Michelle Obama by David Colbert Page B

him.
    In July 1998, their daughter Malia Ann was born. Now Michelle was a working mother with an infant child and a husband whose job was three hours away. Even when he was in Chicago, there were a lot of demands on his time. Politicians have to go to a lot of parties, whether or not they want to. On top of all that, Barack was teaching law at the University of Chicago.
    Barack's solution to his own frustration wasn't to drop out of politics, but instead to aim higher. He decided to run for the U.S. Congress in the 2000 election.
    Michelle was much less supportive of this desire. In his memoir
The Audacity of Hope,
he recalled that "My wife's anger toward me seemed barely contained. 'You only think about yourself,' she would tell me. 'I never thought I'd have to raise a family alone.'"
    He lost that election. But he was still in the state senate, so the pressures remained. Then Natasha (Sasha) was born in June 2001. Michelle was so angry at Barack's absences that she could barely stand to speak to him on one family vacation in Hawaii. Making it worse, the governor needed Barack to return to Springfield early to vote on an important bill. Barack made the decision to stay in Hawaii, and the bill failed to pass, which caused him difficulty with the governor and led to criticism from journalists. But that was easier to face than more of Michelle's anger.
    Michelle's solution was to demand less, but also to train Barack. She wouldn't ask him to be around more. But when he was around, she'd make sure he helped more. She started going to the gym long before dawn. When the girls woke up and needed to be fed, he'd have to feed them. "I spent a lot of time expecting my husband to fix things," she told Rebecca Johnson of
Vogue.
"But then I came to realize that he was there in the ways he could be. If he wasn't there, it didn't mean he wasn't a good father or didn't care. I saw it could be my mom or a great baby-sitter who helped. Once I was okay with that, my marriage got better."
CAN'T BUY ME LOVE
    Michelle also kept working. The University of Chicago Medical Center hired her to improve its poor relations with the community. She helped erase decades of mistrust with straight talk about the longstanding problems.
    Around the same time, she helped her brother make the same decision she'd made earlier. After Princeton, Craig earned an MBA and went to Wall Street. He stayed there nine years, became a vice president and a millionaire, and then joined a Chicago financial firm where his success continued. But he was miserable. He didn't like the work. His unhappiness was one of the reasons he was in the middle of a divorce. What he really wanted to do, he told Michelle, was coach basketball. He had a chance to do that, at a low level and for a tiny fraction of what he had been earning. Should he? Michelle told him to do what she'd done: Follow his heart. Now he's one of the happiest head coaches in basketball. "I'm loving every day of my life," he says.
    Unfortunately, Barack and Michelle's money problems didn't go away. When Barack traveled to Los Angeles for the Democratic National Convention in 2000, he discovered at the airport's car rental counter that he couldn't rent a car because he'd reached the limit on his credit card.
    Every day Michelle took a more practical view of their lives. Part of her hoped that Barack would come around to her way of thinking, and walk away from the world of politics. But although she was still the planner and the worrier in the family, Barack was still the dreamer. In late 2001, he began to think about a run for the U.S. Senate in 2004.
    Michelle thought he was crazy—and that was before she heard how he planned to make it happen.
SHEER AUDACITY
    Michelle later told biographer David Mendell, "The big issue around the Senate for me was, how on earth can we afford it? I don't like to talk about it, because people forget that his credit card was maxed out. How are we going to get by? Okay, now we're going