by Christi Parsons
YORK, Pa. -- Michelle Obama is pretending to take a call, thumb and pinkie finger up to her face, telling how she and her husband used to get calls from loan debt agents not that long ago.
"I remember those days clearly, sweating to get that mail," she said. "That collection agency, the loan debt people calling you telling you that you've got a few more days before you're in trouble."
Heads nod, and cries of "I know" and "That's right" erupt throughout her audience, a crowded theater of people who have turned out to see her speak on behalf of her presidential-candidate husband.
Michelle Obama's overriding message this day is that she knows hard times--and, more importantly, that her spouse, Barack Obama, gets it as well.
Everywhere she goes, Michelle Obama, a native of Chicago's South Side and daughter of a city pump operator, vouches for her husband's understanding of working-class struggles. The moment is more important than ever for Obama, who, by all accounts, rose from humble beginnings and isn't that far removed from financial struggle in his own life.
But he also emerged with Ivy League degrees and ultimately earned millions of dollars in book contracts, and it may be those details combined with his manner of soaring oratory that help fix the word "elite" in the lexicon critics use to describe him.
The perception has been a hurdle for Obama in his quest to finally lock up the Democratic nomination for president, a race he leads in pledged delegates and states won, as well as in the popular vote. Democrat Hillary Clinton's candidacy is still very much alive, though, in part because of support from white working-class voters who seem to relate to the granddaughter of a Scranton factory worker--who also has an Ivy League degree and book contracts to her name.
As Obama makes his appeal to those voters here and in other states with looming primaries, the campaign is dispatching Michelle Obama to help make the case.
See the rest of the story in the Tribune: Photo of Michelle Obama campaigning in York, Pa., by Mike Mergen, for the Tribune.
She has an obstacle or two to overcome toward that end: She's a Harvard Law School graduate who commanded an annual income of more than $300,000 in 2005, and her household's income last year exceeded $4 million.
Also, she doesn't come with documentation to back up her story about financial hardship. Asked to provide evidence of the Obamas' recent debt or contact from bill collectors, a campaign aide said the family was trying to find the personal records in response to a Tribune request last week but could not do so immediately.
But at the Obama event where she told the story last week, an appreciative audience took the story at face value.
A unique window
On the campaign trail, said one key supporter, Michelle Obama says things about her husband that he can't say about himself.
"She tells people who Barack Obama is, and not by reciting policy papers," said Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.), Obama's highest-ranking backer in Pennsylvania. "She gives people a window into what he is that only she could provide."
It's a role candidates' spouses have long been called upon to play, dating at least to 1920, when Florence Harding stood on the front porch of her home, shared recipes and spoke on behalf of her husband, Warren Harding.
Jackie Kennedy charmed ethnic communities in several languages. Barbara Bush's grandmotherly presence on the campaign trail made George H.W. Bush seem a kinder, gentler candidate. Librarian and teacher Laura Bush was a useful counterpoint to her husband's party-hard image.
In their case, as in Michelle Obama's, the power of the recommendation relies on the spouse's credentials.
"No one person really compensates for another, but her story does complement his," said Carl Sferrazza Anthony, author of 10 books on presidential wives and families and a historian at the National First Ladies' Library in Canton, Ohio. "And in telling those biographies of herself and her husband, she illustrates points that may not need to be specifically pounded out."
"She helps him make the case," said Anthony, "that he's 'just folks,' or 'regular people.' "
In fact, "regular people" and "regular folks" are phrases Michelle Obama used at least eight times while speaking to Obama supporters at the historic Strand Theater recently.
Just a few days prior, at a round-table session with working mothers in Harrisburg, N.C., she didn't exercise the exact phrases, but the sentiment dominated the morning conversation.
Gathered in a day-care center where their children are enrolled, the women talked about their struggles to get by. Seated in the center of their circle, Obama had a personal story to match every one of theirs.
'We get it'
Health insurance, child care, personal debt -- their struggles are her struggles and those of her family members, Obama told them, either now or in their very recent past.
"We are not so far away from life," she said. "We get it."
Several of the women embraced Obama as they left the discussion.
"She's just plain folk, you know?" one woman said to another.
In York, Michelle Obama's talk -- this time a speech aimed at a much larger audience -- is a treatise on the problems in modern America, informed and illustrated throughout with the stories of her life and that of her husband.
"People don't know about me and Barack," she said. "Sometimes they look at Harvard and Princeton, and that's all they see. But let me tell you who we are."
She's the product of a working-class family, she said, the daughter of a city pump operator and a stay-at-home mother.
"My father went to work every day, you know why?" she says. "Because he could raise a family of four on a city worker's salary. There was no magic to my life. ... My brother and I are proud products of neighborhood schools on the South Side of Chicago."
Her husband, she says, was born to a teenage single mother who sometimes relied on food stamps to feed her family.
'Like hitting the Lotto'
The two of them got into prestigious colleges and law schools, she says, but they only recently paid off their debt.
"The only reason we're not in debt today is because Barack wrote two best-selling books," she says. "That's like hitting the Lotto, because that was not a solid financial plan."
Before that, she says, she dreaded opening the mail because of the credit card bills she knew would be in it.
Today, Michelle Obama's financial picture is radically improved. She and her husband made millions off his books and reported a combined income last year of $4.2 million.
Still, many people in the York audience who say they're living much closer to the edge of the economy said they identify with Barack Obama and his wife.
"She talks to ordinary people, about people like me who want a job," said Ann Collier, a York resident and single mother of three. "I've never heard a politician speak to me that way. She just has a better understanding of where I come from."
They were 'who I still am'
Annabelle James, a retiree from York, said she sees strains of her own life in Michelle Obama's story, even if Obama's life is more fortunate now.
"She knows my experience," said James, a South Carolina native who says she was "born on Friday and went to work in the fields on Monday."
"I appreciate what they stand for. They were who I was, who I still am."
Even if it's politically smart, historian Anthony thinks it's notable that the Obamas embrace their humble origins.
"Some folks who were regular once sometimes like to run away from that, don't like to remember that they were regular once," he said. "Obama said, 'There was a time when my mother had to get food stamps.' "
Michelle Obama mentions that as a point of pride. That alone is meaningful to Therese McConville, who grew up on Chicago's North Shore but now lives in York, where she is an Obama volunteer.
"I admire the humble roots," said McConville, "and the resolve to make something of yourself."
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Comments
As near as I can figure, the Obamas together have always -- even at their poorest -- have made more money than my husband and I have. He works for a city and I'm self-employed. This year our net income? A bit more than $100,000.
And guess what? We have NEVER received calls from collection agencies. We pay our credit card off every month. I've never feared answering the phone. Why? Because we live within our means, and our means are a whole lot lower on the economic scale than hers.
Yes, she came from a middle class background. But to pretend she is still middle class is ludicrous and, frankly, insulting. Is this why they've not released earlier tax returns, because it would expose this "we were poor" nonsense as the fairy tale it is?
Posted by: Jen | April 20, 2008 7:47 AM
It's a Perfect Storm of an Affirmative Action candidacy. These rich Ivy Leaguer privleged politicians get a free ride cause of their race.
And they get to even thumb their nose (and in some cases even flip the finger), at all those who've they've stepped on along the way.
And the mainstream media just keeps lapping it all up.
No investigations into Obama's Radical Islamic connections in Kenya. No detailed examinations of his friendship with an American-born terrorist who happens to be a neighbor of his and hosted his very first fundraiser. No looking into his questionable "Chicago-style" fundraising tactics even with a guy whose now on trial in Federal Court.
Nope. It's a complete pass from the Liberal Media.
Posted by: Eric Dondero | April 20, 2008 7:55 AM
How far can Michelle Obama bend the truth before the MSM finally calls it an outright lie?
Mrs O: The truth about Michelle Obama's 'working class' credentials
By SHARON CHURCHER 23/02/08
The dress, a purple shift, is almost ludicrously simple. The pearls around her neck are fakes, each one the size of a gobstopper, and deliberately so.
It is clear that the woman gazing out from the cover of Newsweek magazine has a message for anyone caring to glance at the news stand.
Yes, Michelle Obama is a glamorous lawyer with a big salary, a bigger house and a husband with one hand on the Presidency, but never forget that this is also the little black girl from Chicago who overcame the odds to change the face of American politics.
Her impact on the race for the Democratic nomination has been enormous, and never more so than in the past few days, when victories in Hawaii and Wisconsin have seemed to give her husband near unstoppable momentum.
If Barack's gifted oratory has won the hearts of sophisticated young urbanites, it is Michelle who has delivered the crucial female vote and the support of the working classes, including the blacks and Hispanics who had once been solidly for Hillary Clinton.
Michelle's pitch is far from sophisticated, playing heavily on her humble beginnings and traditional values: "I was raised in a working-class family on the south Side of Chicago. That's how I identify myself, a working-class girl," she has told the voters, time after time.
It helps that she cuts a fine figure on the stump, tall and slender with a hair 'flip' reminiscent of Jackie Kennedy. And it does no harm that, while Barack, 46, comes from mixed Kenyan and white parentage, Michelle, 44, is authentically African-American, giving the Obamas an unmatched breadth of appeal.
Last week it seemed the mask had slipped when, speaking unscripted for once, a sharper, less emollient Michelle emerged. 'For the first time in my adult life I feel really proud of my country,' she said, an apparent lack of patriotism immediately seized on by her Republican opponents.
Yet even they have failed to scrutinise her seemingly remarkable story, or question how her homely rhetoric, full of jokes about Barack's domestic failings, squares with the reality.
When The Mail on Sunday went back to the gritty district of Chicago where Michelle LaVaughn Robinson was raised, we found a rather different picture from the one so single-mindedly promoted by Camp Obama.
Instead of the one-room tenement that now appears in most accounts of her upbringing, we found a well-kept neighbourhood of red-brick Arts and Craft-style houses which have long been home to respectable black families.
"Michelle was from a middle-class family," confirmed one of her long-time friends, Angela Acree.
"She came from a regular family. They had a nice home. It wasn't a mansion, but it was just fine. It was a decent neighbourhood."
The Robinsons grew up on the upper floor of a house built in the Twenties. Number 7436 South Euclid Avenue - a classical reference to the Greek mathematician which found an appropriate echo in Michelle's subsequent respect for traditional learning - even has a small garden, shaded by a large elm tree, and an ornate stone bench.
The South Side of Chicago has long had its share of gang-infested housing 'projects' but with the University of Chicago hospital close by, there were plenty of white professionals in the area as well as hard-working families in the Robinsons' own image.
No one could pretend they were rich and it is true that her father, Frasier Robinson, spent some time as a maintenance worker for Chicago's Department of Water Management.
However, he was a good deal more than the labourer that many seem to imagine.
Indeed, according to family friends, Michelle's father was a volunteer organiser for the city's Democratic Party, a by-word for machine politics in America, and his loyalty was rewarded with a well-paid engineering job at Chicago's water plant. Even before overtime, he earned $42,686 - 25 per cent more than High School teachers at the time.
Michelle's mother stayed at home and devoted her energies to her and her older brother Craig. Marian Robinson nurtured great ambitions for both her children, along with the traditional values which are now serving Michelle so well.
Television was all but banned in favour of homework, debates about the issues of the day and improving games of chess.
Bright and determined, Michelle was awarded a place at one of Chicago's first 'magnet' schools, which offered special programmes for gifted children. By the time she was 13, she was taking a college-level biology course.
Even as a child, she was not to be underestimated, says Craig, now 45, who works as the head basketball coach at high-flying Brown University. There was no doubt who was in charge.
"We had this game where we set up two rooms and played 'Office'," he recalled. "She was the secretary, and I was the boss. But she did everything. It was her game, and I kind of had nothing to do. My sister is a poor sport. She didn't like to lose."
She rarely did. Michelle beat huge competition to win a place studying sociology at Princeton, one of America's most venerable and expensive universities.
Once she had arrived amid the fauxgothic precincts, however, she found herself surrounded by spoilt white students from wealthy families. She, in contrast, was obliged to take out loans to pay her way and this rankled, as she revealed in a 1985 thesis.
The document, now locked away by the university until after the election in November, betrays an angry, campaigning brand of politics which in no way fits with the mild-mannered advocate of common sense now winning hearts and minds from coast to coast.
"My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'Blackness' than ever before," she wrote. "I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus, as if I don't really belong."
One solution, she continued, was to "utilise all of my present and future resources to benefit (the black) community first and foremost".
There was something of this same angry Michelle that inadvertently slipped out last week - although it will take far more than a minor hiccup like that to block Obama's sensational progress to the nomination.
There are those who, in any case, suggest that her ideological roots have always remained rather shallow and that, for the most part of her life, politics have been overshadowed by the straightforward business of 'getting on'.
Even at university, Michelle was well aware that there was more to life than politics, admitting in that same thesis that a 'high-paying position' could prove more attractive than a life of placards and late-night meetings.
It was little surprise to those who knew her at the time that it was commerce not campaigning that claimed her when she graduated with a law degree from Harvard, taking a post with Sidley Austin, an eminent Chicago law firm. Her specialist area was not human rights or family law, but the lucrative detail of copyright and trademark cases.
An acquaintance of Obama's family compares her with another political wife, another lawyer as it happens, with a keen interest in making money.
"Michelle is very much like Cherie Blair. She is a middle-class girl who has discovered that money is nice and doesn't see that as a contradiction with having radical beliefs," he said.
Chicago's veteran political consultant and pundit Joe Novak agrees, saying: "She [Michelle] is now motivated more by personal gain than by social consciousness.
"She saw her opportunities, and she took them."
The rewards have been significant. Despite the image she projects on the Newsweek cover, Michelle owns an impressive collection of diamond jewellery, designer outfits and £400-a-pair Jimmy Choo shoes.
When she is wooing working-class voters, however, she favours austere black skirts and white blouses. "Our lives are so close to normal, if there is such a thing when you're running for president," she declared during a campaign stop in Delaware, shortly before her husband's latest victories were announced.
"When I'm off the road, I'm going to Target [a U.S. chain store] to get the toilet paper."
She did not bother to mention, however, that the paper, like the rest of the family shopping, is taken to an £825,000 three-storey red-brick Georgian revival mansion, set amid beautifully manicured lawns in one of Chicago's most affluent districts.
Even the house became a source of controversy when it emerged that the wife of a Chicago slum landlord, Tony Rezko, helped them buy land to enlarge its grounds.
Renowned for leaving tenants of one of his squalid buildings without heat in the city's brutal winter, Rezko now is facing federal corruption charges.
More contentious still was Michelle's appointment as the £150,000-a-year vice-president of external affairs at the University of Chicago hospital in 2005.
It came only two months after Barack was sworn in as a U.S. senator, and was attacked by critics as a blatant attempt, critics claim, by the hospital's hierarchy to curry favour with her husband, in an era when some politicians want to rein in the vast profits of America's medical system.
They questioned why the wife of a committed Democrat would work for a hospital that has been accused of ruthless greed.
Michelle's image was further tarnished in May 2006, when it was revealed that the centre - despite earning some £50million a year - had refused to treat a man who could not afford to pay his bill. He died.
All of which has led some political veterans to accuse Michelle of the very lack of compassion and moral scruples that her husband has lambasted in his Republican rivals for the White House.
Unlike Hillary Clinton, they point out, neither Obama has endorsed far-reaching healthcare reforms.
Michelle also is under attack for joining the board of a food company where she allegedly took part in a 2005 decision to close a pickle and relish plant in La Junta, Colorado, putting 150 mostly Hispanic labourers out of work.
The small town was devastated.
"It totally amazed me when they closed it," said La Junta Mayor
Don Rizzuto, who had believed that Michelle and her husband were "the champions of the little guy".
In their most recently publicised tax returns, for 2005, the Obamas earned £800,000.
This included royalties from the senator's autobiography Dreams From My Father, and his £82,600 Senate salary.
Under a three-book deal which he subsequently-signed, he stands to earn at least £1million.
To Joe Novak, this only goes to prove that Michelle is distorting reality when she attempts to depict herself as a champion of the masses.
"For the past year (she and Barack) have jetted around the country with Oprah Winfrey and Robert De Niro, enjoying penthouse parties and living the high life," he said.
Perhaps, when she contrasts her current red-carpet lifestyle with the unassuming world of South Euclid Avenue, she genuinely may think that her childhood was impoverished. And the one thing that is certain about the incredible Mrs O is that she never intends to have to live that way again.
Find this story at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=517824&in_page_id=1879
©2008 Associated New Media
Posted by: LDW | April 20, 2008 8:47 AM
This woman is, like her husband, a scammer. They are typical nouveaux riche!
They lack integrity.
November? Clinton vs. McCain
Posted by: Sean McM | April 20, 2008 8:52 AM
They way they talk, McCain, Obama & Clinton, none have a grasp of the problem concerning health
Posted by: rawdawgbuffalo | April 20, 2008 10:16 AM
Here's an interesting take on Hillarys stand on NAFTA:
http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/416337
Posted by: Ken | April 20, 2008 10:50 AM
Here's an interesting take on Hillarys stand on NAFTA:
http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/416337
Posted by: Ken | April 20, 2008 10:53 AM
Hey, all of you Republicans, how does the Obama's wealth compare with those common folks, The Clintons and the McCains. Give us a break, you know that the Obamas represent mainstream America, more than either one of those candidates! One couple made over 100 Million Dollars, the other has 7 homes, around the world. No wonder they want to continue President Bush's failed policies, both here, at home, and globally!! Come on, America, be honest, you know who the real elitists are!!!
SUPPORT OUR TROOPS, BRING THEM HOME, ALIVE. NOW.
Posted by: Don Fitzgerald, Chicago | April 20, 2008 11:08 AM
And she still hates America. Phony.
Posted by: Scott | April 20, 2008 1:22 PM
I bet Michelle Obama doesn't need to steal her family recipes from other people.
Posted by: Bubba | April 20, 2008 1:31 PM
The Obama's can't somehow pay the bills on their $200,000-4.2 million yearly income?
So much that Michelle Obama was afraid to open billing statements?
Does anyone outside of the Chicago Tribune believe that this claim--given without any proof--should be taken as anything other than campaign rhetoric?
And if the claim is believed, isn't this a searing indictment of Obama's fitness to manage the government's budget?
Posted by: Bruce | April 20, 2008 3:22 PM
I DO ADMIRE YOU MICHELLE AND THE FACT THAT YOU'VE BEEN ALWAYS THERE FOR YOUR MAN.KEEP UP YOU'RE A GREAT WOMAN.
Posted by: Steve Njenga | August 23, 2008 3:44 AM