and also, as the situation required, a classy woman. She was all of that, and yet to some voters she was a not a reassuring figure.
Michelle Obama is not ascetic like her husband. She has long been familiar with Chicago’s chicest clothing stores, and she’ll “eat a cheeseburger in a heartbeat,” said Cheryl Rucker-Whitaker, her close friend from Chicago (Rucker-Whitaker’s husband, Eric, is a friend of Obama’s from Harvard days and often plays basketball with him). Michelle’s favorite drink, said Rucker-Whitaker, is champagne. “She likes clothes, she’s always loved clothes, she loves purses, she loves getting a manicure, getting her hair done. She really is a girly girl.” Tall and beautiful, she caused flutters (and raised a few eyebrows) when she appeared onstage at a victory celebration dressed in a soignée, early-’60s style reminiscent of Jacqueline Kennedy. She was a Princeton and Harvard Law grad, formidable and elegant but at the same time playful. While her husband was a dreamer and serious, she was the practical one and a bit of a jokester and teaser. There was no doubting their physical attraction. Reporters liked to snicker at how much looser the candidate seemed after spending the occasional night at home or on the road with his wife.
She was also more deeply rooted in black America than Obama, whose mother had been white and who had grown up in Hawaii and Indonesia. Though no one on the Obama staff talked about it much, there was no doubt that Michelle’s self-conscious blackness was unsettling to that narrow but important slice of swing voters, the so-called Reagan Democrats, older working-class voters in the Rust Belt swing states of Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Michelle was from the South Side of Chicago; the white political machine of Chicago had intentionally segregated Chicago, cutting off the South Side with a highway, and racial politics were played hard in the place Michelle grew up. At Princeton in the early 1980s, Michelle felt like an outsider at an elitist college that began taking blacks only after World War II. Her senior thesis for the sociology department examined whether African-American graduates of Princeton identified with “white society” as they enjoyed upward mobility. Beneath its academic formalism, her writing has a rueful quality—she clearly (and accurately) expected to be drawn into the white world upon graduation, but wrote that, even so, she expected to “remain on the periphery of society; never becoming a full participant.” In fact, she became a lawyer at a fancy Chicago law firm (where she met her future husband, who was interning for the summer from Harvard) and later a high-level hospital administrator. But she never forgot her roots. When some African-Americans began grumbling that her husband was not “black enough,” Michelle was the one who directly confronted the issue, bluntly telling a South Side of Chicago crowd, “Stop that nonsense.”
For the most part, Michelle Obama was a poised and confident campaigner. But in late February, when her husband was on a roll, winning caucus after caucus, she slipped up. She told a Milwaukee audience, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country, because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.” The Republicans quickly jumped on the intimation that she had not been proud of her country before then. The next day, Cindy McCain told a rally, “I’m proud of my country. I don’t know about you—if you heard those words earlier—I’m very proud of my country.” Right-wing talk radio began to portray Michelle as a latter-day Angela Davis, a fire-breathing ’60s-type black radical, but the mainstream press steered clear of any race baiting. So did the Clinton campaign. In March, Mark Penn suggested that the campaign target Obama’s “lack of American roots,” and drape Hillary in the flag as much as possible. The idea seemed to be to subtly emphasize Obama’s “otherness.” To the Clintons’ credit, they chose not to go down this route, at least not in any overt way.
Sometimes it seemed as though Hillary Clinton’s campaign staffers were more interested in destroying each other than Obama. Patti Solis Doyle was finally fired on Feb. 10, and a messy scene greeted her replacement, Maggie Williams.
Staffers were trying to work, sort of, and ignore the sounds coming from the office of communications director Howard Wolfson. “He’s going to ruin this f–––ing campaign!” shouted Phil Singer, Wolfson’s deputy. No one was quite sure who “he” was, but most assumed it was Penn, the chief strategist who was in more or less constant conflict with Hillary’s other top advisers. Wolfson said something indistinct in response, and Singer cut loose, “F––– you, Howard,” and stormed out of his office. Policy director Neera Tanden had the misfortune of standing in his path. “F––– you, too!” screamed Singer. “F––– you,” Tanden started. “And the whole f–––ing cabal,” Singer, now standing on a chair, shouted loudly enough to be heard by the entire war room. “I’m done.” Within a week or two Singer was back, still steaming and swearing. “If the house is on fire, would you rather have a psychotic fireman or no fireman at all?” Wolfson explained to Williams. A former top aide to Bill Clinton, Williams was regarded as a grown-up, but she wasn’t eager to play hall monitor. She had been living quietly with her husband on Long Island, away from the Clinton melodrama, and she didn’t appear to have her heart in the battle when a reporter later met with her in the spring of 2008. At the time, commentators were beginning to accuse Hillary of running as the White Candidate. An African-American woman, Williams seemed almost despondent worrying about the effect on young staffers, black and white, of being accused of racism.
Even though the campaign raised more than $100 million before Iowa, money was chronically short. “The cupboard is bare,” Harold Ickes announced after New Hampshire at a stunned staff meeting. No one seemed quite sure where it had all gone, though there were a lot of bitter jokes about Hillary’s penchant for G4 business jets and Mark Penn’s hefty bills for polling and direct mail. Fundraising was getting tougher that winter. A top aide told a NEWSWEEK reporter, “Our donors were so disillusioned, particularly with Bill Clinton. The whole Clinton mishegoss—people said, if she can’t control him in the campaign, how could she control him in the White House? We took a pounding.” The campaign aides suggested that the Clintons loan $5 million from their personal fortune before the Super Tuesday primaries on Feb. 5. “Let’s do it,” Bill Clinton said immediately, but Solis Doyle could hear hesitation in Hillary’s voice. She came around, and when word got out that she was tapping her own money, contributions poured in—many from women.
Shortly after Williams took over, she called a major meeting for senior staff. Penn was given the floor, and he began to walk through all the iterations of Hillary slogans: […continued on page 4]