Michelle: A Biography - Softcover

While Michelle was at Princeton, a watershed event had occurred in Chicago: Harold Washington was elected mayor in 1983, the city's first black mayor. It was a tremendous victory for the African American community, practically and psychologically, as the newcomer Barack Obama would later hear from his barber. Which is not to say that racial peace broke out in the city. During his first term, Washington became engaged in a long-running battle with the white-majority council that got so nasty that once, the mayor threatened to punch out his chief antagonist, council leader Ed Vrdolyak, telling him he would get a mouthful of something he didn't want. On another occasion Vrdolyak taunted a Washington supporter, Walter "Slim" Coleman, so badly from the council floor that Coleman leaped over the rails and was about to attack Vrdolyak but was restrained by several bailiffs.

But Washington's tenure, according to Judson Miner, a white attorney who worked for Washington as corporation counsel, carried a basic lesson: It became clear to people that "an African American could run Chicago and it wouldn't fall apart." Running for his second term, Washington did better among whites; while he did not get a great many more white votes, fewer whites voted against him. Washington's death from a heart attack at his desk in 1987 was a tremendous blow, but his tenure changed racial dynamics in the city.

This wasn't clear at first. Barack told me that after Washington's death, he felt disillusioned by the splintering of the progressive biracial coalition that had supported the mayor, who was replaced by an undistinguished councilman picked by the old machine. "I was, like many people, impressed by the degree to which he could mobilize the community and push for change. I was frustrated by the inability to build an organization that could sustain all that excitement and deliver [results]." At that point, Obama says, "I was somewhat disdainful of politics. I was much more interested in mobilizing people to hold politicians accountable."

That attitude helps explain what Barack decided to do after he graduated from Harvard Law School in 1991. He was offered many jobs and could have gone to work anywhere. Abner Mikva, a former U.S. congressman who was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, called to offer him a clerkship, and when Obama turned him down, Mikva jokingly says he assumed Barack was an "uppity black" who would only clerk for a black judge. Michelle was also surprised that he was uninterested in clerking, even for a U.S. Supreme Court justice. She said Barack had gone to law school because he realized, working as a community organizer, that to bring about change he needed to better understand how laws are created.

"You've got to have a grasp of the law, so he goes to law school, he goes to law school for more than just being a lawyer," Michelle told me. "Even though he was head of the law review he didn't become a Supreme Court clerk, which is the natural progression. Never did it cross his mind. Here I am, knowing the power of his position: 'You're not going to clerk for them? You're kidding me!' He's like, 'No, that's not why I went to law school. If you're going to make change, you're not going to do it as a Supreme Court clerk.' It was change, it was always change. It was always this notion, how do you help move this country."

Instead, Obama took a job at Judson Miner's civil rights law firm, though he first spent six months on a voter registration drive, Project Vote, targeting low-income African Americans. It was an effort strikingly reminiscent of what Michelle's father, Fraser Robinson, the genial precinct captain, had done, walking the streets of South Side exhorting folks to go out on election day and vote Democratic. The drive was so successful that it helped Bill Clinton win in Illinois and assisted Carol Moseley Braun in becoming the first black woman elected to the U.S. Senate. He also embarked on his book project, writing his first memoir, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. Obama got the book contract after his election to law review president attracted admiring profiles in newspapers around the country. Miner laughs, though, at the fact that publishers -- making a clichéd assumption about his background -- assumed it would be the tale of how a young black man heroically rose from the ghetto. Instead, Obama would write a complex memoir about growing up biracial and fatherless in Hawaii and Indonesia, then leaving for the mainland to find his identity as a black man in a variety of American landscapes. Miner says that during a series of lunches, Obama quizzed him on race relations under Harold Washington, asking what it had been like for him, working in a government run by an African American. Miner's firm did mostly civil rights litigation, including voting rights and discrimination cases, often suing the city. The firm, Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, was small and the work didn't pay particularly well, Miner says, but it was prestigious and had a reputation for hiring upand-comers. Moreover, Miner -- along with Newton Minow and Abner Mikva -- would introduce Obama to a range of supporters and political contacts, including African Americans, Jewish leaders, progressives, socalled lakefront liberals, politically involved socialites. During those lunches, Miner says, "It was really clear that he was interested in government."

But while Barack was reaching out to Chicago's progressive coalition, Michelle was embedding herself in a mayoral administration that many of the same people regarded with suspicion. During her last, dissatisfied year at the law firm Sidley Austin, Michelle began sending letters to general counsels for universities, trying to find an area of the law that might be more satisfying. In 1991, she wrote to Valerie Jarrett, a high-level operative in the second Daley administration who came from a distinguished Chicago family. Jarrett had grown up in Hyde Park and she had attended one of the top private schools in the country, the Laboratory Schools affiliated with the University of Chicago. Her mother was a child psychologist and her father, a pathologist, was the first African American to receive tenure at the University of Chicago's department of biological sciences. Jarrett, who had a law degree from the University of Michigan, was working as deputy chief of staff for Richard M. Daley, the first Mayor Daley's son, who was now himself mayor. She was instantly impressed with Michelle. "I offered her a job at the end of the interview....She was so confident and committed and extremely open," Jarrett would say later. But before Michelle would accept, she asked that Jarrett have dinner with her and Barack.

According to one account, Barack was concerned, even then, about how it might affect his nascent political career if his wife were to work for Daley, who, while not the Machine politician his father had been, was regarded by many as representing the establishment that independents had long been fighting against. "Certainly, it would be something that they would look upon [unfavorably] in Hyde Park -- anyone who worked for Daley would be highly suspect," says the political consultant Don Rose, which may be one reason why Michelle did not stay long in the job. Obama was also worried, according to biographer David Mendell, that Michelle might be too straightforward and outspoken to survive in a political setting. He fretted, too, that if she was going to enter this realm, she needed someone to look out for her. Patronage was waning as a style of doing business, but in Chicago it still helped to have a mentor. Jarrett agreed to have dinner with Michelle and Barack. "My fiancé wants to know who is going to be looking out for me and making sure that I thrive," Jarrett recalled Michelle saying. At the end of the evening, Jarrett asked, "Well, did I pass the test?" and Barack smiled and said she did.

That dinner would set a pattern. While many professional husbands and wives operate in spheres that don't overlap, Michelle and Barack have been more of a tag team, making speeches at each other's behest, inviting each other to sit on panels, in large part because they share the same academic and professional training -- Ivy League, Harvard Law -- as well as the same mission. Michelle would later assert, "Barack hasn't relied deeply on me for his career path, and I haven't relied on him at all for mine." This is true in the sense that she is a highly qualified person perfectly capable of securing jobs on her own merits. Still, it's also fair to say that the two of them are more closely melded, personally and politically, than many couples, and have helped each other along. "Fundamentally we work well together because we share the same values," Michelle would later say to the Hyde Park Herald.

Michelle was valuable to Barack, politically, in a number of ways. Through his work as an organizer, he already made contacts and earned stature with leaders and politicians on the South Side, but she helped him deepen and broaden that stature, having grown up there herself. "There are a lot of successful people who have a hard time working in the community because they're not from there," their friend John Rogers told Newsweek. "Craig and Michelle can do it because it's where they come from." She knew some of South Side's political leaders; her friendship with Santita Jackson would be an entrée into the Jackson household and an introduction to Santita's father and brother, Jesse Jackson Sr. and Jr.

And at the same time, thanks to her own ambition and achievements, Michelle would provide him with contacts in the new professional class, introducing Barack to some of the people who would be his well-connected friends and most important financial supporters. Through her job with the city, she had made contacts in Daley's inner circle. Jarrett was chief among them; she became a friend and confidante, and an extraordinarily useful person for Barack to have in his corner. One of the most p...