Barack Obama's Story

Nov. 28, 2007 | MONTICELLO, Iowa -- Michelle Obama is sitting in an alcove of the Monticello Public Library, a gaggle of children at her feet. The 43-year-old mother of two daughters is finishing up a rousing reading of "Olivia and the Missing Toy," a book she appears to be familiar with. "Do you guys know Olivia?" she asks her rapt audience. "She's a pig; she's quite the personality; she's a drama queen. Do you guys know what a drama queen is? Always into something." When Obama finishes the story, she asks, "Any thoughts on Olivia? Comments? Queries? Statements?" The kids shake their heads no and look imploringly at their new friend for more.

There's time for one more story before Obama has to address the adults gathering in an adjacent room, and someone has set aside two books from which Obama can choose. There's one unfamiliar book called "Skippyjon Jones," and a hardback edition of "Our National Anthem," the sort of red, white and blue book Lynne Cheney would write, and that an aspiring first lady would be expected to read. "Not that one," says Obama, quickly discarding the patriotic volume. She opens "Skippyjon Jones" and begins the story of a Siamese kitten who, for reasons too murky to convey here, soon starts using "his very best Spanish accent," to say things like, "My ears are too beeg for my head. My head ees too beeg for my body. I am not a Siamese cat ... I AM A CHIHUAHUA!"

The tale of Skippyjon Jones' trippy, nearly incomprehensible quest for beans (or something) requires Obama to utter lots of awkwardly accented Spanglish things like, "Yip Yippee Yippito! It's the end of Alfredo Buzzito! Skippito is here, we have nothing to fear. Adios to the bad Bumblebeeto!" As she perseveres, the kids go loco, rolling off their beanbags with belly-busting laughter. The wife of presidential contender Barack Obama is laughing pretty hard herself, making significant "Help me!" eye contact with her chief of staff. But she forges on, hollering "Holy Frijoles!" with great gusto. "This is a crazy book!" she says several times, eyebrows raised meaningfully at the adults in the room.

The next day, while Michelle is giving an interview elsewhere in Iowa, one of her staffers, who had missed the reading, overhears me and a photographer laughingly recall "Skippyjon Jones"-gate. When she hears about the rejection of the national anthem and the politically incorrect Mexican accent, the staffer half-jokingly, half-pleadingly says to me, "That was off the record."

The children's book is a minor, insignificant choice, one that brought down the 6-year-old house. But on the presidential campaign trail, the teensiest of signifiers can carry weight. In September, Obama's husband landed in hot water when he failed to put his hand to his heart during the national anthem at Sen. Tom Harkin's steak fry. In light of that absurd kerfuffle -- you're not even supposed to put your hand to your heart during the national anthem -- the safe choice would really have been to read the kids "Our National Anthem." But Michelle, a daughter of Chicago's working-class South Side, a Princeton and Harvard Law graduate, who has made no secret of her reticence about jumping into the presidential fray, could not help choosing the book that was untested over the book that was boring.

Obama is by no means the only presidential partner shaking things up out there. We're living in the Wild West of educated, professional, outspoken political spouses; in a post-Hillary, post-feminist nation, the ladies and gentlemen hitting the trail are not armed with recipes and decorating ideas, but with Ph.D.s and presidencies on their résumés. The Family Circle cookie contest -- in which the wives of the two major-party presidential nominees are asked to submit their favorite confections -- may not be completely extinct. But when, four years ago, a bescarfed Teresa Heinz Kerry blithely admitted that her purported recipe for pumpkin spice cookies had been sent in by someone in her office, and that she herself didn't even like pumpkin spice cookies, it was clear that the façade of the happy first hausfrau was crumbling.

This election's crop of spouses includes Judith Giuliani, whose husband suggested she might one day sit in on Cabinet meetings, the tongue-pierced Elizabeth Kucinich, and Elizabeth Edwards, who while living with cancer has become her husband's brassiest and most potent (and most unassailable) weapon against his opponents.

But Obama's particular impulse -- to reject meaningless political pablum or helpmate hokum in favor of unexpected candor and a good laugh -- has already distinguished her yearlong tenure on the presidential campaign circuit.

"You've never seen anyone like us before, and that's a little freaky, isn't it?" she asks the crowd of grown-ups who've assembled at the Monticello library after the bangito conclusion of "Skippyjon Jones." "It's like, 'They're real!' Well, guess what? Real people can be politicians too. We as a country have grown suspicious of real. We take the fake."

In different versions of the speech she gives in Monticello and other towns during a 48-hour, mid-November blitz of Iowa, Michelle promises her audiences that "you will not see another politician like [Barack] in your lifetime. Because they don't come along very often. There are other people like him out there, but they don't choose to go into politics because they have sense. My husband is a little crazy."

From : www.salon.com