"The Obamas" Rewrites First Lady's History

The last word on the new book, which ignores the global impact of the Kitchen Garden, gives the Let's Move! campaign short shrift, and turns Sam Kass into a footnote...
Obama Foodorama's MARIAN BURROS, a longtime reporter for The New York Times, had the first interview with Mrs. Obama about the Kitchen Garden, for the Times, on the eve of the groundbreaking in 2009. Burros writes:

Reporters who covered the first shovelful of dirt that was dug by Michelle Obama on March 20, 2009 to create the White House Kitchen Garden are scratching their heads over the short shrift the occasion was given in Jodi Kantor’s much-discussed new book, “The Obamas.”  As one of those reporters I, like my colleagues, have wondered how an event that occurred just two months to the day after Barack Obama was inaugurated and made the front page of virtually every newspaper in the country (including the newspaper Kantor works for, The New York Times) and every six o’clock newscast, could have been so studiously avoided in a book that purports to know how unhappy, how frustrated, not to mention, demanding, the First Lady was during the first two and one-half years of her husband’s Administration, in part, according to the book, because she didn’t have anything worthwhile to do.  (The photo at top was above the fold on the front page of the Times on March 20, 2009. Sam Kass is behind Mrs. Obama)

But what Kantor had promised the publisher that was worth a seven-figure advance, was how the two strong personalities of the President and First Lady would play out in the White House, something with which she was familiar from covering them during the primaries and in interviewing them about their marriage in 2009. To do this, Kantor had to do a little rearranging of history. She mentions the Kitchen Garden for the first time on page 138, about seven months after it was announced, and then only to belittle its impact. (Above: The President and Mrs. Obama at a reception in March of 2010)

By one year after the Kitchen Garden groundbreaking, Mrs. Obama was on the cover of Newsweek magazine, with the garden and her childhood obesity initiative, Let's Move! (formally launched in February, 2010) the centerpiece story. Mrs. Obama's garden had already caused people all over the world to plant their own gardens, some meticulously mimicking the 1,100 square feet of the one on the South Lawn. There was an uptick in seed sales for home gardeners in the US. The garden was the first thing world leaders asked her about when she traveled abroad, Mrs. Obama said. She hailed it as one of the greatest achievements of her life.

But only without accurately detailing the history of the Kitchen Garden is it possible for Kantor to write: “For the rest of the spring 2009, however, Michelle continued to struggle,” in part because “there was still no central project to her first ladyhood, no major goal into which she could pour her natural intensity.”

To acknowledge Mrs. Obama’s keen interest in the garden, a potentially game-changing moment in the almost intractable problem of getting children to eat fruits and vegetables, would have undermined Kantor’s premise about Mrs. Obama’s state of mind during the early days in the White House. As it is she can only infer from conversations with present and former White House staff, because neither Obama would give her an interview for the book. But it hasn’t stopped Kantor from drawing conclusions about Mrs. Obama’s moods.

Unhappiness and "small efforts"...
In Kantor’s version the First Lady sounds like a woman no one could satisfy. While acknowledging her strengths, Kantor describes Mrs. Obama as very demanding, a hard taskmaster, a perfectionist, overcritical, intense, obsessive about order. She says Mrs. Obama was "deeply frustrated” that she didn’t have a worthwhile project, that she was “struggling with the limits of life inside the White House.” (Above: Less than a month after breaking ground, Mrs. Obama planted the garden on April 9, 2009, which also was global headline news)

In the fall of 2009, Kantor writes, “Mrs. Obama was starting to work on a health care initiative of her own, a campaign to reduce and prevent childhood obesity. Her initial progress was very slow, and at first she was stuck on small efforts: the White House garden, a new farmers market on Pennsylvania Avenue, hula-hooping with youngsters on the South Lawn.”

To lump the garden with hula hooping, as effective as the pictures of Mrs. Obama doing 142 hula hoops revolutions was in making the point that exercise is important, is demeaning, but it serves the narrative of unhappiness in the White House.

How does Kantor know Mrs. Obama is unhappy? Aides told her.

“The First Lady was having an unhappy, difficult time in her new role,” according to advisors who are also the source of Kantor's comments about the First Lady's frustration because she wanted her husband to rely on her more and to listen when she told him Americans were not getting the message about the advantages of the Health Care bill.

Throughout the book Kantor inserts herself into the narrative, telling the reader what Mrs. Obama was thinking, telling the reader what conclusions to draw. When the Obamas paid a visit to a local school, Kantor writes: “a little girl told Michelle she wanted to grow up to be first lady. ‘Doesn’t pay much,’ she shot back. She was joking, but the message was clear.” She didn’t think much of the job, according to Kantor.

Really? Anyone who has covered Mrs. Obama at all, can’t imagine why anyone would read so much into one of her well-known humorous asides.

Kantor makes no mention of Mrs. Obama's childhood obesity work after the formal launch of the Let’s Move! campaign. There's no mention of her success in getting supermarkets to open stores in food deserts, places where it takes a car to get to a store that sells fresh fruits and vegetable. No mention of her really tough talk to the Grocery Manufacturers Association, telling them they needed to make dramatic changes in what they produce and advertise to children.

There's also just one mention in the book of Sam Kass (l), who now has the title of Senior Policy Advisor for Healthy Food Initiatives. Kass came to Washington from Chicago with the Obamas to cook for the First Family. He became the chief architect for the Let's Move! campaign, and oversees the Kitchen Garden. Yet when he is mentioned in the book it is not in connection with either. After Mrs. Obama, he is the face of the garden and the campaign. But the purpose of the book is not to discuss the wide-ranging impact Mrs. Obama has had, or to accurately portray history.

It is only to explore the First Lady's unhappiness. Mrs. Obama directly addressed the issue in a CBS interview earlier this week: "Who can write about what I feel? What third person can tell me what I feel?"

It’s why, she said, she hasn’t and won’t read the book.

“It's a game, in so many ways, that doesn't fit,” Mrs. Obama said.

But she was obviously troubled by the portrait she felt had been painted, telling the interviewer that she is “not an angry black woman.”

On the contrary, her success with the garden and promoting Let’s Move! has had an enormous impact on her popularity ratings, which are far higher than the President’s. What the unflattering comments about Mrs. Obama will do to her poll numbers, if anything, will be available in a poll from the Pew Research Center, which will be released in the next ten days. But the book does not acknowledge the success Mrs. Obama has had in significantly raising the profile of healthy foods and the huge problems caused by childhood obesity.

At the end of the book, Kantor has come to the conclusion that Mrs. Obama has adjusted, that the West Wing now understands how valuable she is to the Administration and has been making important contributions, the most recent of which is her military family initiative, Joining Forces, which Kantor describes as “politically astute.” Still, the author cannot resist one last dig, though some might see it as a compliment: “As one aide pointed out, Michelle Obama was a natural for military life square, ordered, strict.”

Kantor gets some simple facts wrong, too, things that a little research would have easily uncovered. Despite Kantor’s statement that there were no nutritional standards for school lunches before the most recent legislation passed, there certainly were and they were based on existing federal Dietary Guidelines. The newer standards, however, are more rigorous.

Kantor also writes that the State Floor of the White House, the public rooms, have not been redecorated since the Kennedy Administration. The Clinton Administration did a significant redo of the state rooms, decorating them in a style authentic to the period the house was built. The Kennedy redecoration was heavily French. BuzzFeed fact checked nine other facts critics have said are wrong in the book, and came up with an uneven score card.

In the end, the most telling quote in the book may be the one that comes from David Axelrod, a Senior Advisor and strategist for the President who said: “A lot of what we do is frankly bullshit. That’s the nature of government, it’s the nature of politics. What she is doing is very real. Michelle’s work may end up having more of an impact than many of the West Wing’s policy initiatives.”

This April, the First Lady will publish her own book, "American Grown." It is her first outing as an author, and it is about the Kitchen Garden.

Related posts about "The Obamas:" The White House statement about the book: "An overdramatization of old news." Press Secretary Jay Carney last week said a Mad Hatter Tea Party the Obamas hosted during Halloween 2009 was not a secret. White House reporters disagree.

*Editor's note: After retiring from The New York Times, Burros, an award-winning journalist and cookbook author, joined Obama Foodorama in late 2011. She is one of only two food policy writers on the planet to report on the First Lady's food intiatives FROM the White House since the beginning of the Administration. The other writer is the founder and editor of this blog.

*Photo at top by Todd Heisler for The New York Times. Planting photo by Samantha Appleton/White House; other photos by Eddie Gehman Kohan/Obama Foodorama