Michelle: Kenya trip made Obama believe he could be US president

Two major events helped shape the next big decision for the Obama family. The first was the publication, in October 2006, of The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.

The book laid out Obama’s values and how he had arrived at them, his thoughts on everything from family and faith to race. But it was also an unusually frank assessment of his shortcomings as a family man — as if he were trying to inoculate himself against at least one case that could be made against him as a candidate.

It was also, not incidentally, a mea culpa directed at Michelle, as if he were trying to bring her aboard the next adventure with the argument that if he could be this honest about his flaws, he could be trusted to try to fix them.

My marriage intact

In the chapter on his family, he talks at length about the strengths he brings to his own family and the philosophy that informs it. “My marriage is intact and my family is provided for,” Obama wrote.

“I attend parent-teacher conferences and dance recitals, and my daughters bask in my adoration.”

He described a speech he had given one Father’s Day, at Salem Baptist Church on the South Side, which took as its theme the topic of “what it takes to be a full-grown man.”

In it, he recalls, he “suggested that it was time that men in general and black men in particular put away their excuses for not being there for their families. I reminded the men in the audience that being a father meant more than fathering a child; that even those of us who were physically present in the home are often emotionally absent; that precisely because many of us didn’t have fathers in the house we have to redouble our efforts to break the cycle; and that if we want to pass on high expectations to our children, we have to have higher expectations for ourselves.”

This type of speech — exhorting men, particularly African American men, to step up to their responsibility — would become a theme of his in Father’s Day speeches.

But in the book he also turned his scrutiny on himself. “[O]f all the areas of my life, it is in my capacities as a husband and father that I entertain the most doubt.” After all, he wrote, “thinking back on what I said, I ask myself sometimes how well I’m living up to my own exhortations.” He described a life that keeps him on the road and away from

Michelle and the kids for long stretches, and “that exposes Michelle to all sorts of stress.” He said the price he has paid for his absences is that he sometimes feels like an interloper when he’s home. “There are times when I get the sense that I’m encroaching on her space — that by my absences I may have forfeited certain rights to interfere in the world she has built.”

Obama’s book tour produced sold-out crowds and regular requests to run for president. Toward the end of it Barack and Michelle went on Oprah, an appearance that coincided with their fourteenth wedding anniversary, which, Obama said, they would celebrate over the following weekend because Michelle went to bed so early that there was no way they could celebrate that night. Michelle was asked, again, whether she felt like a single mother.

“You know, you always feel that way,” she said honestly. “I mean,

when you’ve got somebody who is travelling so much, that there’s a level of that. That’s always been the nature of the beast.” But she added — diplomatically — that she appreciated what Barack did, and the way he treated her when he was at home.

“It’s not just the time but it’s the intent, right? It’s what he does and how he reflects the importance of our relationship when he is there.”

This is a point that Obama has also made, saying Michelle has impressed it upon him that, while flowers are always nice, what she most wants is his attention, his full presence.

Legislative triumph

On the show, they also shared two anecdotes from the book. In one, Obama talked about how he called home from the US Senate one day to talk about a legislative triumph regarding arms control, and was informed by Michelle that there were ants in the house and he needed to stop at the drug store on his way home and buy ant traps.

“I’m thinking, ‘Is John McCain stopping by Walgreens to grab ant traps on the way home?’” Obama said.

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

The other was about how she tries to get him to participate, at some level, in the organisation of the girls’ birthday parties, usually assigning him one of the more doable tasks, such as ordering the balloons or pizza.

The other event that shaped the couple’s big decision was a trip they took in the summer of 2006 that led the family to Ethiopia, Chad, Djibouti, South Africa, and Kenya. With a considerable press entourage in tow, Obama spoke out against the violence in Darfur, and, in Kenya, about government corruption.

Health officials told Obama that it would be enormously influential if he were to publicly take an HIV test, as a way of normalising HIV testing and encouraging African men to do the same, thereby, it was hoped, helping alleviate what has become a major health crisis in many African countries.

Obama suggested Michelle get tested as well. “Barack thought it would be good for us to do it as a couple,” she told a documentary film crew, “because it’s really a couples issue, because it doesn’t matter, if one half of the couple is tested [but] the other isn’t.”

Gamely, Michelle rolled up her sleeve at a mobile health facility in Kenya and gave blood for the cause of public health.

She also toured a massive Kenyan slum with him, describing it afterward as a way to “leverage” their visibility by forcing Kenyan officials to visit the slum and acknowledge its existence.

On this trip, the worship of Obama reached new heights. Citizens lined streets, perched on balconies, sat on outcroppings of building facades, eager and ultimately ecstatic to see a son of Kenya who had risen so far so fast, in the most powerful nation on earth.

Adults and children alike chanted his name, and often sang it — Obama, Obama, Obama, Obama — until it ceased being a name and became an ululation. There was drumming and dancing everywhere.

“It was completely overwhelming, it’s hard to describe unless you were there,” Michelle told the film crew. “To see hundreds and hundreds and thousands and thousands of people just lining the streets of this very small town, cheering this man, my husband.”

Stunned by strangeness

She seemed stunned by the strangeness of witnessing what her husband — her husband! — had come to signify to the world now, or a portion of it.

“It’s sort of like — do you know him?” she said, one of her trademark feet-on-the-ground jokes.

Then she added, “But it was very powerful.” To reporters who were there, she also said, “It’s hard to interpret what all of this means to me and means to us” as a family.

The trip also highlighted the demands the entire extended Obama family now faced, not just Michelle and Sasha and Malia. When the two of them had visited Kenya in 1992, Barack had taken Michelle to meet his paternal grandmother.

“I had to make sure my new wife met the approval of Granny, and she said, ‘She’s good!’” he told a laughing crowd on the 2006 trip. The much-publicised return visit to his grandmother’s homestead was supposed to last more than two hours but, because of chaos and delay, could only last about a half hour.

“We really didn’t have much time at all to spend with her, and that was a bit of a disappointment for her, having had all this built up only maybe to get 30 minutes to see him and talk to him,” Michelle said, clearly able to empathise with what his grandmother was going through.

A powerful trip

And it was a powerful trip for Obama. According to David Axelrod, the crowds in Africa “gave him a heightened sense of what he could accomplish.” In late October 2006, Tim Russert asked Barack Obama again whether he would run for president in 2008. This time, Obama acknowledged, “I have thought about it.”

When the November election returns came in, and it emerged that Democrats had won control of Congress, they sat down in earnest in Axelrod’s office and began talking about a run.

Michelle, as David Mendell puts it, was a major part of these discussions. Her public comments about feeling like a single mother had been an effective signal; the campaign knew that more comments like that could be damaging, and she needed to be brought on board. So she was, Mendell points out, “as a full partner.”

Getting her agreement was paramount. Earlier that year, both Michelle and Barack attended a dinner for Facing History and Ourselves.
Martha Minow remembers going over to Barack and asking about his presidential intentions.

“I huddled with Barack and said, ‘Are you going to run?’ ” Minow recalls. “And he said, ‘There’s one answer: It’s up to Michelle. Go talk to her.’ So I went to Michelle’s table, and we were talking about the kids, and I thanked her for all the help she’d [given] with Facing History. And I said, ‘So, is Barack going to run?’ and she said, ‘We’re having serious family discussions about it.’

She was clearly in the midst of weighing it. I just said, ‘It would be so great for the country.’ I was very sympathetic about what it would mean for the family.” She thinks Michelle’s chief hesitation had to do with the toll it would take on the kids. “She was concerned — two young children.”

“She’s also concerned for his safety,” said Jo Minow. “Don’t kid yourself.”

And she was. During the early days after the keynote speech, David Mendell, who was covering Obama’s Senate campaign, had been struck by the people who now would come to listen to his speeches, a few of whom did not look entirely stable.

TO BE CONTINUED MONDAY

Michelle Obama: A Biography written by Liza Mundy was first published in Great Britain in 2009 by Pocket Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster UK Ltd. Copyright © Liza Mundy, 2008