By Jim Geraghty
Thursday, June 05, 2025
Let’s begin with the full quote, in context. Former first
lady Michelle Obama appeared on a podcast hosted by British entrepreneur and
investor Steven Bartlett, discussing a wide variety of topics. At one
point, she addressed her fears when her husband chose to run for president, and
won:
How do you raise kids in the White
House? It’s dangerous. As the first black potential president, we knew there
would be death threats. There were just all the — how would we afford it?
Because it’s, it’s expensive to live in the White House! As many people don’t
know, I mean, much is not covered. You’re paying for every food — every bit of
food that you eat. You know, you’re not paying for housing and the staff in it,
but everything, even travel if you’re not traveling with the president if your
kids are coming on a Bright Star, which is the first lady’s plane — we had to
pay for their travel to be on the plane. It is an expensive proposition, and
you’re running for two years, and not earning an income. So, all of that was in
my mind. How would we manage this?
As Meghan McCain quipped, “It would be cool if Michelle
Obama had literally anything positive to say about anything.” (Remember, there
is a “no whining” rule in the Obama household — or at least that’s what Michelle Obama told us back in 2008.)
The Obamas entered the White House with a net worth of
$1.3 million dollars, which would be about
$2 million in today’s dollars. As a U.S. senator, Obama was making $174,000
per year. Sales from his memoir, Dreams from My Father, increased the couple’s
income considerably; he made $1.2 million from book sales in 2005 and
$551,240 in 2006. Michelle had stepped down from her position at the University
of Chicago Medical Center, where her income had been about $265,000 a year.
You know who else pays for “every bit of food” that their
children eat? Just about every other family in the country.
There is a stereotype of wives always worrying about
money. It almost seems like a joke: that Barack Obama had just been elected to
a job where he would make $400,000 per year — $605,000 in today’s dollars — and
live rent-free for a four year period with the chance for the same deal for
another four years, plus all of the lucrative opportunities for memoir-writing,
paid speeches, and other deals former presidents and former first ladies get,
and Michelle was worried about how the family would be able to afford the
handful of expenses that were not picked up by the U.S. taxpayer.
In Republican circles, it’s not that hard to find those
who believe the Obamas were the power behind the throne in the previous
presidency, or that Barack Obama was a “shadow president” during the Biden years.
And no doubt, when either Obama calls, every Democrat answers the phone
quickly. But there’s one somewhat glaring counterargument to the theory that
the Obamas remain the secret godfathers of the Democratic Party.
As the new Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes book Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House
makes clear, Barack and Michelle Obama thought quite poorly of Kamala Harris.
It may well have gone back to 2013, when Barack Obama caused a bit of a stir by
calling Harris “the best-looking attorney general in the country.” (In the
video at the link, Obama is defended by, er, Charlie Rose.)
Allen and Parnes write:
Harris let him twist for a day
declining to comment. The most important woman in Obama’s life, his wife
Michelle, found irritation in both his remark and Harris’ silence. In order to
win Harris’ forgiveness, the president was forced to call her and apologize.
Apparently in the interim decade, the Obamas never grew
that impressed with the vice president, and didn’t think Harris should be
handed the Democratic nomination without a fight. Page 154:
. . . Obama still had deep
misgivings about Harris — and a hankering for an intraparty fight. “He did not
think she should be the candidate,” said one confidant. He liked the idea of
Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer at the top of the ticket and Maryland
governor Wes Moore at the bottom — a combination that would still allow
Democrats to rally around a woman and a person of color — but he was mostly
certain he didn’t want a coronation of Harris.
Harris called Barack Obama the afternoon that Joe Biden
withdrew from the race, hoping for an endorsement; he declined to endorse her.
Remember that weird
video that emerged five days after Biden’s withdrawal, showcasing the
Obamas’ endorsement of Harris? That was apparently all the Obamas’ idea:
Harris aides were taken aback when
they heard what they believed was a demand from the Obamas. The former first
couple was purportedly insisting on a campy behind-the-scenes video of Harris
taking their call. She would be on camera, but not the Obamas, and Harris would
have to clear her calendar to align with theirs.
“It was like, ‘here’s the window of
time that Michelle and Barack have for you to take this call, and it can’t be
on video because Michelle’s not going to be camera-ready,” said one aide
familiar with the discussions. “They want you on video, recording the call, so
you have to be on camera. . . .”
To seem real, Harris had to fake
surprise and enthusiasm about what should have been an obvious endorsement from
both Obamas. It took days of intense negotiations to strike a deal on the
simplest act in politics. The whole frame, including the script, was designed
to elevate the Obamas by making it look like she was begging for their
blessing.
The one time since leaving office that Barack Obama has
felt strongly about the direction of the Democratic Party was in the summer of
last year, where he put his efforts into derailing the nomination of Harris.
And as far as we can tell, Obama’s efforts went nowhere. No one even bothered
to formally challenge Harris for the nomination.
For more than eight years now, the Democrats who adored
Obama from 2008 to 2016 have grappled with a particularly thorny question: If
he was such a great president, why did the country elect Donald Trump in 2016?
Sure, Hillary Clinton was a deeply flawed candidate, but the electorate doesn’t
roll the dice on a complete outsider and human wrecking ball like Trump unless
they’ve lost all hope from traditional avenues of reform. By the autumn of
2016, two-thirds of Americans said the country was on the wrong track, and just 28 percent told Gallup they were “satisfied with the
way things are going in the United States at this time.”
And more than a few Democrats have concluded that Obama
wasn’t such a great president. They conclude he compromised too much, that he was “the last gasp of neoliberalism,” that his failures birthed Trumpism, and in the final
catastrophic mistake, he picked Joe Biden off the scrap heap in 2008 and
elevated him to the position of his successor within the party. (Had Obama
picked Indiana Senator Evan Bayh instead, our entire modern political history would have turned out
differently.)
We aren’t just in the post-Obama era; we’re the in the post-post-Obama
era. Barack and Michelle are now mostly celebrities, subject to divorce speculation as intense as for any Hollywood couple.
No one in the Democratic Party seriously thinks a retired president can lead
them out of the wilderness; when Obama salutes
Harvard for standing up to Trump, it barely creates a ripple in the news
cycle. When the former president marked the anniversary of signing Obamacare
into law earlier this year, he
acknowledged, “I know it can feel like a different era sometimes.”
Perhaps when your time has passed, and you see your party
and your country moving in an extremely different direction than the one you
wanted, it leaves you pessimistic and focused on the negative of everything —
including living in the White House for eight years.
Speaking of Michelle Obama . . .
I wonder how many people in the “MAHA” movement — “Make
America Healthy Again” — who are currently cheering Robert F. Kennedy Jr. now
felt about Michelle Obama back in 2008. Back then, the future first lady was saying
things like:
“You know,” she said, “in my
household, over the last year we have just shifted to organic for this very
reason. I mean, I saw just a moment in my nine-year-old’s life — we have a good
pediatrician, who is very focused on childhood obesity, and there was a period
where he was, like, ‘Mmm, she’s tipping the scale.’ So we started looking
through our cabinets. . . . You know, you’ve got fast food on Saturday, a
couple days a week you don’t get home. The leftovers, good, not the third day!
. . . So that whole notion of cooking on Sunday is out. . . . And the notion of
trying to think about a lunch every day! . . . So you grab the Lunchables,
right? And the fruit-juice-box thing, and we think — we think — that’s
juice. And you start reading the labels and you realize there’s high-fructose
corn syrup in everything we’re eating. Every jelly, every juice. Everything
that’s in a bottle or a package is like poison in a way that most people don’t
even know. . . . Now we’re keeping, like, a bowl of fresh fruit in the house.
But you have to go to the fruit stand a couple of times a week to keep that
fruit fresh enough that a six-year-old — she’s not gonna eat the pruney grape,
you know. At that point it’s, like, ‘Eww!’ She’s not gonna eat the brown
banana or the shrivelledy-up things. It’s got to be fresh for them to want it.
Who’s got time to go to the fruit stand? Who can afford it, first of all?”
I guess all those worries about artificial sweeteners,
preservatives, etc. sound a lot more plausible when they come from the guy with
brain worms who dumps baby bear carcasses and decapitates whales.
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