Obama’s secret: Muppets, motherhood and apple pie

Obama’s secret: Muppets, motherhood and apple pie
By Chrystia Freeland
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
Published: May 8 2009 16:02 | Last updated: May 8 2009 16:02
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9cab58f8-3bff-11de-acbc-00144feabdc0.html


There are not many Harvard-trained lawyers who, after three months in the White House, would describe the highlight as the opportunity to appear alongside Big Bird and Elmo.

Michelle Obama’s apparent delight in her stroll down Sesame Street is part of a role she has thrown herself into with gusto: that of “mom-in-chief”. Her genuinely private family life does seem remarkably content. But Mrs Obama also deserves the president’s professional thanks.

She is one of the keys to the political mystery that is torturing the Republican party: the perplexing fact that the unabashedly liberal Barack Obama is strongly trusted by an American public that is less so.

Since the days of Ronald Reagan, it has been conventional wisdom to describe America as a “centre-right” nation. Recent surveys tend to confirm that view. Just one in five voters in the 2008 election described themselves as “liberal”, while more than a third said they were conservative.

Yet those voters handily elected a president who campaigned on a progressive agenda. In office, Mr Obama has pursued that agenda forcefully – and the country seems to approve of that, too. When Mr Obama’s administration passed the 100-day mark, Americans gave him a higher favourability rating than any president since Reagan achieved at that moment.

One source of Mr Obama’s appeal is his cerebral serenity – the right sort of charisma for these troubled times. Another may be those troubles themselves: thanks to the recession, and Wall Street’s role in creating it, Americans are uncharacteristically receptive to higher taxes for the rich and a more muscular state. Yet the fact remains that some of Mr Obama’s most explicitly liberal policies, such as his blanket ban on torture, are among his least popular. And according to one recent poll, nearly half of Americans deemed the president to be more liberal than they were.

But, to the howling frustration of the increasingly marginalised Republican party, Americans’ trust for Mr Obama trumps their views on his specific policies: his overall job rating is higher than nearly all of his scores on single issues.

Which brings us back to Michelle Obama and the Obamas’ joint creation of a vision of family life that is both perfect – and perfectly traditional.

When Mrs Obama, a Princeton graduate, met her future husband, she was senior to him at the law firm where they both worked. For much of her married life, she out-earned him.

Yet, in the White House, the new first lady has been the ideal small ‘c’ conservative wife and mother. She has planted an organic vegetable garden on the south lawn and says her main focus is settling her daughters in a new city. Mrs Obama has embraced the more ornamental aspects of her role with grace, too – indeed, she has already inspired a style book, whose subtitle dubs her “the first lady of fashion”.

The contrast with the last Ivy League-educated female lawyer to live in the White House is instructive – Hillary Clinton seems to have been Mrs Obama’s guide to how not to do it. The first lady does not call herself Michelle Robinson Obama; her husband did not offer the nation two for the price of one; and you are more likely to see Tom Daschle lead the new administration’s healthcare charge than have Mrs Obama come close to such a fraught issue.

If you doubt the significance of Mrs Obama’s circumspection, consider the abuse she received on the campaign trail on the few occasions when she ventured beyond Hallmark sentimentality. When Mrs Obama ribbed her husband about his inability to put the butter back in the fridge, she was chided for “emasculating” him by liberal doyenne Maureen Dowd. Mrs Obama’s observation that “for the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country” was seized on by the right as a menacing sign of a lack of patriotism.

The New Yorker magazine famously caricatured that view by depicting Mrs Obama as a fist-bumping militant with an assault rifle strapped over her shoulder. That same cartoon had Mr Obama dressed in sandals, a robe and a turban, with an American flag burning in the Oval Office fireplace.

Some hard-core conservatives, who have taken to calling the commander- in-chief a socialist, an appeaser and even a Manchurian candidate, may think this image is close to the “real” Obama. As one letter in The Wall Street Journal lamented: “This is what can happen when the campus radical you might have known decades ago somehow gets elected president.”

But the man most Americans see when they peek into the White House is, instead, a reassuringly traditional paterfamilias with two charming daughters and a wife who looks great in a sleeveless dress and spends most Saturdays cheering those girls on the soccer pitch. And, since this is 21st-century America, the Obamas also provide the occasional, tasteful glimpse of what looks like love – witness those hand-holding photos after their private dinner last week.

Conservative writer David Brooks has warned Republicans that Mr Obama is dangerous because he has figured out how to sell his progressive agenda with an appeal to traditional conservative values such as thrift, hard work and prudence. True enough. But what makes Mr Obama an even greater threat to the right is the first family’s enticing presentation of all of those small ‘c’ values. God help the Republicans if photos of their Mother’s Day celebrations this weekend include the dog.

chrystia.freeland@ft.com

More columns at www.ft.com/arts/columnists/chrystiafreeland