When the Republican Scott Brown defeated the Democrat Martha Coakley to win Edward M Kennedy’s Senate seat in 2010, Michelle Obama was apoplectic. There was no major player in American politics whom Mrs Obama treasured more than Ted Kennedy. For most of her adult life, wherever he stood on public policy issues, she pretty much stood. The first lady ardently believed that Kennedy’s endorsement of her husband for the 2008 Democratic nomination had been a real act of courage, the straw that tipped the scales in his favour against Hillary Clinton. Recognising Brown’s surprise win as a threat to her husband’s entire health care initiative (the election cost Senate Democrats their supermajority), Mrs Obama went scalp hunting. She blamed senior White House officials like Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs for the Massachusetts disaster — and her husband for not riding herd on them. “She feels,” President Obama sheepishly told aides, “as if our rudder isn’t set right.”
Pointing out such concerns is, of course, the province of a spouse. The difference when a head of state’s spouse performs an advisory role is that both the content and its consequences resonate through a lot more than one household. And that’s the point of Jodi Kantor’s new book, The Obamas. Call it chick nonfiction, if you will; this book is not about politics, it’s about marriage, or at least one marriage, and a notably successful one. This is a couple who listen to each other, and no one believes more in America’s 44th president than his wife. Last August, at a party for his 50th birthday, Kantor writes, Mrs Obama toasted her husband for passing the health care Bill, appointing two women to the Supreme Court and killing Osama bin Laden. When he signalled for the accolades to be toned down, she cut him off. “No, you’re just going to stand there and listen,” she snapped. “I know it makes you uncomfortable, but you only turn 50 once, so you’re just going to have to take it.” And he did.
Kantor, a Washington correspondent for The New York Times, interviewed the Obamas for a 2009 Times Magazine profile and became intensely interested in the working relationship between Potus and Flotus. The result is The Obamas, a dimly controversial palace intrigue that attempts to explain how the first couple’s marriage works. “In public, they smiled and waved,” Kantor writes, “but how were the Obamas really reacting to the White House, and how was it affecting the rest of us?” A reportorial wunderkind, she had the gumption not only to collect colourful, hard-to-come-by insider anecdotes about the Obamas, but also to venture into the dangerous terrain of psychoanalysing the first lady. When an amateur puts the powerful on a shrink’s couch, following the example of Freud with Woodrow Wilson, the hunches about human nature had better be spot on.
Fortunately, The Obamas is more Sally Bedell Smith than Kitty Kelley. Kantor interviewed 33 White House officials and aides and Cabinet members. She reconstructs a half-dozen or so strange, gossipy moments that hardly hold up as serious journalism, but provide insight nonetheless. Mostly, she illuminates, in breezy prose, how the first lady sets the tone and tempo of the current White House.
As the Obamas have been hoarding their personal stories for their White House memoirs, the American public has got only glimpses into their marriage. This chronicle provides a few more, but what we learn we had basically already guessed. Mrs Obama is the mega-progressive, and her husband the starchy pragmatist who knows how to deliver a thumping speech when he’s up against the wall. Mrs Obama isn’t just the family’s hard-nosed gatekeeper. She also serves as the president’s “sparring partner, early-warning system, refuge and guardian”. With echoes of Jackie Kennedy’s style sense, Lady Bird Johnson’s green thumb and Nancy Reagan’s zealous protection of her family from the arrows of political discourse, Mrs Obama also comes across as a moral force. If the president is intent on actualising a third Clinton term, Mrs Obama embodies the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr.
It’s understandable that the first lady wasn’t pleased with The Obamas. It’s the same old complaint about the fishbowl: you spend countless warmhearted days with the staff, but one inconsequential disagreement gets blown into a maelstrom. On a couple of occasions, the tabloid scent in the book is so strong that one would be forgiven for thinking Kantor writes for US Weekly, not The Times. Don’t the Obama children have a right to privacy? Thankfully, the vivid prose stays free of snark. This allows Kantor to write about Sasha and Malia with a degree of impunity. Mrs Obama does suffer a few dings and dents, as when she supposedly told the French first lady, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, that living in the White House was “hell” — hardly a strong pitch for re-election.
Taken as a whole, The Obamas is more valentine than vitriol. Consider the poor Clintons, who were served up scalding in books by Christopher Hitchens, Michael Isikoff and R Emmett Tyrrell Jr, among others. If the Obamas want four more years in the fishbowl, they’re going to have to learn to grin and bear friendly popgun fire from time to time.
©2012 The New York Times News Service
