The OBAMAS - Portrait of an American Family

Soon the USA will vote for its next president, and for the first time in history, one of the two candidates is a Black man. For a year, ESSENCE magazine pursued an interview with the entire Obama family – to no avail. Finally, this summer ESSENCE became the only Black media outlet allowed a glimpse into the lives of Barack, Michelle and their two girls, Malia and Sasha, when ESSENCE was invited to their South Side Chicago home. Weeks later, veteran political journalist Gwen Ifill was with the family as they campaigned in a small mostly White western town, and she flew with them to a Black church in the urban Midwest. In a rare conversation with the couple and the children, Ifill discussed the political attacks on Michelle, Barack’s take on his controversial message to Black men, and how the family remains so close when they are so often apart. BHM brings you that interview.

Barack Obama is sitting in the back of his rented luxury campaign bus with its granite counters and two flat-screen TVs. The Illinois senator’s arms are wrapped around his wife, Michelle, whom he doesn’t get to see much these days. At this very moment he is, of all things, singing.

I’ve just asked them how their lives have changed since he won the Democratic presidential nomination. There have definitely been changes, especially for Michelle Obama, who used to pride herself on campaigning by day and rushing home to her daughters each night. Now she is spending more of her days and nights on the road, but seldom in the same place as her husband. And when their daughters—Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7—get to see their dad, they likely have to share him with thousands of adoring strangers. “Daddy’s gone a lot,” Sasha notes. “We don’t see him that much.”

But on this Fourth of July, everyone is together. Even though there are at least a half-dozen aides and family members on the bus with us, it feels intimate back here. Michelle and Barack are curled up on the beige couch, while the children are reading and coloring a few feet away. Michelle folds her long legs to her chin and leans into her husband as he explains the reality of their lives. When he pauses, she finishes his sentences.

Their ease with each other recalls the day several weeks earlier when ESSENCE arrived to photograph the Obamas at their large Georgian Revivial home on Chicago’s South Side. Barack stood on the lawn playfully teasing his wife as she posed for our cameras. Now, as then, his customary public caution melts away when he is with his family. Under relentless media scrutiny, Barack Obama says his family is going the extra mile to “maintain this little island of normalcy in the midst of all this swirl of activity.” But family snapshots of this sort are rare, as are moments when the Obamas can just chill. “Michelle has done a heroic job of managing the house, the family and still finding time to campaign and be out on the road,” he says, after directing staff members to turn off the television, which was tuned to Fox News Channel. “I’m always marveling at everything that she can do.”

And then he sings. “I’m every woman,” he croons. She cringes. He laughs. “That’s Michelle. It’s like, Chaka Khan! Chaka Khan!”

The Michelle Factor
The entire family is on display during a Fourth of July event, as Michelle Obama leads a Montana picnic crowd in a rendition of “Happy Birthday” to daughter Malia, 10. When I ask Malia later exactly how many times she has been sung to that day, she responds with a small smile, “A jillion.”

The point is for the Obamas to be together—and have the world watch them doing it. Mom hugs people at the town parade, daughters greet furry parade mascots, Dad flips burgers for hundreds of his newest friends in Big Sky country. Picnickers in Obama for President T-shirts try to catch a glimpse of the candidate, and television cameras are trained on the family’s every move.

The frenzy of attention—much of it glaring, some of it negative—never lets up. Aside from the fact that the Obamas could become the US’s first African-American First Couple, there is little new about all this: Presidential candidates and their families have had to cope with such scrutiny almost since the founding of the Republic. People want to know who they are.

But for family members, reading or hearing tough talk about someone you raised can take an adjustment, as Michelle’s mother readily admits. “It bothers everyone in the family except Michelle and Barack,” says Marian Robinson. “The last time Barack heard us talk about what we heard on the radio, you know what he said? ‘Why don’t you all stop listening to that?’ That’s his attitude. When he first said he was going to do this, he said everyone should develop a thick skin, because this is what will happen, and exactly what he said would happen, happened.”

For months, Michelle has had to answer for her unfortunately phrased words at a spring campaign event: “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country,” she said, setting off a political firestorm. She insists she was referring to her pride in seeing the level of engagement in this year’s political process, but critics have accused her of being insufficiently patriotic. The right-leaning blogosphere, talk show circuit and publishing world rushed to join in: A National Review magazine cover featured an angry-looking picture of Michelle with the headline: “Mrs. Grievance.”

Barack Obama says none of this happens by accident. “There are a group of conservative columnists; they become an echo chamber,” he tells ESSENCE. “The National Review puts Michelle on the cover, Fox News starts running things in a loop over and over again. They try to create a caricature.”

By midsummer, a survey taken by the Associated Press and Yahoo found the “caricature” was winning, with more people viewing Michelle negatively than positively—35 to 30 percent. That’s when the Obamas struck back, launching a campaign within a campaign to showcase Michelle as a regular—and nonthreatening—working Mom. Central to that effort was her appearance on ABC’s The View, where she bumped fists with the cohosts while wearing a $148 sleeveless summer dress that immediately became a retail phenomenon. “You saw what happened when she was on The View; she’s selling dresses now,” Barack says, nudging his wife with a grin. “So I would distinguish between that and the political or the chattering class that very systematically tried to go after her.”

Michelle appears unfazed by most of the criticism, focusing instead on what she says she sees as she travels the country—people of all races and descriptions who crowd in to hug her at campaign events, and who do not seem to have gotten the word that she is supposed to be an angry Black woman. “In our generation, we were just taught that if you know who you are, then what somebody calls you is just so irrelevant to the day-to-day issues that have to be a focus of this race,” she says, speaking in a rush, as her husband nods in agreement. “If I wilted every time somebody in my life mischaracterized me or called me a bad name, I would have never finished Princeton, would have never gone to Harvard, and wouldn’t be sitting here with him. So these are the lessons we want to teach our kids. You know who you are, so whatever anybody else says is just interesting fodder.”

Laughing, Michelle’s mother acknowledges the advice she gave to her daughter and her son, Craig: “If someone calls you a dog, do you jump down on all fours and start barking? Or do you continue doing whatever you were doing before they called you a dog?”

It’s what helps Michelle shrug off the intensity of the campaign. “The values that we’ve grown up with, that we live and breathe are pure American values,” she reflects. “That is more me than the schools I went to. That is more me than the color of my skin even. That’s more me than my gender. I am a mother who wakes up every day worried about the future of her children and the children in our lives. I know how blessed my girls are, because I know too many kids in my family and other communities whose futures are different because of one slip, one mess up, one thing that just didn’t work out right. I just know how precarious it is, because I grew up in these communities. But first and foremost,” she says, buttoning up her argument, “the reason I think people can connect with me when they see me and get to know me, is that I’m just not that different.”

Patriot Acts
The Obamas’ lives have been transformed by the presence of 24-hour security and lightning-fast media coverage. No detail goes unremarked on, from the precise shade of chartreuse Michelle wears onstage, to the exact blue tone of Barack’s tie that he dons for a summertime unity event with Hillary Clinton. On this 90-degree day in the rolling mine country of Butte in southwestern Montana, the Obamas greet supporters as Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I’m Yours)” wafts from the loudspeakers. In a not-so-subtle response to recurring suggestions that they are just not patriotic enough, the Obamas have chosen to come to Butte on the Fourth of July, the most patriotic of all holidays. The candidate now wears a flag pin on his lapel every day, and Michelle concentrates on proving that, as the product of a working-class Chicago family, she is as mainstream as America gets. In a state where 90 percent of the population is White and only 0.4 percent is Black, the Obamas may well be the largest group of African-Americans the town has recently seen. Soon enough, the music shifts to Springsteen.

“Montana is a White, blue-collar rural state,” observes Brian Kahn, a White public radio program host who has come to join the event. “I’ve lived here 20 years and we’ve never seen anything like this.”

This is what they see: Barack’s sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, is the daughter of Obama’s Indonesian stepfather and his White mother. Her husband, Konrad, is a Chinese American born in Canada. Both hold Ph.D.’s and live and work in Honolulu. Their daughter Suhaila laughs and plays with her cousins. Despite the range of ethnicities, as a family, they seem perfectly ordinary. Michelle and her daughters are dressed alike, in sundresses with leggings and flat shoes. Michelle throws a white sweater over her shoulders for photographs, and everyone’s hair is pulled back—in Malia’s case, in neat cornrows, to guard against the rigors of heat, wind and sudden thunderstorms.

The Obamas pride themselves on creating a family picture that is authentically Black with shades of Norman Rockwell. As Barack stands on a picnic table to talk about health care, energy independence and infrastructure in the blazing high-mountain heat, Malia sits stoically as her mother leans over to press cold bottles of water against her daughter’s overheated forehead. By the time Michelle takes the microphone, she is wearing a red, white and blue bolo string tie that Governor Brian Schweitzer has slung around her neck. Michelle La Vaughn Robinson Obama, Ivy League–trained lawyer and well-paid executive, is on hiatus. The supportive wife and working mom has taken her place, singing her husband’s praises. Their daughter Malia, confronted on every hand by strangers calling her name, is unfailingly polite to everyone who wants to sing “Happy Birthday” to her or tell her how cute she is, including the governor, and Hartford “Sonny” Black Eagle and his wife, Mary, who were selected by Montana’s Crow Indian Nation to be Barack’s “adopted grandparents.” Sasha generally has a harder time sitting still. She circles around to where her cousin Suhaila sits, plants one, then two kisses on her cheek, then runs back to her mother for permission to strip her feet of her spangly summer sneakers.
Later, there are hula hoops. Someone in the crowd races forward to hand the girls matching pink cowboy hats. This, Barack says, taking in the whole scene, is what America actually looks like, and his campaign is eager to showcase the tableau.

The Good Father
Both Obamas say their travels have convinced them that the racial divide—one of our “national obsessions,” Barack calls it—is not as wide or deep as many believe. “I think we don’t give the American people enough credit for having undergone a dramatic change, not just in the last 40 years, but even the last 20 years in terms of racial attitudes,” Barack says. “In that sense, my campaign is a testament to how far we’ve come. I would say that our popular culture still fastens on race the way it fastens on sex, the way it fastens on violence. There’s a fascination with it that’s not always healthy, and not particularly productive.”

Still, the next day it is jarring to leave Butte and fly to St. Louis, where Obama speaks to the Forty-eighth Quadrennial Session of the General Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The delegates start chanting “Yes, we can!” the moment the candidate steps into view. Aside from the press corps and security, there is nary a White person in sight.
As is often the case when he speaks to an African-American crowd, Obama launches into his stump speech emphasizing the gospel of individual responsibility, sounding for all the world like a cross between Bill Cosby and T.D. Jakes. “I know some people say ‘Why? He’s blaming the victim,’” he tells the churchfolks. “I’m not interested in us adopting the posture of victim. I recognize there are outstanding men doing an outstanding job under the most difficult of circumstances. But I also believe that we cannot use injustice as an excuse,” he adds, as the congregation cheers. “We can’t use poverty as an excuse. There are things within our control that we’ve got to attend to.”

Obama says he has the credibility to speak about sore issues like absent Black fathers, in part, because his father, too, was absent. Barack Obama, Sr., left the family when his son was 2. “It’s indisputable that when we’ve got the majority of African-American children growing up in single-parent households, that that has an impact,” he says. “It has an impact, certainly economic. The single biggest indicator of poverty is being a single mom and trying to raise kids. It has an impact socially; it has an impact in terms of how they do in school and their future prospects. Now there are single moms doing heroic jobs all across America and within the African-American community. And by the way, there are great fathers who are doing the right thing. One of the finest men I ever knew was Michelle’s dad, who worked every day despite enormous hardship to make sure his children and his family were cared for.”

But, on Father’s Day, Obama told the congregation at Apostolic Church of God in Chicago that “we need fathers to realize that responsibility doesn’t just end at conception.” He went on, “That doesn’t just make you a father. What makes you a man is not the ability to have a child. Any fool can have a child. It’s the courage to raise a child that makes you a father.”

Those comments sparked criticism from many Black Americans, including, notoriously from the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who used a crude term to express his anger at the candidate for what he described as “talking down” to the Black community. But days before Jackson’s comments, in conversations with ESSENCE, Obama had defended his call to responsibility. “The point I was simply trying to make is that you can’t keep on using excuses for the failure to be engaged with your child,” he says. “Yes, we have a tragic history. Yes, the economy and the collapse of the manufacturing base that used to provide good blue-collar jobs had a disproportionate effect on African-American men. Yes, the problem of drug trade and incarceration rates makes it more difficult for men to stabilize and be there. But there are a lot of middle class men who are aren’t engaged in their children’s lives as well. And I think that’s become too culturally acceptable.”

The perception among some observers is that there is a campaign calculus that involves Obama making White audiences feel comfortable with him, while doling out straight talk to African-Americans. After two days in Montana, Obama and his entourage swept in and out of St. Louis within two hours, stopping backstage only to receive a blessing from the bishops and preachers. The press was barred.

The Candidate Next Door
Obama’s sister, Maya, also grew up largely without her father, and she credits Barack, who is nine years her senior, with filling the gap. She, too, is spending the summer on the campaign trail. Despite the fact that her brother is making history, she says he really hasn’t changed much. “He’s about the same,” she insists. “I mean, honestly, our banter is the same. He’s still wonderful in all the same ways, and irritatingly opinionated in all the same ways.”
Maya is part of the tight family circle, accompanying her presidential candidate brother to the soccer games and dance recitals he crams in on rare weekends home. Barack’s BlackBerry is ever present, his nightly conference calls with campaign staff a constant. But his wife says she gets what she needs.

“The thing that Barack does is that when he is there, he is a parent,” says Michelle. “He’s not like play dad. He’s the guy who has read through all of the Harry Potter books with Malia. Barack is very good about understanding that the kids and their structure and stability are important. And he’s somebody who, if there’s discipline that needs to be handed down, he doesn’t hesitate just because he hasn’t seen them in a week.”

The Obamas are already seeking advice on how best to protect their girls should they make it to the White House, including where to send them to school. Barack asked Hillary Clinton for her opinion on what worked with Chelsea. Michelle has asked Caroline Kennedy what it was like to be a child of a president, and she plans to call on Tipper Gore. But there is an inevitable absence that is the byproduct of presidential ambition. In the Obama family, the single person most responsible for filling it is Marian Robinson. Michelle’s mother lives five minutes away and picks the girls up from school each day to take them to tennis and piano lessons, dance class, soccer practice and play dates. The children are polite and disciplined, playful with other children and respectful with adults. They get that from their mother, who got it from her mother.
It was Robinson’s idea, for instance, that the girls not receive gifts for their birthdays. Instead, each is allowed to choose something she would like to do, instead of what she would like to get. “It’s more important for them to be exposed and be active,” Robinson says in a telephone conversation.

This does not mean Grandma doesn’t sneak them the occasional ice cream treat. She does. And if helping Michelle means she might have to move to Washington, D.C., she’ll do that too.
For now, living on Chicago’s Black South Side, where the family resides in a gated $1.65 million Hyde Park home that is only a stone’s throw from what Michelle freely describes as “the ‘hood,” has kept them aware of the problems plaguing African-Americans such as diabetes, HIV/AIDS and breast cancer. When I mention that I haven’t heard AIDS—which has reached crisis status among Black women—come up much in the campaign, Barack agrees that it’s a critical issue he has talked about and should talk about. “There is no illness that we are not disproportionately affected by,” he says. Michelle picks up the thought: “A lot of us don’t have access to primary preventive health care. People can’t afford regular doctors.”

Michelle says their home turf keeps them grounded in other ways as well. “One of the things I like best about this, what we’re doing, is that we still live on the South Side,” she says. “So for all of this wonderful madness that comes along with our lives—the Secret Service, the cars—there are kids on Forty-seventh and King Drive who can walk two blocks and be that close for the first time to somebody who can be the president of the United States. I love that... I like for them to be able to walk and stand in front of our house and see him up close and personal. ‘This man lives in my neighborhood.’ “

“They don’t know where Kennebunkport is,” Barack adds, referring to the Bush family compound in Maine, “but they know where the South Side is.”

He recalls one of the most powerful moments on the campaign trail. “A White woman comes up to me and says, ‘My son teaches in an inner-city school in San Francisco, and he’s told me that during the course of your campaign he’s noticed that the Black boys in the class are working harder, are more focused, are fascinated by this whole thing,’” he says. “You know kids just want to feel like they’ve got a shot. If they can recognize something that gives them some sense of a path to achievement and respect, they absorb it like sponges.”

Trying for Normal
Despite all that has changed for them publicly, the Obamas insist that little has changed in their private lives. Their friends are the same. And the family treats them the same, as at their last Thanksgiving. “Everybody came over to our house just like nobody was running for president,” Michelle says, laughing.

And sometimes the Obamas find ways to merge their two lives. At the end of the day in Butte, Montana, the family returned to the local Holiday Inn Express where they were staying, ordered dinner in from a local restaurant, ate cake, and cranked up birthday girl Malia’s favorite music: Beyoncé, the Jonas Brothers and Hannah Montana. “We just spent about two hours dancing and singing, rocking out,” Barack told the reporters on his campaign plane the next day. “Malia said it was the best birthday she’d ever had.” He pauses, then adds wistfully: “I don’t know if she was just telling us what we wanted to hear, but I can tell you from my perspective, it was one of the best times I have had in a long time.” n

Gwen Ifill’s book The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama (Doubleday) is scheduled to be published next year.

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