Barack now traveled with a swarm of attentive aides, and I was allotted funds to hire a two-person staff of my own, which given that I planned to volunteer only two or three days per week to the campaign seemed like plenty to me. I had no idea what I needed in terms of support. Melissa Winter, who was my first hire and would later become my chief of staff, had been recommended by Barack’s scheduler. She’d worked in Senator Joe Lieberman’s office on Capitol Hill and had been involved in his 2000 vice presidential campaign. I interviewed Melissa—blond, bespectacled, and in her late thirties—in our living room in Chicago and was impressed by her irreverent wit and almost obsessive devotion to detail, which I knew would be important as I tried to integrate campaigning into my already-busy schedule at the hospital. She was sharp, highly efficient, and quick moving. She’d also been around politics enough to be unfazed by its intensity and pace. Just a few years younger than I was, Melissa also felt more like a peer and an ally than the much younger campaign workers I’d encountered. She would become someone I trusted—as I do still, to this day—with literally every part of my life.
Katie McCormick Lelyveld rounded out our little trio by coming on board as my communications director. Not yet thirty, she’d already worked on a presidential campaign and also for Hillary Clinton when she was First Lady, which made her experience doubly relevant. Spunky, intelligent, and always perfectly dressed, Katie would be in charge of wrangling reporters and TV crews, making sure our events were well covered and also—thanks to the leather briefcase she kept packed with stain remover, breath mints, a sewing kit, and an extra pair of nylons—that I didn’t make a mess of myself as we sprinted between airplanes and events.
* * *
Over the years, I’d seen news coverage of presidential candidates making their way around Iowa, awkwardly interrupting tables full of unassuming citizens having coffee at diners, or posing goofily in front of a full-sized cow carved out of butter or eating fried whatevers-on-a-stick at the state fair. What was meaningful to voters and what was just grandstanding, though, I wasn’t quite sure.
Barack’s advisers had tried to demystify Iowa for me, explaining that my mission was primarily to spend time with Democrats in every corner of the state, addressing small groups, energizing volunteers, and trying to win over leaders in the community. Iowans, they said, took their role as political trendsetters seriously. They did their homework on candidates and asked serious policy questions. Accustomed as they were to months of careful courtship, they were not likely to be won over with a smile and a handshake, either. Some would hold out for months, I was told, expecting a face-to-face conversation with every candidate before finally committing to one. What they didn’t tell me was what my message in Iowa was supposed to be. I was given no script, no talking points, no advice. I figured I’d just work it out for myself.
My first solo campaign event took place in early April inside a modest home in Des Moines. A few dozen people had collected in the living room, sitting on couches and folding chairs that had been brought in for the occasion, while others sat cross-legged on the floor. As I scanned the room, preparing to speak, what I observed probably shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did, at least a little. Laid out on the end tables were the same sorts of white crocheted doilies that my grandmother Shields used to have at her house. I spotted porcelain figurines that looked just like the ones Robbie had kept on her shelves downstairs from us on Euclid Avenue. A man in the front row was smiling at me warmly. I was in Iowa, but I had the distinct feeling of being at home. Iowans, I was realizing, were like Shieldses and Robinsons. They didn’t suffer fools. They didn’t trust people who put on airs. They could sniff out a phony a mile away.
My job, I realized, was to be myself, to speak as myself. And so I did.
“Let me tell you about me. I’m Michelle Obama, raised on the South Side of Chicago, in a little apartment on the top floor of a two-story house that felt a lot like this one. My dad was a water-pump operator for the city. My mom stayed at home to raise my brother and me.”
I talked about everything—about my brother and the values we were raised with, about this hotshot lawyer I met at work, the guy who’d stolen my heart with his groundedness and his vision for the world, the man who’d left his socks lying around the house that morning and sometimes snored in his sleep. I told them about how I was keeping my job at the hospital, about how my mother was picking our girls up from school that day.
I didn’t sugarcoat my feelings about politics. The political world was no place for good people, I said, explaining how I’d been conflicted about whether Barack should run at all, worried about what the spotlight might do to our family. But I was standing before them because I believed in my husband and what he could do. I knew how much he read and how deeply he thought about things. I said that he was exactly the kind of smart, decent president I would choose for this country, even if selfishly I’d have rather kept him closer to home all these years.
As weeks went by, I’d tell the same story—in Davenport, Cedar Rapids, Council Bluffs; in Sioux City, Marshalltown, Muscatine—in bookstores, union halls, a home for aging military veterans, and, as the weather warmed up, on front porches and in public parks. The more I told my story, the more my voice settled into itself. I liked my story. I was comfortable telling it. And I was telling it to people who despite the difference in skin color reminded me of my family—postal workers who had bigger dreams just as Dandy once had; civic-minded piano teachers like Robbie; stay-at-home moms who were active in the PTA like my mother; blue-collar workers who’d do anything for their families, just like my dad. I didn’t need to practice or use notes. I said only what I sincerely felt.
Along the way, reporters and even some acquaintances began asking me some form of the same question: What was it like to be a five-foot-eleven, Ivy League–educated black woman speaking to roomfuls of mostly white Iowans? How odd did that feel?
I never liked this question. It always seemed to be accompanied by a sheepish half smile and the don’t-take-this-the-wrong-way inflection that people often use when approaching the subject of race. It was an idea, I felt, that sold us all short, assuming that the differences were all anyone saw.
Mainly I bristled because the question was so antithetical to what I was experiencing and what the people I was meeting seemed to be experiencing, too—the man with a seed-corn logo on his breast pocket, the college student in a black-and-gold pullover, the retiree who’d brought an ice cream bucket full of sugar cookies she’d frosted with our rising-sun campaign logo. These people found me after my talks, seeming eager to talk about what we shared—to say that their dad had lived with MS, too, or that they’d had grandparents just like mine. Many said they’d never gotten involved with politics before but something about our campaign made them feel it would be worth it. They were planning to volunteer at the local office, they said, and they’d try persuading a spouse or neighbor to come along, too.
These interactions felt natural, genuine. I found myself hugging people instinctively and getting hugged tightly back.
* * *
It was around this time that I took Malia to our pediatrician for a well-child visit, which we did every three to six months to keep tabs on the asthma she’d had since she was a baby. The asthma was under control, but the doctor alerted me to something else—Malia’s body mass index, a measure of health that factors together height, weight, and age, was beginning to creep up. It wasn’t a crisis, he said, but it was a trend to take seriously. If we didn’t change some habits, it could become a real problem over time, increasing her risk for high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes. Seeing the stricken look on my face, he assured me that the problem was both common and solvable. The rate of childhood obesity was rising all around the country. He’d seen many examples in his practice, which was made up mostly of working-class African Americans.