Michelle Obama and Politics: A (Sort of) Love Story

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https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/michelle-obama-and-politics-a-sort-of-love-story

Daily Comment
Michelle Obama and Politics: A (Sort of) Love Story
By Amy Davidson Sorkin
December 27, 2018
One of the most thought-provoking aspects of the former First Lady’s memoir is the question of what she considers politics and what she does not.

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Their time on the trail reminds her of what she doesn’t like about politics. Speaking, without a script, in Wisconsin, she says, “for the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country. And not because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction, and just not feeling so alone in my frustration and disappointment.” What she was saying, in a full sense, was that, for the first time, she was really proud of politics. But politics lashed back: taken out of context, that first phrase (“those fourteen stupid words”) were used to caricature her as an “angry black woman” who hates her country. She likens the experience to being punched in the face.

But, as her husband approached victory and then entered the White House, Michelle became more at home with the idea of hope. There is no reason to doubt her when she says, as she has repeatedly, that she will never run for office. At the same time, her memoir gradually becomes a parable about the possibilities of the electoral system and of all that a President and, next to him, a “soft power”-wielding First Lady, can do. It winds up like a love story between Michelle and a stranger named politics; it’s tumultuous, but (notwithstanding the late-chapter emergence of Donald Trump) it has a mostly happy ending.

And yet there is an aspect to this narrative that complicates it and makes it more interesting. You could call it a plot twist, except that it’s there from the beginning. Michelle was, all along, leading a life that was very much built around public service. As a corporate lawyer, she had pushed her firm to recruit a broader range of young lawyers. By the time she married Barack, she had left to work first in the Chicago mayor’s office—for Valerie Jarrett, whom she introduced to Barack—and then at Public Allies, a nonprofit that helps place civic-minded college graduates in jobs where they can be helpful. Barack was an influence on her career path—“his version of hope reached far beyond mine”—but so was her own search, which she writes about throughout the book, for ways to make a meaningful contribution.

When Barack ran for President, Michelle was the executive director for community affairs for the University of Chicago Medical Center, focussed on improving access to medical care and on pushing the hospital to adopt such measures as hiring patient advocates, work that she found “challenging and satisfying and in line with my beliefs.” She fought to safeguard some private space for her family; she was also deeply immersed in what would broadly be called civil society. Still, she consistently draws a line between such work and “politics.” Of Public Allies, she writes, “For the first time in my life, really, I felt I was doing something immediately meaningful, directly impacting the lives of others while also staying connected to both my city and my culture.” Perhaps this “first time” is also a slip, but it’s notable that by then she’d spent more than a year working with Jarrett in City Hall.

Indeed, one of the most thought-provoking aspects of Michelle Obama’s memoir is the question of what she considers politics and what she does not. The opposite of politics for her, certainly, is not retreat. The distinction between her priorities and her husband’s is not really between the public and the private. What she recoils from, specifically, is electoral politics; he believes in the ballot so much that, soon after they are married, he blows the deadline for his first book, “having been so caught up in registering voters” for a group called Project VOTE! (For him, the verb “vote” is always an imperative.) Of Barack’s decision to run for the State Senate, she writes, “In my heart, I just believed there were better ways for a good person to have an impact.” (In this week’s magazine, I quote a similar line said by James Comey, in explaining why he won’t run for office.) But wasn’t what she was doing politics, too, or at least political?

Political life is too important to be left entirely in the hands of the professional politicians. That’s an important lesson of Michelle Obama’s life, too, one that “Becoming” does a good, and understated, job of illuminating. The love story between the kind of engagement that she has embraced and the grittiest variety of electoral politics needs to be a mutual one. They may never have been such strangers after all. Some good people have to run for office—if not, who will be left to run city hall? And someone has to keep them honest.