Share this
Mister Wong
Digg
Del.icio.us
Slashdot
Furl
Yahoo
Technorati
Newsvine
Googlize this
Blinklist
Facebook
Wikio
Hear this text
Print
E-mail
Tags
The modern-day first lady of the Western WorldThe official White House website portrays Michelle Obama – complete with a professional über-flattering photograph – as the mother first, wife second, lawyer and career person last. It emphasises her strong family and, indeed, community orientation by highlighting her humble origins in the modest family home on the wrong side of town, the South Side of Chicago, where she grew up as part of a loving and close working class family.
Her father, Fraser Robinson, was a pump operator for the Chicago Water Department.
He suffered from multiple sclerosis from a young age, yet he was diligent, rarely allowing his condition to make him miss work.
Her mother, Marian, ran the household and focused on raising Michelle (born 17 January 1964) and her brother, Craig.
Both parents clearly steered their children to achieve, both academically and professionally Michelle told several journalists that her father never raised his voice. All he had to do was tell the children that he was disappointed with them, and fix them with a cold stare, causing them to collapse in tears and to try harder.
Craig (today head basketball coach at Brown University) learned to read by the age of four and skipped second grade, excelled as a basketball star player and, like his sister Michelle, entered the Ivy League Princeton University.
Michelle majored in African-American studies, and proceeded to the immensely prestigious Harvard Law School, where she graduated in 1988. (She is, incidentally, only the third first lady to hold a postgraduate degree after Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton).
Her first job was at the Chicago law firm Sidley Austin, where she met her future husband, Barack Obama, whom she mentored as a summer associate. But her heart was neither in corporate law nor public office – it was in social change and community upliftment.
As an undergraduate student, she chose in her free time to run a literacy programme for kids from the local neighbourhoods. At Harvard Law, she campaigned for enrolling more minority students and professors.
Her former professors describe her as low profile, in contrast to the public, charismatic orator that Obama had been in his law school days. Instead of talking from podiums, she went around doing the less visible job of recruiting black undergraduates to Harvard.
One of her professors, Charles Ogletree, told an interviewer: “For her, politics wasn’t so much about being inspirational as it was being practical – about getting something specific done... she was not trying to get ahead.”
True to her instincts, she held various public sector positions, from being assistant to the Mayor of Chicago to an assistant commissioner of planning and development, to vice president for community and external affairs of the University of Chicago Hospitals.
In her own words she says, “One of the small themes in my professional life, is to try to be the bridge so that more people feel like they have access; that their voice, that their faces, that their worlds count in places like this [the White House] and that there is understanding across those divides.”
On the campaign trail, however, Michelle Obama had to shed her possible initial dislike of public platforms. Running for the job of first lady is a high-order call in American public life, despite the fact there is no such official campaign.
According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Although the first lady’s role has never been codified or officially defined, she figures prominently in the political and social life of the nation. Representative of her husband on official and ceremonial occasions both at home and abroad, the first lady is closely watched for some hint of her husband’s thinking and for a clue to his future actions. Although unpaid and unelected, her prominence provides her a platform from which to influence behaviour and opinion, and popular first ladies have served as models for how American women should dress, speak, and cut their hair.”
The title “First Lady” became widely used in the United States only towards the end of the 19th century, possibly coinciding with the completion of the railway system crisscrossing all the states, as well as the expansion of national distribution of newspapers.
However, by the end of the 20th century, it had become popular in other countries as well and was often used, untranslated, to describe the wife of the nation’s leader – even in countries where the leader’s spouse was not publicly exposed and was seen to exert much less influence than in the United States.
Elsewhere, wives of most heads of states are, at best, vaguely recognised unless, of course, they were a supermodel-turned-singer like Carla Bruni of France. But she is the exception that proves the rule. When was the last time you thought about Mrs Brown, for example, and how many people know her first name? (Sarah, by the way.)
At home, our new President Jacob Zuma has, as been much written about, more than one wife, although he certainly does not have six, as rumours flew before he was inaugurated.
The non-debate in the press a few days before his inauguration around “who would be the official first lady”, gave a strong taste of forcing a tradition that does not really exist in South Africa.
In the end, all three showed up at the opening of Parliament.
Michelle Obama has a few extra pressures. She is the first black woman to fill the role of first lady; and after an aspirational campaign, the Obamas are freighted with expectations.
For example, they must provide a model of a happy, functional family. Michelle is also – and some would say first and foremost – a mother of two young girls (Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7).
Juggling her responsibilities while trying to provide her daughters with whatever can pass under the circumstances as a healthy, balanced upbringing, is a great challenge.
Every move she makes is reported and dissected in the American media: which school is chosen for the girls (complete with profiles of the schools, how many times the Obamas visited, who else goes to that school, etc. – the answer is the posh private Sidwell Friends School in Georgetown, Chelsea Clinton’s alma mater); what the girls are wearing (J. Crew is very popular with them, and every item seen on them flies off the shelves); and what breed of dog would become the first dog (a Portuguese Water Dog puppy, Bo, who apparently does not take his potty training seriously).
Living in a fishbowl White House and having mega celebrity status creates its own burdens.
For example, on the Obama’s first official visit overseas, the British media created a frenzy around the enormously crucial question – “did she or didn’t she” (put her arm around Her Majesty first, or did she simply respond to the Queen putting her regal arm around the much-taller Michelle first)? This also tells us something about public priorities.
In a historic week when the world’s top leaders met to discuss the greatest financial crisis the world has known since the Great Depression, it is hard to believe that a small gesture by Michelle Obama should be the focus of attention.
Perhaps it provided a welcome distraction from the grimness of the economic meltdown.
It did not end with physical proximity to the monarch (we later learned that the Queen and the first lady got on famously).
The media’s interest in what Mrs Obama wore every day was also extraordinary. Partly, this was because it was her first international visit, and everyone wanted to see what image she would project.
Would she opt, again, for good quality prêt-á-porter clothes, sending a message of normalcy and thriftiness in hard times for all, or would she attempt a fashion statement by deploying the access she now has to the best designers money can buy?
She ended up splitting the difference, and to judge from some of the magazines and fashionistas, she pulled it off (Oscar de la Renta’s peevish remark, “You don’t... go to Buckingham Palace in a sweater” notwithstanding). Vogue United Kingdom, for example, elevated her to “fashion icon status”.
It is impossible to know what stresses she carries in executing and juggling her duties as mother, wife and the nation’s sweetheart, role model and fashion trendsetter. American success stories tend to come coated in much sugary icing, photo touch-ups and hordes of public relations experts whose job is to keep one believing in the image they are paid well to create and preserve.
The glimpses we are allowed to have, however, are revealing.
In a May interview, for example, she attempted to show that she and the president are not that unique and special, as a successful black couple. As she elaborated, “There are thousands of Michelle and Barack Obamas all over this nation. And that is true. I know them, I’ve gone to school with them, I live with them... the truth is that there are thousands of role models like me. I just happen to be the first lady.
“So that’s why I feel like I have a responsibility because people see me, but every single day there are people doing what I’m doing. When I visit a healthcare organisation or a youth centre or a service project, those heroes are working.
“They’re serving on their boards. They’re packing the boxes. They’re teaching in the schools.”
David Axelrod, senior strategist for the Obama campaign, told the media that shortly before he took the final decision to run as Democratic candidate, at two meetings with Obama and his political aides Michelle grilled them about practical details.
These had nothing to do with Barack’s “sweeping themes of ‘hope’ and ‘change’. Rather, she wanted to know exactly what demands would the campaign place on their lives. Where would the money come from?
“Could they really take on the Clinton machine and win, or was this just an extended ego trip?
“Will he be safe? She didn’t want Barack to launch some kind of empty effort here,” said Axelrod.
Moreover, he added, “Michelle has always been in the camp of, ‘Let’s not forget what we’re fighting for’.”
A report on Michelle’s first few months in the White House noted, “The most striking was that she made it seem natural. She did not spend decades dreaming of this destination, and maybe that’s the secret. ‘I’m not supposed to be here,’ she says again and again... asking, ‘What are the things that we can do differently here, the things that have never been done, the people who’ve never seen or experienced this White House?’” (TIME magazine, 21 May 2009).
But another interesting viewpoint is that, apparently, the presidential lifestyle enables Michelle to have a family life she always wanted but never had: her husband used to commute to his various places of work and travel a great deal, and she accused him of abandonment and of having to raise a family on her own (as he describes it in his autobiography, The Audacity of Hope).
Now that the office and residence are in the same locale, the family is able to see each other on a daily basis.
By all accounts, Michelle’s greatest concern is keeping her husband connected to the reality of life outside the bubble of the presidency and its vast trappings. He often calls her “my rock”.
She seems to be much less involved in matters of policy and state than Hillary Rodham Clinton was, yet she clearly has the ear of the leader of the free world, and this places her in a position of incredible power.
In a month when we celebrate Women’s Day, we can take stock of many women who have the ears of powerful decision-makers, important leaders in academia, art, media and business, and look at the potent role they play.
Like Michelle Obama, many of them are not Stepford wives anymore, on the contrary, these days they are likely to be career women, competent mothers or homemakers, either one or a combination of all three.
But then there is the fourth role: to provide their men with a sense of stability, balance and, dare I say, sanity in a fast-and-faster challenging world.
Thankfully, for more and more women today, it is a question of choice, not fate. ▲
Michal Leon, practising executive and life coach in Cape Town, has been involved in leadership development and in management both in Israel and in South Africa for over 22 years. Closely involved in politics both personally (being Tony Leon’s wife) and professionally (as a coach for politicians and political staff over the past two years) as well as an Israel Broadcast Authority (Kol Israel) radio reporter in South Africa.
Michal resided temporarily in Washington, DC from October to December 2008.
www.tmlcoaching.co.za
MICHELLE OBAMA
Five things you
(maybe) did not
know about
Michelle Obama
1. Her approval rate at the start of her husband’s primaries campaign was poor (35%) – she was seen as a complainer, talked about America as being “just downright mean, and lazy, and cynical”, how life for most people had “gotten progressively worse throughout [her] lifetime”. Conservative critics dubbed her “Mrs Grievance”, depicting a bitter and anti-American. It was so bad that Obama had to defend her patriotism and call the attacks on her “detestable”.
2. She is the first cousin, once removed, of Rabbi Capers C. Funnye Jr, one of the United States’ leading black rabbis.
3. She loves to touch and hug people and says it is her way of disarming any intimidation people may feel in the presence of “the
First Lady“.
4. Michelle’s salary just before she became a full-time campaigner for her husband was $273 618 (R2 325 800 in today’s terms) from the University of Chicago Hospitals, while her husband had a salary of $157 082 (R1 335 200) as a US Senator. However, the total Obama household income was $991 296 (R8 426 020!), which included $51 200 (R435 200) she earned as a member of the board of directors of TreeHouse Foods, as well as investments and royalties from Barack Obama’s very successful books.
5. In 1993, Michelle became the executive director for the Chicago office of Public Allies, a non-profit organisation encouraging young people to work on social issues in non-profit groups and government agencies. She worked there for nearly four years, showing a great talent for fund-raising (an activity she later said – in the political context –
she absolutely hated).
