Transcripts For CSPAN First Ladies Influence Image 20140216

Service. Coming up next, the original series first ladies. Looking at the shell obama. After that, the state dinner with the french president. After that, the cochairs on the election in administration. You come into this house and there is so much to do. So much coming at you that there is no time to think or reflect. Hi, everyone. We are here digging up soil because we are going to plant a garden. I will not be satisfied until every single veteran and Military Spouse who wants a job has one. At the end of the day, my most important title is still mominchief. In 2008, barack obama was elected as our 44th president and he and First Lady Michelle Obama went into the history books as the first africanamerican first couple. One year into a second obama term, the first lady continues her focus on childhood obesity, support for military families, and access to education. Good evening and welcome. Tonight is the final installment in our yearlong series, first ladies influence and image. We finish appropriately with the current first lady, Michelle Obama. We will learn more about her biography and how she has approached the job in her six years in the office so far. Let me introduce you to our two guests who will be with us throughout that time. They are both journalists who have covered the first lady. Liza mundy is a biographer of Michelle Obama. Her 2008 book was called michelle. Krissah thompson is a Washington Post journalist who covers the first lady as her beat. We will start our program with a clip and this is from 2008. Michelle obama in a Campaign Speech talking about her own personal story. All my life i have confronted people who had a certain expectation of me. Every step of the way there was somebody there telling me what i could not do. I applied to princeton cannot go there, your test scores are not high enough. I went and graduated with honors. Wrong. [applause] then i was not supposed to go to harvard. I dont even know why they said that. I can go through every curve and twist and turn of my life and find somebody that was telling me to lower my expectations, set my sights low, i cannot do that. Every time i push passed other peoples limited expectations of me and reached for things i knew i could do and grabbed my seat at the table that others felt so entitled to, what i learned was that there is no magic to these people who feel so much more ready than me. I was just as ready, always just as prepared as anyone at that table. We are going to talk about her biography but we chose that clip because that was before she went to the white house. Both of you were observing her professionally. When you watch the 2008 Michelle Obama, the prewhite house Michelle Obama, and think about her today. How has she grown in the job . How has she changed her approach to the public from what we see in that clip . She has become more optimistic and positive. I have a hard time imagining her saying something quite like that today. She seems to be articulating in that clip something almost like there is something called imposter syndrome when people feel like they are not supposed to be where they are and it takes them a while to get over that feeling. Because maybe you came from a background where youre not expected to be at this place. If she felt any of that, she certainly has gotten over it. She seems very comfortable in where she is. She still is saying some of the same things. I think some of the rough edges have been polished off. When she is talking to young people, she is saying, people did not believe in me at different points in my life, but i showed them that i could overcome and i made these achievements anyway. This line that there is no magic to this. She says that often so that people know she can close this gap between where she came from and where she is. Kids can do the same thing. In your book, you say early on that Michelle Obama once said of politics that sometimes it is like a waste of time and she has become over time her husbands trusted political advisor. When did that transformation happen . She came from chicago which is a city of machine politics, a city that had not been politically just or fair towards africanamerican residents. She had a lot of reason to be skeptical of politics when she was growing up and her family was famously skeptical to the point where barack obama when he confessed to Craig Robinson that he wanted to be a politician, he said to keep that under his hat. She even described herself in 2007 as having been the last one to accept that barack obama was going to run for president. It mustve come during the president ial campaign. Do you agree . I do. There is this idea that she was a reluctant campaigner. I think that she was reluctant to sign on in part because they had two young daughters at the time and thinking about this sort of sacrifices that would have to be made. She had been through a campaign for senate that took them all across the state and her mom had to step up in many ways and help with the daughters. When you think about taking that to the nation, there was a lot to consider. She counted the costs. Then i am told once she signed on, she was all in. It was not that this reluctance continued throughout. What we started this series, we promised it would be from Martha Washington to Michelle Obama. Obviously, this one is a challenge tonight because it is a sitting first lady and the story has not been told nor has there been some distance in time to judge her legacy and history. Lets spend some time on her biography and how she has used her six years in the white house. We do invite your calls along the way. Here is how you can join in. You can do it by telephone you can find us on twitter firstladies is our twitter address. Facebook is another opportunity. There is already a conversation on facebook about Michelle Obama. We will go to her biography. She was born when and where . She was born in chicago in 1964. It was january 17. What was 1960 chicago like for the Robinson Family . It was a very segregated city. She grew up on the south side of chicago. There were a lot of different neighborhoods, different immigrants, different ethnic neighborhoods. The city was just opening up a little bit so that her family when she was still pretty small was able to move into a neighborhood that had been a white neighborhood. Craig has said that they remember the white families started moving away when families like the robinsons were moving in. They wouldve been aware of that. They wouldve been aware that opportunities were opening up for better neighborhoods, better schools, but at the same time, there was a white flight that was going on that they wouldve been aware of. Father Fraser Robinson born in 1935 and died in 1991. And her mother, marian robinson, whom we all know because she lives at the white house. We dont see her too often but she is part of the first family. We have a clip about Michelle Obama talking about her father. Lets listen in. My father was a pump operator at the city water plant. He was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when my brother and i were young. Even as a kid, i knew there were plenty of days when he was in pain. I knew there were plenty of mornings when it was a struggle for him to simply get out of bed. But every morning, i watched my father wake up with a smile. He grabbed his walker, prop himself up against the bathroom sink, and slowly shave and button his uniform. When he returned home after a long days work, my brother and i would stand at the top of the stairs of our little apartment, patiently waiting to greet him, watching as he reached down to lift one leg and then the other to slowly climb his way into our arms. Despite these challenges, my dad hardly ever missed a day of work. He and my mom were determined to give me and my brother the kind of education they could only dream of. [applause] when my brother and i finally made it to college, nearly all of our tuition came from Student Loans and grants, but my dad still have to pay a tiny portion of that tuition himself. Every semester, he was determined to pay that bill right on time, even taking out loans when he fell short. He was so proud to be sending his kids to college and he made sure we never missed a registration deadline because his check was late. You see, for my dad, that is what it meant to be a man. Lots to follow up on but lets start with her father and his influence on her life. If you look at the obamas as a couple, the interesting comparison is that barack obama did not know his father at all. It seems from what we can see there that for Michelle Obama, her father was a very important influence. Her father was a central figure. Really both of her parents. Her brother describes their childhood as being a time when their parents that a lot of time with them, they were not leaving their kids with babysitters. They built the kids selfesteem and made it seem like they were wonderful people to be around. That kind of confidence infused in their lives. They took family trips, played board games. They knew all their relatives, went to visit, and described a really warm, familycentered childhood. Their dad was at the heart of that. She described him as a pump operator but he was also part of the precinct democratic precinct in the city of chicago. What was his job and how did that influence the families . He was a precinct captain. He would go around in some ways, he was a Community Organizer like barack obama. Neighbors said that he was a joking man and had a great sense of humor. It may be that he genuinely enjoyed being a precinct captain. It may also be that it was necessary to be a precinct captain in order to get that pump operator job because that was the way you would get a city job. The other thought i had about both of her parents is having a good city job meant for them that Michelle Obamas mom could stay home with the children in a way that many women were not able to do so. Africanamerican women have a longer tradition of having to go out to work. I think when she had children, she asked herself, should i be home with my daughters the way my mom was home with me . I think it probably made her fathers job seem all the more valuable to have. I think that is an important point about her mom. She was a stayathome mom but she had a couple of years of Teachers College so she was able to Homeschool School her children before homeschooling was popular in the way that we think about it. Both of them skipped early grades in elementary school. You see some things happening in this family really early that are different. Both children went to princeton and michelle went to harvard law school. Where did the emphasis of education come from . Her parents. They were really clear this was the road to get ahead. Her brother in his book writes about his mom teaching them to read at home and doing math tables and that kind of thing. When they got to school even as early as first and second grade, they were already steps ahead of everyone else and that continues along with their own hard work through high school. Theyre excelling really early on. When Michelle Obama got into a Magnet School that was in a completely different part of chicago, she had to take several modes of transportation to get to her high school and leave really early in the morning. An hourlong bus to school in each direction. During the 2008 your newspaper wrote a big story about the genealogy of Michelle Obamas family, tracing it back to a slave in georgetown in South Carolina. A question for both of you. The arc of the Robinson Family life is the arc of black history in america in ways that Barack Obamas life is not. Can you comment on that and what we see in the Robinson Family and part of the great migration in the 1940s and 1950s and how we should understand their experience . Do you want to go first . You can go, liza, you may know a little more about the family from South Carolina onto chicago and just that arc. We do know that for africanamericans, the fact that her story is rooted in relatives that were enslaved has been a very important and connective to her relationship with the community in general. When you look back to 2008, there were some questions early on about is barack obama black enough . You never heard that sort of thing about Michelle Obama and i think part of that is rooted in the more traditional africanamerican experience. That way she kind of serves as a validator for him in many ways. She definitely did. That was important. What do you want to add about the Robinson Family history . Her familys history is quintessential in that some of her family stayed in georgetown and she has relatives who are still there. There was a train depot very close to town. At least one of her male ancestors, i think it wouldve been her greatgrandfather traveled to chicago because that is where the trains went. He was able to settle in the south side where there was the meatpacking plants and all that industrial labor. There were still a lot of racism and different wage scales for black men and white men but it was better than the south. The Robinson Family was able to establish a very broad and rooted family in chicago so that when she and barack obama were first going out, that was a real epiphany for him. An experience to be in such a rooted family where your uncles were coming around and people were visiting with each other, it was a different family life than he experienced. Adrienne on twitter asks, mrs. Obama is into having children exercise more. I wonder if she played any sports when she was younger. She did ballet in high school so she danced. Her brother writes a little bit about this in his book describing his sister as being very competitive. She wanted to win board games and foot races and that kind of thing. If my recollection is right, it is part of the reason she did not continue let me pause. She said she didnt do many sports in high school and beyond because she was taking the bus back and forth that wouldve kept her at school too late to be able to do some of those afterschool programs. Craig went to a different high school where he was able to play basketball. I thought she said at one point she resisted playing basketball because she was tall and people thought she would be likely to play basketball. And not being able to beat her brother at it, too. The first lady is 511. Do we know when she reached that height . I have a photo of her in ballet and she looked pretty tall. We will take a couple of calls and then learn about her days in princeton and then law school and then meeting the future president. Cathy is in colorado. Good evening. I have been watching the Program Since Martha Washington until now. My comment is that i am a romantic. I see some of the president s and their wives seemed to show a lot of love. For instance, pat and Richard Nixon i think he loved her but he did not show it. I can see it with michelle and president obama that they really do love one another. I think they really do care for one another and they enjoy each others company. That was my comment. I think this is so important for the people of the United States to say these two people love one another and i dont care if youre a republican or democrat, i think it is important that they do show that they do care and dont put on a show. Also, since we have been moving through history with this series, has societys standards changed where we are more welcoming to seeing the personal emotional side of the people of the white house . I think so because of reality television, if nothing else. We are so intimately involved with people that we dont know. In some ways, people feel like they know the obamas because it is on public display. We catch wind when they are on date night. We know they had an early valentines day dinner. The fact that is out in public and people see them warmly touching each other and hugging. Even his campaign at one point sent out a photo of them together hugging one another, both embracing one another and that went viral. There were pieces in newspapers thinking about what it means to see a kind of modern marriage in the white house and considering those ideas. A modern marriage in the white house and an africanamerican couple. You write in one of your articles that valerie was been with the first lady since her early days says they are cognizant of this role model importance that they have. Would you comment on how much of this is a conscious effort . I think it is very conscious, not just for young people who have been a focus of both the president and first lady, but also for families. There were so much talk now about how you do family well in this country. They understand that people are hungry for that information. How do you raise welladjusted teenagers and to have a woman doing that in the white house and giving Parenting Tips. She gave some Parenting Tips the Justin Biebers mother the other day. People want that kind of information and i think it provides us some of that personal connection that this white house has done i would save very well in helping people feel the white house is the peoples house and this is a family that could be the family next door that you could relate to. It is really the first fully social media white house. They have advantages on social media that past president did not so we have seen a lot of them in lots of different forms. John is in houston. This show is great and i called during the helen taft show. After they killed osama bin laden, when they saw the pictures, what was his reaction and her reaction and will they e