Michelle withstands searing media focus
By Edward Luce in Washington
Published: November 2 2008 19:13 | Last updated: November 2 2008 19:13
If Barack Obama wins the presidential election on Tuesday, the world will doubtless marvel at the racial threshold the US has crossed. Perhaps even more striking, however, will be the prospect of the country’s first black first lady moving into the White House with her two young daughters.
Often compared to Jacqueline Kennedy, who also raised a young family in the White House, Michelle Obama has evolved into one of her husband’s most effective advocates. Her every outfit scrutinised and her every sentence minutely parsed, she has withstood a searing media focus over the past 21 months.
Depicted on conservative talk radio as an angry feminist elitist whose patriotism is open to question, Mrs Obama was at one stage during the primaries steered away from campaigning in the kind of blue-collar communities that took so well to Hillary Clinton but so badly to the junior senator from Illinois.
Like her husband, who riled many people when he said that small-town America sought relief from its economic woes by “clinging” to guns and God, Mrs Obama has made only one outsized gaffe during the course of the campaign. In a line that both Cindy McCain and Sarah Palin were later to pick up on, she said her husband’s success meant she was proud of the US for the first time in her adult life.
Before foraying into more expensive couture, Ms Palin, the Republican vice-presidential candidate was seen wearing a T-shirt that said: “Always Proud”.
Bill O’Reilly, the conservative Fox New anchor, said on air that he wanted to ascertain the truth of Mrs Obama’s remarks before sending out a “lynching party”.
Another Fox anchor described a playful bumping of fists the Obamas exchanged on stage as a “terrorist fistbump”. And the internet was awash with rumours that Mrs Obama had been captured on tape several years ago railing about “whitey” at Jeremiah Wright’s church in Chicago.
The tape never existed. The fist bump did not recur. And the worst fears about Mrs Obama becoming a direct target in the campaign went unrealised. Most people in the Obama campaign attribute this turnround to the woman herself.
“There were a lot of reports that Michelle was over-handled or excessively scripted by the campaign, which weren’t true,” said an Obama campaign official. “I think it’s safe to say she’s way more intelligent than most people around her and is very disciplined about getting her point across.”
Unlike Mrs Clinton, who in 1992 converted herself into a lifelong object of hatred of many conservative groups when she appeared to mock women who “stay at home and bake cookies”, Mrs Obama has successfully blunted incipient chatter about her own much-projected, but entirely undocumented, political ambitions.
Instead, she has become the chief campaign chronicler of her husband’s working-class origins in blue-collar and white-collar communities alike, as well as on countless softball television programmes, such as The View, Larry King Live, the Jay Leno Show and Entertainment Tonight.
She has also served to humanise her sometimes sainted husband by gently mocking his tendency to leave socks lying around at home, for example, or revealing his mistake in having first telegraphed to the media the fact that he was planning to send her roses to mark their 16th wedding anniversary.
“I read it in the paper before I got the flowers,” she told Jay Leno last month. On the campaign trail, she paints a vivid portrait of her husband’s penurious roots. “Barack gets it,” she often repeats, having described how he was raised by a single mother, who spent much of her last cancer-ridden months trying unsuccessfully to get insurance companies to cover the medical bills. Mrs Obama has also come in for a little luck. The fact that the Republican party was revealed to have spent $150,000 (€118,000, £93,000) on clothes and clothing consultants for Sarah Palin, and that Mrs McCain’s outfit and jewellery at the Republican convention were estimated to be worth $300,000, enabled Mrs Obama to highlight the fact that she orders items online worth as little as $40.
She drops in little anecdotes about the weird quality of giving big speeches and then traipsing off to Target to buy lavatory paper. “He’s a gifted man, but he’s just a man,” she says of her husband. “We try to maintain a normal family life.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
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