I was still thinking about Mandela five days later as we flew back to the United States, traveling north and west over Africa and then across the Atlantic over the course of a long dark night. Sasha and Malia lay sprawled beneath blankets next to their cousins; my mother dozed in a seat nearby. Farther back in the plane, staff and Secret Service members were watching movies and catching up on sleep. The engines hummed. I felt alone and not alone. We were headed home—home being the strange-familiar city of Washington, D.C., with its white marble and clashing ideologies, with everything that still needed to be fought and won. I thought about the young African women I’d met at the leadership forum, all of them now headed back to their own communities to pick up their work again, persevering through whatever tumult they faced.
Mandela had gone to jail for his principles. He’d missed seeing his kids grow up, and then he’d missed seeing many of his grandkids grow up, too. All this without bitterness. All this still believing that the better nature of his country would at some point prevail. He’d worked and waited, tolerant and undiscouraged, to see it happen.
I flew home propelled by that spirit. Life was teaching me that progress and change happen slowly. Not in two years, four years, or even a lifetime. We were planting seeds of change, the fruit of which we might never see. We had to be patient.
* * *
Three times over the course of the fall of 2011, Barack proposed bills that would create thousands of jobs for Americans, in part by giving states money to hire more teachers and first responders. Three times the Republicans blocked them, never even allowing a vote.
“The single most important thing we want to achieve,” the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, had declared to a reporter a year earlier, laying out his party’s goals, “is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” It was that simple. The Republican Congress was devoted to Barack’s failure above all else. It seemed they weren’t prioritizing the governance of the country or the fact that people needed jobs. Their own power came first.
I found it demoralizing, infuriating, sometimes crushing. This was politics, yes, but in its most fractious and cynical form, seemingly disconnected from any larger sense of purpose. I felt emotions that perhaps Barack couldn’t afford to feel. He stayed locked in his work, for the most part undaunted, riding out the bumps and compromising where he could, clinging to the sober-minded, someone’s-gotta-take-this-on brand of optimism that had always guided him. He’d been in politics for fifteen years now. I continued to think of him as being like an old copper pot—seasoned by fire, dinged up but still shiny.
Returning to the campaign trail—as Barack and I began to do in the fall of 2011—became something of a salve. It took us out of Washington and returned us to communities all around the country again, places like Richmond and Reno, where we could hug and shake hands with supporters, listening to their ideas and concerns. It was a chance to feel the grassroots energy that has always been so central to Barack’s vision of democracy, and to be reminded that American citizens are for the most part far less cynical than their elected leaders. We just needed them to get out and vote. I’d been disappointed that millions of people had sat out during the 2010 midterm elections, effectively handing Barack a divided Congress that could barely manage to make a law.
Despite the challenges, there was plenty to feel hopeful about, too. By the end of 2011, the last American soldiers had left Iraq; a gradual drawdown of troops was under way in Afghanistan. Major provisions of the Affordable Care Act had also gone into effect, with young people allowed to remain longer on their parents’ insurance policies and companies prevented from capping a patient’s lifetime coverage. All this was forward motion, I reminded myself, steps taken along the broader path.
Even with an entire political party conspiring to see Barack fail, we had no choice but to stay positive and carry on. It was similar to when the Sidwell mom had asked Malia if she feared for her life at tennis practice. What can you do, really, but go out and hit another ball?
So we worked. Both of us worked. I threw myself into my initiatives. Under the banner of Let’s Move! we continued to rack up results. My team and I persuaded Darden Restaurants, the parent company behind chains like Olive Garden and Red Lobster, to make changes to the kinds of food it offered and how it was prepared. They pledged to revamp their menus, cutting calories, reducing sodium, and offering healthier options for kids’ meals. We’d appealed to the company’s executives—to their conscience as well as their bottom line—convincing them that the culture of eating in America was shifting and it made good business sense to get out ahead of the curve. Darden served 400 million meals to Americans each year. At that scale, even a small shift—like removing tantalizing photos of cool, icy glasses of soda from the kids’ menus—could have a real impact.
A First Lady’s power is a curious thing—as soft and undefined as the role itself. And yet I was learning to harness it. I had no executive authority. I didn’t command troops or engage in formal diplomacy. Tradition called for me to provide a kind of gentle light, flattering the president with my devotion, flattering the nation primarily by not challenging it. I was beginning to see, though, that wielded carefully the light was more powerful than that. I had influence in the form of being something of a curiosity—a black First Lady, a professional woman, a mother of young kids. People seemed to want to dial into my clothes, my shoes, and my hairstyles, but they also had to see me in the context of where I was and why. I was learning how to connect my message to my image, and in this way I could direct the American gaze. I could put on an interesting outfit, crack a joke, and talk about sodium content in kids’ meals without being totally boring. I could publicly applaud a company that was actively hiring members of the military community, or drop to the floor for an on-air push-up contest with Ellen DeGeneres （and win it, earning gloating rights forever） in the name of Let’s Move!
I was a child of the mainstream, and this was an asset. Barack sometimes referred to me as “Joe Public,” asking me to weigh in on campaign slogans and strategies, knowing that I kept myself happily steeped in popular culture. Though I’d moved through rarefied places like Princeton and Sidley & Austin, and though I now occasionally found myself wearing diamonds and a ball gown, I’d never stopped reading People magazine or let go of my love of a good sitcom. I watched Oprah and Ellen far more often than I’d ever tuned in to Meet the Press or Face the Nation, and to this day nothing pleases me more than the tidy triumph delivered by a home-makeover show.
All of this is to say that I saw ways to connect with Americans that Barack and his West Wing advisers didn’t fully recognize, at least initially. Rather than doing interviews with big newspapers or cable news outlets, I began sitting down with influential “mommy bloggers” who reached an enormous and dialed-in audience of women. Watching my young staffers interact with their phones, seeing Malia and Sasha start to take in news and chat with their high school friends via social media, I realized there was opportunity to be tapped there as well. I crafted my first tweet in the fall of 2011 to promote Joining Forces and then watched it zing through the strange, boundless ether where people increasingly spent their time.