"I just want to make sure that all of the homework that we do for the week was finished or being done," she explains, then mimics a child's assurance: "I don't have anything to do; I'm done." She rolls her eyes with a mother's skepticism.
She has been tending the White House garden with similarly determined oversight, chronicled in her first book, American Grown: The Story of the White House Kitchen Garden and Gardens Across America (Crown, 271 pp., $30). Out today, the book is filled with photos and stories about her efforts to encourage gardens â€" from plots in vacant city lots to pots of herbs on apartment windowsills â€" and, with them, healthier diets, especially for kids.
Her drive against childhood obesity riles critics who say she is pursuing Nanny State policies on an issue better left to families. Four in 10 Americans say the federal government shouldn't play a big role in combating obesity.
Michelle Obama (who denies any Nanny State intentions) says she's glad the "big, bright light" that shines on her as the president's spouse can be focused on her chosen causes, but says she's not tempted to pursue such issues by running for office herself. More than not tempted, really: She rejects speculation that she might follow in Hillary Rodham Clinton's footsteps to try to go from first lady to the U.S. Senate (a New York Times columnist last week wrote he had heard "vague murmurings" about a post-White House bid in her native Illinois) with the sort of no-wiggle-room language politicians typically avoid.
Michelle Obama celebrates healthy eating and gardening.
"Absolutely not," she says flatly in an interview with USA TODAY. "It will not happen."
Or any political office?
"No chance at all."
Next question?
She is poised to play a central role in President Obama's re-election campaign. She already has, headlining 54 fundraisers that have raised millions of dollars over the past year. Closer to Election Day, she'll be deployed to help turn out Democratic partisans who give her overwhelming approval. "I'm going to fight as hard as I can," she says. "I'm going to work as hard as I can to make sure that we have him for another four years, because there is a lot left to do."
For the moment, though, she would prefer to engage on the wonders of the garden she has tucked in a corner of the South Lawn, shielded by trees from the formal entrances where foreign leaders arrive but visible to tourists who cluster along the chain-link fence.
On this muggy sprin g day, there is an expanse of blue-green broccoli on the ground and deep-red fish peppers ripening on climbing vines.
There is Swiss chard and sea kale and Early Jersey Wakefield cabbage and four kinds of garlic. A patch of blueberries is in a low wire enclosure, designed to keep birds from feasting on the fruit. Two of the raised beds are named for Thomas Jefferson, the third president and an avid gardener. There, English peas are growing from seeds collected from his gardens at Monticello.
Banned: beets.
Barack Obama hates them.
To begin a convers ation
Michelle Obama first had the notion of creating a garden at the White House before there was any certainty her family would be moving here. It was even before the victory in the Iowa caucuses in January 2008 that would ignite her husband's hard-fought Democratic nomination battle against Clinton, then a New York senator and now his secretary of State.
"Back then, it was really just the concept of, I wonder if you could grow a garden on the South Lawn?" Michelle Obama says. "If you could grow a garden, it would be pretty visible and maybe that would be the way that we could begin a conversation about childhood health, and we could actually get kids from the community to help us plant and help us harvest and see how their habits changed."
She was a city kid from Chicago's South Side who had never had a garden herself, though her mother recalls a local victory garden created to produc e vegetables during World War II. One childhood photo included in the book shows Michelle as an infant in her mother's arms â€" the resemblance between Marian Robinson in the picture and Michelle as an adult is striking â€" and another depicts a young Michelle practicing a headstand in the backyard.
("I can't do that anymore," the 48-year-old Harvard-trained lawyer says with a chuckle in the interview. "Tried it and had a headache for a week.")
Concern about her daughters' health had sparked her interest in seeking out fresher, healthier and more locally grown foods. She discussed the idea with some friends who gardened but didn't mention it to her husband until after Election Day.
"I didn't talk to him about it until he had won, because I figured you don't jinx an election by ta lking to the candidate about â€" you know, 'When we get there … ' " she says, gesturing around her and laughing. After the election, she broached her idea to start the first vegetable garden on the White House grounds since Eleanor Roosevelt's victory garden in the 1940s.
Since the garden's groundbreaking in 2009 â€" just two months after the inauguration â€" she has hosted seasonal waves of students from local elementary schools that help plant the seeds. Groundskeepers and dozens of volunteers weed and tend the garden. Charlie Brandts, a White House carpenter who is a hobbyist beekeeper, has built a beehive a few feet away to pollinate the plants and provide honey that Michelle Obama says "tastes like sunshine."
(The hive faces southeast to put the flight path of the bees i n the opposite direction of the White House basketball court, and the base is solidly strapped to the ground so turbulence from the Marine One helicopter, which lands and takes off nearby, won't topple it.)
Some of the harvest is donated to Miriam's Kitchen, a feeding program for the homeless in downtown Washington, and jars of pickled White House vegetables have been part of gift packages for United Nations dignitaries. At a luncheon last week for spouses of the Group of Eight leaders meeting at Camp David, the menu featured greens from the White House garden.
The book includes recipes from White House chefs, from corn soup to spinach pie.
Obama is contributing her proceeds from the book to the National Park Foundation, a non-profit group that will use the funds to offset the modest costs of the White House garden as well as finance programs promoting gardening, healthful eating and outdoor activities by young people.
Many evenings, the Obamas' family dinner features something that is ripe and ready from the garden â€" although 14-year-old Malia turns out to be no fan of snap peas, homegrown or not. The dinner hour itself has been an unexpect ed benefit of their White House tenure, Michelle Obama says.
"Truly, before we came to the White House, we didn't have time for family dinners," she says. "We were like most families. Dad was at work or traveling. The girls and I would eat as much as possible together, but sometimes they had activities and somebody was eating at a different time."
Now, almost every night at 6:30, they sit down to dinner in the second-floor family quarters of the White House. They go around the table to say what each is thankful for that day, then repeat a blessing Malia and Sasha, now 10, came up with when they moved here â€" "We hope to live long and strong" â€" before clinking their glasses together and digging in.
'She knows him'
Michelle Obama has become a formidable political asset.
"There's no one other than the president himself that our supp orters would rather hear from," says David Axelrod, a top strategist for Obama since his 2004 Senate bid. She can speak about her husband with authority, he says. "Nobody understands the president and gets the president more than Michelle. She knows him; she knows what motivates him, what drives him."
At times, she was a more mixed presence in 2008. A remark she made during a campaign event in Milwaukee â€" "For the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country" â€" created a furor, though she said the comment was taken out of context and misrepresented.
Four years later, her popularity exceeds his. A USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken this month puts President Obama's favorable-unfavorable rating at 52%-46% while Michelle Obama's standing is a rosier 66%-27 %.
The survey of 1,012 adults May 10-13 has a margin of error of +/-4 percentage points.
That puts her in the same positive territory that Nancy Reagan and Laura Bush occupied during their husbands' first terms in the White House. She isn't as popular as Barbara Bush, whose grandmotherly mien made her all but una ssailable, but is considerably better liked than Hillary Clinton was after overseeing creation of her husband's doomed health-care proposal.
Michelle Obama has burnished her standing by taking a traditional course in a role that has no clear job description.
"She's earned respect even from political detractors like me … for the fact that she set out from the beginning and seemed to hew very closely to her goal first and foremost of being a mother," says Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway, praising the Obamas for their close family life at a time broken homes are common. "That has helped to soften the sharp edges an d the sharp elbows from 2008."
The first lady bristles a bit at the suggestion she has stuck to safe issues. "I don't think there is anything non-controversial about children's health," she says. "There are still people who question whether this is an issue."
"The road to gastric hell is paved with first lady Michelle Obama's Nanny State intentions," conservative columnist Michelle Malkin wrote. Most Republicans think the government shouldn't have a major role in fighting obesity, according to a Pew Research Center survey this year. In the USA TODAY Poll, 56% of Republicans have an unfavorable impression of her â€" offset by the 90% of De mocrats and 66% of independents who have a positive one.
Katherine Jellison, a history professor at Ohio University who studies women in politics, has changed her assessment of Michelle Obama. During the 2008 campaign, she saw her as a potential first lady in the mold of the outspoken Betty Ford. Now she sees her as more analogous to Jackie Kennedy, fashion-forward and focused on her kids.
"I do see her playing it more safely this time around," Jellison says. "I think back to some of the moments in 2008 when she got a lot of flak and blowback, and I think it was a bit of a wake-up call for her." During this campaign, "she's really, really working to put the right foot forward a nd give as little ammunition as possible to people of a mindset ready to pounce on any perceived misstep."
Michelle Obama's value in the campaign is unique, Democratic pollster Celinda Lake says.
"She's a character reference for him," Lake says. "I think that's important because you have these crazy accusations about him â€" 'the food stamp president,' the birthers (who question his citizenship) â€" and it makes it harder for that stuff to stick when she's part of the picture."
Both Michelle Obama and Ann Romney, wife of likely Republican nominee Mitt Romney, help humanize husbands who at times can seem aloof.
What does she see as her mission in this campaign?
"I have seen up close and personal what being president of the United States looks like and feels like," Michelle Obama replies. "When you've got all these people advising you â€" and you're going to get advice from everywhere â€" all you have in the end is your character, your values and your vision for this country," Michelle Obama says. "That's what it all boils down to. … And I wouldn't trust anybody more than I trust Barack to make that happen. That's what I can share with people."
That, and tales of her garden.
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar