The Obama Marriage-How does it work for Michelle Obama? [View All]

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The Obama Marriage
How does it work for Michelle Obama?
By Melinda Henneberger
Updated Friday, Oct. 26, 2007, at 10:14 AM ET


This is the first installment in Slate's First Mates series, which will examine the marriages of the presidential candidates. Read Melinda Henneberger's introduction to the series here. In today's piece, Henneberger looks at Michelle Obama's role in the marriage. Next time, she considers Barack Obama's role, and what their partnership tells us about what kind of president he might be.

Michelle Obama has stopped publicizing her husband's most forgivable flaws, though truth to tell, she never accused him of anything more reprehensible than leaving the butter out after breakfast. Still, she no longer enlightens audiences on how he can't seem to manage to pitch his dirty socks into the hamper. In interviews, she has quit humanizing him quite as pungently as when she told Glamour that he's "so snore-y and stinky" when he wakes up in the morning that their little girls don't want to crawl into bed with him.

She dialed back on proclaiming him "a gifted man, but in the end just a man," after New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who has lots of advice for wives, wrote that some supporters "worried that her chiding was emasculating, casting her husband—under fire for lacking experience—as an undisciplined child.'' But what the candidate's wife was trying to pull off, according to her friends, was not an act of sabotage but something even more subversive: How about let's not pretend that he or any other candidate is perfect, so that when he turns out not to be, we can all skip pretending to be surprised?

We say we want truth in political advertising, but do we? We say we want candidates who are authentic and have real relationships, too, but when they are and do, the howls of protest—are you going to play this game or aren't you?—come first and foremost from the press. Connoisseurs of artifice, we object on those rare occasions when the only reasonable conclusion is that we have not been lied to. And we demand from candidates and their spouses what Dowd once told an interviewer she considers the secret of a good marriage: "a certain amount of acting.''

"People think I'm trashing him," Michelle Obama told Susan Sher, a longtime friend and her boss at the University of Chicago Medical Center, where she is vice president for community and external affairs. "I was trying to make a larger point, that we want to put our president on a pedestal, when not only can no one fulfill all our fantasies, but we're all in this together and we can't leave it up'' to any one Decider.

In the same way, both Barack and Michelle Obama have made a conscious, conspicuous effort to represent their marriage in the most realistic possible terms. So much so, in fact, that they may have overdone it, not only sharing strains that other political couples would have papered over, but portraying a strong relationship in a sometimes overly harsh light. This is what perfectionists in love look like, unaccustomed as we are to the sight. And this is how two former community organizers function in a relationship that's far more egalitarian than most political unions. Decision by consensus is so crucial to both Obamas that she once took him along on a job interview—not for backup, but to see if the interviewer passed Barack's test.

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http://www.slate.com/id/2176683/pagenum/all/#page_start