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“The
Obamas” by Jodi Kantor; Little, Brown ($29.99)
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With all
the headlines about Jodi Kantor’s book on Barack and
Michelle Obama, the biggest surprise about it is this:
There aren’t any surprises.
I learned
little about the Obamas or the presidency that I
didn’t know or imagine, and I’m not even a
passionate follower of events in Washington. Well, one
thing shocked me. Can you believe the White House
residence has a spotty Internet connection and only one
extension of the landline?
Though
the book is admiring of its subjects and seemingly
inoffensive, it is not an authorized work. The Obamas,
having granted Kantor a 40-minute interview when she was
working on an article about them for The New York Times
magazine in 2009, never spoke to her again. The White
House press office and Michelle Obama have said the
private moments and emotions reported in the book are
made up, and that Kantor’s characterization of
tensions between East and West Wings is exaggerated.
No one
can say that Kantor, a Times reporter and former Slate
editor, didn’t report the living daylights out of the
story — interviewing 200 people, including all the top
West Wing staff, and covering pretty much every minute
of the Obama presidency. But without firsthand insight
from the subjects, the emotional moments seem forced. In
fact, the two most moving elements are the text of a
speech by the president, and a photograph in the
pictorial insert.
The
speech is at the memorial for the victims of the
Gabrielle Giffords shooting last January. Obama had just
come from Giffords’ bedside and seen the congresswoman
open her eyes for the first time. Even just reading the
words “Gabby opened her eyes” repeated several
times, as Obama did that day, brought tears to my eyes.
Kantor writes: “With Obama’s repetition and
refrains, he was speaking the language of the church.
... He quoted Job, his command of Scripture rebuking
those who said he was not a Christian. That told-you-so
look flickered in his eyes — I will mention Jesus on
my own terms, you jerks.”
Kantor’s
analysis starts on solid ground with the comparison to
spiritual oratory, but goes off the deep end with the
invented internal dialogue — attributing to the
president mean, buzz-killing thoughts at that. And her
attempt to penetrate Michelle’s mind at that moment is
no more uplifting: “The expression on Michelle’s
face was one of deep satisfaction. He had given the kind
of speeches he knew he could give. The look on her face
said: This is the kind of president I wanted you to
be.”
Kantor
explains, as others have before her, that Michelle Obama
is beautiful and self-possessed, that she is a
traditional South Side Chicago girl, that she is
critical yet intensely supportive and ferociously
protective of her husband. Somehow these themes are most
movingly expressed by the Damon Winter photograph at the
center of the photo section. Barack is in profile in one
half of the picture — out of focus, somewhere between
person and icon. Michelle watches him from behind,
high-def down to the arch of her eyebrows and the swoop
of her bangs. The alert, solemn, worried expression on
her face is worth a thousand words.
The
Obamas are boring do-gooders with a solid marriage: they
dine with their kids five nights a week, have made no
new friends in Washington, don’t have anyone over
except two couples they’ve been besties with since
Chicago. They don’t party or go to parties. The few
times they’ve tried to have a life — the infamous
Date Night in New York, Michelle’s trip to Spain —
they’ve been slapped down so hard, they mostly just
stay home. The only drama this book has to serve up is
the nail-biter of the presidency itself, so it’s
disconcerting that Kantor cuts it short before its
ending, which would have been the coming election.
As the
story closes in August 2011, things are a mess. Staff
members are leaving, the U.S. credit rating has been
downgraded and a helicopter carrying Navy SEALS from the
unit that took out Osama bin Laden has been shot down.
Yet 2012 looms. Will Obama retire in failure or
re-emerge to rewrite history again?
Why stop
this story before we know how it turns out? Perhaps the
author and publisher thought they’d better hurry up
before Obama gets the boot and no one cares about him
anymore. Though the outcome will be revealed in real
life, I felt as a reader as if I’d been dragged from
the theater before the final curtain.
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