who run these operations, it's a bit startling that even the volunteers call her Michelle and shout a casual greeting as she arrives. I don't know that I've ever seen a presidential candidate's wife inspire less fear in the troops.

Politics wasn't discussed much in their home when Michelle was growing up. "I didn't like to talk about politics'' until fairly recently, Michelle says. For one thing, there seemed to be so many other ways to make a contribution. For a while, she'd hoped to become a pediatrician. "I like kids, and I thought being a doctor was a noble profession.'' But? "Then I got to high school and started taking science. And math.''

Today she works in a medical center, but as an administrator for the University of Chicago Hospitals. She's on leave now but has quadrupled the number of volunteers who come in to lend a hand and rejuvenated a volunteer program to get a similar number of hospital employees to give time to the community-Michelle's old neighborhood-in their off-hours. She's also led a push to get patients who use the ER for routine care connected to neighborhood clinics instead, both to cut costs and to improve preventive care for low-income families.

She's not a big fan of the political process, even now, "because it seems like a dirty business, and Barack is such a nice guy," she says. "I thought, Eventually he'll come to his senses.'' Instead it's she who has come to hers, although a lack of good sense was never an issue for a woman whom friends uniformly describe as the mom most likely to set immovable boundaries for her children. (You don't like what's for lunch? Guess you'll be extra hungry for dinner!) In his first book, Dreams from My Father, her husband wrote of Michelle that "in her eminent practicality and Midwestern attitudes, she reminds me not a little of Toot,'' his maternal grandmother, the no-nonsense Kansan who raised him-and who, after meeting Michelle for the first time, pronounced her "a very sensible girl.''

To hear Marian tell it, her daughter was born that way, maybe too much so. As a mom, "Michelle is way stricter, she has way too many rules," says Marian. "I don't think I was that bad. I let them look at TV.'' But then, by Marian's account, Michelle practically raised herself: "I really just think I left her alone,'' she says with a laugh. Both of her kids, she says, "were way smarter than I was, from the very beginning!"

Says Michelle, whose own girls, Sasha and Malia, are seven and ten, "Mama always understates her role.''




If Michelle is vain about anything, it's not her fancy degrees from Princeton and Harvard Law, or even her husband's presidential aspirations, but the family she was born into. Her parents lavished her with "structure and consistency and chores,'' made their kids budget their allowance and their time, and played board games with them every Saturday night. Marian was home full-time until her children were in high school, then worked in a bank. The family's one-bedroom apartment-the upper floor of a bungalow in the South Shore neighborhood-was so snug that Michelle and Craig slept in the living room, which they divided with partitions, up until they packed for college. Marian still lives there; she occupies the whole house now, in the same part of town where both she and her husband were born.

"We used to talk about things before they came up, all the problems you might run into," Marian says. "My husband and I would talk about the things that we had done that were pretty stupid, [like] why we didn't finish school."

"They didn't hide stuff from us, like why our grandparents were separated,'' agrees Michelle. Only, oops, that was a private discussion: "Are you going to put that in there?'' her mom asks, pretending to huff before laughing again. ("My mom laughs at everything, and I know that now,'' her daughter teases, "but when you're a kid, you think, Oh, I'm pretty funny.'') Not that every topic of discussion was immediately hauled into the open. When Michelle first started dating Barack, for instance, his mother-in-law says, "I didn't know his mother was white for a long time. It didn't come up. Not that it made any difference, because that wasn't an issue in our family.'' Neither Barack nor Michelle ever mentioned that he was running for editor of the Harvard Law Review, either, for that matter. Marian admits she wasn't bowled over immediately by her daughter's suitor, because he didn't talk about himself. "But since I've gotten to know him,'' Marian says, drawing out the words for emphasis, "I find I'm quite impressed with the man.''

Though something of a perfectionist, Michelle was actually the laid-back one in her family. Craig, who is two years older, "was one of these people who are always preparing for an impending disaster,'' Michelle says. He practiced dragging their father down the stairs in the event of a fire. He also practiced writing with his left hand, in case something happened to his right, as well as going around the house blindfolded, in case he lost his eyesight. "Part of that,'' Marian says quietly, "had to do with the fact that he had a handicapped father.''

Paradoxically, perhaps, their father's illness taught both of his children that if he could get up and go to work and enjoy his life, then they didn't have to feel constrained, either, in any way. With one exception: How would Michelle ever find a man who could live up to her father's example? "That was the kind of guy my sister was looking for,'' her brother said. "We used to joke as a family, 'She'll never find a guy like that, because they don't exist anymore.''' What she sought most of all in a mate was Fraser's glass-half-full fortitude-and there's a pretty straight line between that worldview and Obama's "Yes, we can!''

Michelle met her future husband in 1988, when he took a summer job at the Chicago law firm Sidley & Austin, where she specialized in intellectual property law. She was assigned to mentor Obama, who had just finished his first year at Harvard Law. As he recalled their first meeting in The Audacity of Hope, "I remember that she was tall-almost my height in heels-and lovely, with a friendly, professional manner that matched her tailored suit and blouse.'' He was smitten from the get-go, but she worried that it wasn't a good idea to date someone from the office. Even when she brought him home to meet the family, they at first assumed that "he was just another one who wasn't going to make it,'' her brother said. "It was hard to pass muster with my sister." Michelle asked Craig to check out Barack by playing basketball with him-she'd always heard their dad say that you could tell a lot about a man's character on the court. And? "No personality flaws with respect to the basketball evaluation,'' Craig said. So Michelle and Barack started dating.

At a rally last year in New Hampshire, Michelle described falling in love with her husband's ideals. "He talked about the simple notion that we as Americans understand the world as it is-and it is a world sometimes that is disappointing and unfair-but our job as American citizens is to work toward building the world as it should be." Her husband has written that what he wanted more than anything was to be the kind of father he'd never had. After his parents divorced and his father returned to Africa, he visited him only once. In a speech he gave on Father's Day, Obama said, "I resolved many years ago that it was my obligation to break the cycle-that if I could be anything in life, I would be a good father to my girls.''

Obama wanted a partner who would expect nothing less and a woman who saw parenthood that same way. In a recent interview with Reader's Digest, he credits Michelle with creating a "zone of normalcy" for his daughters. The girls still go to the same school. Michelle dropped them off and picked them up each day until recently, when her mother took over. They still don't have a nanny. "Their lives haven't changed or been disrupted, and that's been Michelle's greatest gift to me," says her husband.




By the time Michelle and Barack married, in 1992, she'd quit her big law job for public service work. The couple were married by their then-pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, whose anti-American remarks have raised questions recently about the Obamas' own patriotism. "Obviously, if we had heard anything like that, we wouldn't have been part of it,'' she argues. Though she's been blamed for getting her husband to join the church, Trinity United, she says that instead, "Barack knew the reverend from his work in the city, and we joined together.''

But there's no question that Wright's words were even more damaging when coupled with Michelle's own statement-played on cable television almost as often as Wright's-that "for the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country.'' In the same speech, at a rally in Wisconsin last February, she went on to say that "I feel privileged to even be witnessing this, traveling around states all over this country being reminded that there's more that unites us than divides us, that the struggles of a farmer in Iowa are no different than on the South Side of Chicago, that people are feeling the same pain and wanting the same things for their families.''

Only the "proud'' comment is recalled now, despite her insistence that she didn't mean to say anything more incendiary than that she's never felt prouder. Because Barack Obama is not as well-known as his Republican rival, voters look to his wife for clues about what kind of a person her husband is in a way that they may not look to Cindy McCain. So "changing that first impression will be critical to the public's perception of her,'' said the University of Notre Dame's Robert Schmuhl, "and possibly to whether her husband wins the White House."

She's no longer ambivalent about whether that would be such a good idea: "Eventually I thought, This is a smart man with a good heart, and if the only reason I wouldn't want him to be president is that I'm married to him, no, I can't be that selfish.'' If Barack is elected, Michelle insists, she has no interest in a role beyond that of helpmate and mother. As November approaches, she is impatient with questions about attacks on her: "I could care less-no, I don't want to say that-but I don't worry about me." (She is learning to self-edit.) "I worry about the issues, so the focus should be on moving this ball forward, on the greater good of our kids, the environment, and who cares what they say about me."

"Mmm-hmm," her mom says approvingly. "That's part of the upbringing too."

See a photo slide show of the women at readersdigest.com/firstlady