at the airport in the mornings and hustling through security, where the guards all knew my name. I was recognized more often now, mostly by African American women who’d call out “Michelle! Michelle!” as I walked past them to the gate.
Something was changing, so gradually that at first it was hard to register. I sometimes felt as if I were floating through a strange universe, waving at strangers who acted as if they knew me, boarding planes that lifted me out of my normal world. I was becoming known. And I was becoming known for being someone’s wife and as someone involved with politics, which made it doubly and triply weird.
Working a rope line during campaign events had become like trying to stay upright inside a hurricane, I’d found, with well-meaning, deeply enthusiastic strangers reaching for my hands and touching my hair, people trying to thrust pens, cameras, and babies at me without warning. I’d smile, shake hands, and hear stories, all the while trying to move forward down the line. Ultimately, I’d emerge, with other people’s lipstick on my cheeks and handprints on my blouse, looking as if I’d just stepped out of a wind tunnel.
I had little time to think much about it, but quietly I worried that as my visibility as Barack Obama’s wife rose, the other parts of me were dissolving from view. When I spoke to reporters, they rarely asked about my work. They inserted “Harvard-educated” in their description of me, but generally left it at that. A couple of news outlets had published stories speculating that I’d been promoted at the hospital not due to my own hard work and merit but because of my husband’s growing political stature, which was painful to read. In April, Melissa called me one day at home to let me know about a snarky column written by Maureen Dowd of the New York Times. In it, she referred to me as a “princess of South Chicago,” suggesting that I was emasculating Barack when I spoke publicly about how he didn’t pick up his socks or put the butter back in the fridge. For me, it had always been important that people see Barack as human and not as some otherworldly savior. Maureen Dowd would have preferred, apparently, that I adopt the painted-on smile and the adoring gaze. I found it odd and sad that such a harsh critique would come from another professional woman, someone who had not bothered to get to know me but was now trying to shape my story in a cynical way.
I tried not to take this stuff personally, but sometimes it was hard not to.
With every campaign event, every article published, every sign we might be gaining ground, we became slightly more exposed, more open to attack. Crazy rumors swirled about Barack: that he’d been schooled in a radical Muslim madrassa and sworn into the Senate on a Koran. That he refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. That he wouldn’t put his hand over his heart during the national anthem. That he had a close friend who was a domestic terrorist from the 1970s. The falsehoods were routinely debunked by reputable news sources but still blazed through anonymous email chains, forwarded not just by basement conspiracy theorists but also by uncles and colleagues and neighbors who couldn’t separate fact from fiction online.
Barack’s safety was something I didn’t want to think about, let alone discuss. So many of us had been brought up with assassinations on the news at night. The Kennedys had been shot. Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot. Ronald Reagan had been shot. John Lennon had been shot. If you drew too much heat, you bore a certain risk. But then again, Barack was a black man. The risk, for him, was nothing new. “He could get shot just going to the gas station,” I sometimes tried to remind people when they brought it up.
Beginning in May, Barack had been assigned Secret Service protection. It was the earliest a presidential candidate had been given a protective detail ever, a full year and a half before he could even become president-elect, which said something about the nature and the seriousness of the threats against him. Barack now traveled in sleek black SUVs provided by the government and was trailed by a team of suited, ear-pieced men and women with guns. At home, an agent stood guard on our front porch.