Michelle Obama's Hidden Power
by Kati Marton
Michelle Obama
Ethan Miller/Getty Images
Whether she’s the second coming of Jackie Kennedy, Eleanor Roosevelt or even Dolley Madison, Michelle Obama will be a transforming First Lady—and vital to her husband’s success. Kati Marton examines the state of their union.
Michelle Obama, who turns 45 years old today, will be a transforming First Lady. Her astonishing personal narrative is already part of our history; the first African-American to fill an iconic role shaped by women like Dolley Madison, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jacqueline Kennedy, and Hillary Rodham Clinton. That in itself is obviously of enormous historic significance. But there is more. Unlike her husband, Michelle Robinson Obama is the product of the urban black experience. To underscore that fact she has sometimes referred to her husband as a “brother” in interviews. We are no longer in Midland, Texas, anymore, but on Chicago’s South Side, a working-class neighborhood that went from being white to black during the turbulent ’60s and ’70s. Unusually for a First Lady, Michelle is from a blue-collar background: Her father, Fraser Robinson, worked for the city, tending boilers at a water-treatment plant. But from those modest beginnings, Michelle catapulted to the (formerly) whitest and Waspiest of Ivy League schools, Princeton, followed by Harvard Law. Only Hillary Rodham Clinton among First Ladies has been this well-educated. And, like Hillary, Michelle is focused and at times driven—while being a serious, full-time mother. Too impatient for the tedium of corporate lawyering at Chicago’s Sidley and Austin, Michelle left after just three years, bent on making an impact on the world. Now she will.
Nobody will consider it surrender if Michelle Obama spends more time caring for her children than making policy. On the contrary, she will be admired for it.
Ironically perhaps, because the new First Lady has already distinguished herself professionally, she will be free to play any role she chooses in the White House, including a very traditional one. Hillary Rodham Clinton, one generation older, did not have that freedom. “In some ways Hillary was a victim of feminism,” George Stephanopoulos told me, “If she did it the traditional First Lady way, it would be
a surrender. Whereas if she had an office in the West Wing, and her own policies, it was not derivative; she was being recognized in her own right.” Nobody, on the other hand, will consider it surrender if Michelle Obama spends more time caring for her children than making policy. On the contrary, she will be admired for it. It is inconceivable, however, that a woman as bright and focused as Michelle Obama will not find specific causes and issues to advocate from the First Lady’s bully pulpit. She would, for example, make an extraordinary occasional envoy to Third World women at a time when our nation desperately needs an image makeover, and she has already showed great interest in helping military families.
What is certain is that the White House will transform her, as it has all previous occupants. History will bear down on her as it did on Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. Who could have predicted that Mrs. Kennedy, the ethereal post-debutante, would pen an eloquent letter as the nation’s first widow to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, urging him to pursue the détente begun under her husband’s presidency? Like Mrs. Kennedy, Mrs. Obama will cross corridors where Eleanor Roosevelt once walked. She will be swept up by the power of 200 years of myths and memories—in unpredictable ways. I have a feeling she will not squander the opportunity offered by her platform. She will realize that being First Lady is not a job, but the opportunity of a lifetime. There is no role in the world like the one she is about to play.
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-01-17/michelle-obamas-hidden-power/
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