If you’ve paid attention to the cable news coverage of New York Times correspondent Jodi Kantor’s new book The Obamas, or listened to Michelle Obama talk about the book, you’d think that Kantor’s been making up stuff about the president and first lady. Not so (as if you needed one more reason to take cable news shows with a decided grain of salt). The Obamas is a fair, thoughtful, perceptive, and nuanced book, grounded in interviews with more than 200 people who work with or are friends of the couple, including an interview with the couple themselves in 2009. Kantor is clearly fascinated with The Obamas and the book is a thrilling, intimate read. Her insights about a president who can sometimes seem inaccessible are valuable because her reporting is so multi-faceted. She gives such a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the first lady’s struggles and eventual triumphs that you put the book down with a deeper understanding of the Obama administration. The Obamas gives equal time to both Obamas; that makes it relatively unique among political books. Although 2012 just began, it’s already clear that The Obamas is going to be one of the best political books published this year. Kantor talked to me recently about why she wanted to write the book in the first place, and what it took to make it happen.
- Clay Smith

Texas Book Festival: You’ve said that No Ordinary Time by Doris Kearns Goodwin, about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, was an influence on you - what do you like about that book?

Jodi Kantor: I say that without wanting to be presumptuous because as a first-time author, it’s hard to say you want to achieve what she does in that book. Even though that book is about a presidency, it gives the president and the first lady equal weight, not because they have equal power, but because she is a fascinating character. It’s about their whole lives and it makes the connection between the personal and the political so clear - we go from WWII to why you need to understand FDR’s relationship with his mother and that really appealed to me. I wanted to write about that connection between the political and the personal.

Festival: What other political books do you like?

Kantor: I really love Marjorie WiIliams’ profiles from the Washington Post - sadly, she died about 10 years ago. She wrote these psychologically penetrating profiles I really loved. And I should say that I was trying to get away from the standard presidential narrative - to me there’s a very strong connection in the book between the fact that The Obamas are living in this virtual prison and the fact that he has such trouble communicating with the country. One of the reasons I like writing about him is that he’s the president but he has this tortured relationship with politics - his struggles with politics are not unreasonable. They’re struggles that lots of people have. And yet - he’s a politician! One of the reporting moments that made me sit up in my chair is when he’s going to a Christmas party in December of 2009, and the administration is passing some dodgy deals trying to pass health care reform - basically, a giveaway to an entire state [Nebraska] in exchange for a vote, so the administration is working frantically to pass these bills. He was pretty desperate for it to go forward. And The Obamas often don’t mingle freely - they often just stand behind the rope and reach out to shake hands but he sees Jerry Kellman, his old community organizing boss, and he’s so happy to see him he reaches across and pulls him in. And Obama says, “I’m still organizing.” It was a stunning moment and when [Kellman] told me the story, it had echoes of what Valerie Jarrett had told me once - “The senator still thinks of himself as a community organizer.” How fully has this guy resolved himself to what he’s really doing? On the one hand, he’s passing these backroom deals to pass health care reform, but on the other he’s telling his old boss he’s still a community organizer. I think that plays into what will happen in the 2012 race. The book is a story of transformation - there are things The Obamas gain and things they lose - and what I see is that Obama is becoming a more conventional politician. You could argue that that is necessary because he has to be reelected. But The Obamas were so appealing to so many people because they seemed so different. Remember the Barack Obama who didn’t want to wear an American flag pin because it seemed so cheesy? That Barack Obama is several generations ago already.

Festival: You quote some of The Obamas’ African American friends talking about the disjunction they experience having looked up to older African American people and having older African Americans be the butlers and staff in the residence of the White House. What are the racial nuances of what The Obamas must be experiencing?

Kantor: One of the things I was looking for in my reporting was the real experience of being the first African American president. There’s all sort of ceremonial aspects - you and I are talking the day before Martin Luther King Jr. Day and The Obamas went to church and will be doing events to commemorate MLK Day, but what I was more interested in are the more unexpected moments and I found it came up quite a lot. Even something like their relationship with the residence staff - they meet the residence staff (it’s a huge household staff) and the president’s best friend told me, “We met the people who work in the White House and they were supposed to be waiting on us but they feel familiar to us. My mom used to have a job like that.” When Michelle Obama and her brother Craig Robinson were at Princeton, their aunt was a housemaid. That was a moment to me that was what it really felt like to be the first African American president. And there was a debate over whether Michelle Obama should appear in Vogue. She gets the invitation - her black advisors really want her to do the cover because they’re acutely aware of how powerful that image is and what it will mean to young black women to see a black woman on the cover, but the white advisors are concerned because this is a time of great public anger over the economy and Vogue is a luxury magazine. And they say, “Do you really want to be American’s number one fashionista?” And she did it and there was almost no criticism of it.

Festival: Why do you think there aren’t more books about first ladies, written while they’re in office, at least?

Kantor: I haven’t covered prior administrations, I don’t know, but I think Michelle Obama is a groundbreaking, fascinating figure and I thought she was worth that treatment. On the other hand, if you can get deep enough reportorially, covering her is a real window on the presidency - she was this reflecting glass. If I could figure out her reactions, I could figure out what was going on in the administration. Michelle Obama is a much more vocal person than her husband. Even sometimes on matters in the West Wing, people sometimes have a clearer picture of what Michelle Obama thinks than they do the president.

Festival: The most salient criticism I read about Game Change was that it felt so inside-baseball, so insular, with no sense of the American public in that book. There’s always a sense of the American public in your book, which I liked ...

Kantor: I think that the public is present in two ways in this book. One is that the book is really about the transition The Obamas made from being pretty normal people to famous people. Their marriage became a super marriage. She has a rocky debut and over the course of my reporting time, she really turned it around. One of the reasons The Obamas were really appealing to the country in 2008 was that they really did seem more like us. The dramatic stakes at the heart of the book are that they were relatively normal. How do you hold on to that when you go into the White House?

And the second thing is that there’s never second person in the book, as in, “You need to be aware of this,” but I do feel like I’m making it clear in the book that our public perception of the White House is basically wrong. The accepted wisdom is that we shouldn’t complain about it, that it’s wrong for them to bellyache. Except that after spending a lot of time at the White House and looking at these restrictions, I was standing there once when Sasha was coming home from school and I felt so awkward that Sasha couldn’t just come home; she had to pass by reporters. I hope readers will see that this life is really hard and the glamorous images we have of living in the White House I think are wrong. Michelle Obama starts exercising twice a day just to compensate for all the steps she’s missing since her movements are restricted. Malia and Sasha really want to go trick or treating and they get swarmed and have to abort mission. They have tremendous privileges and they got to meet the Pope and write a report about him but on the other hand, they can’t experience the life that other people can.

Festival: You write that “While Barack Obama had spent the summer struggling with the limits of presidential influence, Michelle Obama was struggling with the limits of life inside the White House.” Neither of them felt as powerful as the world thought they were ...

Kantor: It’s our assumption that they’re powerful but once I looked into it, there was a kind of powerlessness, and the president finding that the White House is a very different place than what he thought it would be. There’s a moment during the debate on the stimulus when he has an idea about making the power grid more efficient. His advisors say, “It’s a legal nightmare because the [new] grid would have to cut across all these municipalities” and he says to them, “I’m the president! Can’t I get this done?” Michelle Obama’s powerlessness is of a different kind - she can’t say what she thinks. She’s intensely restricted in her physical movements. They have the first lady’s garden but she can’t ever go out there because of the tour groups. They seemed to reflect each other’s powerlessness to me. But Michelle Obama gets very creative and she invents her own power - she finds creative ways of being powerful that are often outside the typical channels of government. Her power to inspire Beyonce to record a music video to encourage kids to exercise is creative. For Barack Obama, so many channels are blocked off for him now, he doesn’t really have money to work with and with the Republican strategy of opposition, his legislative power is restricted. What I’m looking for in the presidential election is if he can somehow become more creative in his use of power.