The Worst Wing
❧ How the East Wing Shrank Michelle Obama

March 24, 2014
By Reid Cherlin

In the fall of 2010, the nasty midterms drawing to a close, Michelle Obama was contemplating her next move. Two years into her tenure as first lady, the breathless fixation on guest lists and china selections was subsiding into routine, and she wanted a plan for the rest of her husband’s time in office. Of course, her calendar would never lack for National Hostess duties—the obligatory social functions outlined in binders left by Laura Bush’s team. She had already launched Let’s Move!, the childhood obesity initiative, and Joining Forces, a program to help military families and veterans, was also in the works. But she wondered whether she should do more. And so the first lady directed her staff to conduct a review of her options and to hire a top-flight communications director to lead the effort. Some palace watchers had been underwhelmed so far by her agenda, and this was an opportunity to prove these critics wrong.

Perhaps no first lady in recent memory has entered the stately recesses of the East Wing under a higher burden of expectation than Michelle Obama. From her earliest appearances on the 2008 campaign trail, it was clear that she possessed rare political gifts. Like Hillary Clinton before her, she was an accomplished lawyer with policy smarts. But unlike Clinton, she was also an electrifying speaker, able to translate her husband’s lofty agenda into a grounded, commonsense morality. When Michelle Obama entered the White House in 2009, she attracted staffers eager to bring about the policy prescriptions that she had so forcefully advocated on the trail...

Read on at The New Republic ➝