First Lady Michelle Obama
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The Obamas' marriage has a history of tension around chores: as his career took him away for long stretches, Barack admitted, "my failure to clean up the kitchen suddenly became less endearing." Michelle smiles about this and says, "That's off the table." Now they live in a house with 35 bathrooms and in which all domestic tasks are taken care of. "She thinks it's nice that people play 'Hail to the Chief,'" the President says. "But I still am expected for family dinner on time, and I still have to walk the dog." He gets the night shift, Michelle says. "That's usually right before bed. It's like 10 p.m. We sort of handle Bo like we did the kids. I'm the early-morning person ... Once I go to bed, I don't care what happens. Just make sure the dog doesn't have an accident." She talks about the dog with the smitten tone of a girl who never had one of her own before. She walks him frequently, sometimes every couple of hours. "He's getting to the point where he can be naughty," she says, "like you walk in the room and it's like, 'Where'd you get that sock?'" The family has learned to limit Bo's range of potential destruction by keeping doors closed. "We try to set him up for success," she says with a knowing smile.
Maybe this is what women watching her covet: not the clothes or the glamour or the glory, but the fact that she seems to be having a blast, in a way Laura Bush and the rest never did. After working hard for 20 years, she gets to take a sabbatical, spend as much time as she wants with her kids, do as many high-impact public events as she chooses and, when it's all over, have the rest of her life to write the next chapter. "I don't even know what that is yet," she says, but she'll have choices then, as she has now, that most working mothers only dream of.
Division of Labor
Ask anyone in the East Wing how Michelle sees the role of First Lady and you hear a lot about "supporting the President's agenda." But what happens if she disagrees with her husband about some policy he's embraced? "I'm sure I do what every spouse does," she says, as though their potential disagreements are in any way like any other couple's. "We'll have conversations, and we'll share our opinions over the course of the conversation. But I don't want to have a say. Really, there are a lot of times when I'm like, Don't tell me what happened today at work. I just don't want to hear it, because I want the home space to really be free of that." Unlike in the Clinton White House, when a member of the First Lady's staff was in nearly every important meeting, Michelle does not send an emissary to key policy debates or the 7:30 a.m. meeting in chief of staff Rahm Emanuel's office. But no one who heard her on the campaign trail can imagine for a minute that she doesn't have strong views on many issues, or that her husband doesn't know what they are.
She has dropped some of the traditional baggage that First Ladies have hauled around for eons, passing up this gala or that benefit for the first time since Bess Truman's day and planting her famous garden to teach a lesson about healthy eating. Like all First Ladies, Michelle will at some point do or say something that gets her in trouble, and it won't just be wearing $540 sneakers to work in the food bank, the way she did last month.