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

• In the second part of the serialisation of LIZA MUNDI’s book, Michelle Obama: A Biography, read how the crowds in Kenya that lined the streets to cheer Obama during his visit in 2006 gave him a heightened sense of what he could accomplish in life

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.