Portrait of Obamas’ marriage
The details are far from juicy
Staff fights, politics and a splashy party.
The Obamas is a peek at first couple. Review,
The Obamas By Jodi Kantor Little, Brown, 359 pp., $29.99 out of four
The Obamas, by New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor, has made headlines even before it goes on sale today. A White House spokesman dismissed it as an “overdramatization of old news.”
But readers expecting controversy will be disappointed. The book — a political dissection of a marriage — promises more than it delivers.
It’s filled with stories of infighting among White House staff. Beyond Washington, few will call it juicy, except for details of a 2009 “Hollywoodesque” Halloween party at the White House with Johnny Depp in costume as the Mad Hatter from his role in the film Alice in Wonderland.
Kantor says the White House kept details secret, fearing how a splashy party would appear during a recession.
The book portrays the first lady as more political than her image but opens with a debatable assumption: Obama’s re-election “increasingly rests on attractive images and charming stories of him and his family.”
Kantor’s narrative is built on the couple’s political dif- ferences, not over policies but over the role of politics. Kantor writes that Michelle Obama doubted if “true change could be accom- plished through the legislative process.” Other differences are explored: He’s tolerant of staff failures. She’s not. Kantor attributes that to their childhoods: Both are Ivy League-educated lawyers from modest backgrounds, but he partly raised himself and has a “soft spot” for anyone who has helped him. With her strict parents, there were no excuses.
The book is best on the Obamas’ enduring friendship with two African-american couples from Chicago and on the inner workings of the White House — how security and obsessive fears about image disrupt normal family life.
It’s a book that will be viewed through its readers’ politics: a liberal apology to conservatives, too focused on style for liberals.
Kantor concludes that the first lady has gained influence, “ironically” because she “played the role of not-very-political wife and mom so well. The less popular her husband became, the more powerful she became.”
She’s the “more confrontational Obama, the one who tended to slip into what one friend called ‘mama bear’ mode when her husband was threatened.” On Obama’s re-election campaign, Kantor writes, “This would be the last race he would ever run, and his wife intended for him to win.” We’ll see if Kantor has exaggerated the first lady’s role.