Singing in the Key of Life — The Music of Michelle Obama
By Stuart Mitchner
Just as hate knows love’s the cure…
—Stevie Wonder
For psychiatrists treating patients fearful that Donald Trump might win, the most potent remedy for Trump Anxiety Disorder is absolutely natural, over the counter, no synthetics, no suspect chemicals, just stature and beauty, strength and charm, sweetness and light in the form of Michelle Obama. When she walked onstage in that bold blue dress smiling and waving, it was possible to believe that whichever side this woman was on had nothing to fear from T.A.D.
“When someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you don’t stoop to their level,” the First Lady told the enraptured delegates, recalling the advice she and the president gave their daughters. “Our motto is, when they go low, we go high.”
A Stormy Convention
Michelle Robinson was a four-year-old living with her family on Chicago’s South Side when the 1968 Democratic Convention came to town, a political superstorm that had cops clubbing protestors and a grown-up bully, Mayor Richard J. Daley, shouting curses at Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff for speaking out against “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.”
My wife and I witnessed the scene on a pint-sized Sony TV whose 11-inch screen seemed to expand to Cinemascopic dimensions to take in that moment of jaw-dropping truth. Here was a scene from all the bad guy-good guy movies ever made and it was happening in real life! To the Democrats! In Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Norman Mailer begins his account of the confrontation with an unflattering sketch of Ribicoff, “not a powerful looking man” who had “a weak mouth which spoke of the kind of calculation which does not take chances” and who “had gotten along by getting along, making the right friends.” In fact, “he had no flair, he was indeed about as boring as a Republican speaker” (there were “yawns”), until he delivered the explosive line and people turned to each other. Had he really said that about Gestapo tactics? Yes he had. “His voice had quavered a hint with indignation and with fear, but he had said it, and Daley was on his feet, Daley was shaking his fist at the podium, Daley was mouthing words. One could not hear the words, but his lips were clear. Daley seemed to be telling Ribicoff to go have carnal relations with himself.” Meanwhile, “There was a roundhouse of roars from the floor, a buzz from the gallery. Daley glowered at Ribicoff and Ribicoff stared back, his ordinary face now handsome, dignified with some possession above itself. Ribicoff leaned down from the podium, and said in a good patrician voice, ‘How hard it is to accept the truth.’”
The Daley Machine
By far the hardest-to-accept truth is that, thanks to riots, assassinations, and the Chicago convention, Richard Nixon captured the White House. And once you start putting the political dominoes back in place you come to another truth, that the Daley machine helped swing the 1960 election from Nixon to Kennedy.
Referring to Daley’s six-term dynasty in Michelle Obama: A Life (Knopf $27.95), Peter Slevin notes how the mayor “perfected the power of patronage to bend the city to his vision and his will. He earned the loyalty of many, co-opted others, and bulldozed the rest.” As for the black community, “he used their committeemen and officeholders to get votes” while allotting them little more than “their mathematical share of patronage.” In fact, the rent for the South Euclid Avenue apartment the future First Lady grew up in was paid by the mayor’s office. Fraser Robinson, Michelle’s father, had a patronage job as a janitor in a water plant while serving as a Democratic precinct captain, a role that “suited his outgoing personality.” By the time Michelle was five, her father was “tending boilers for $858 a month,” a job he kept “until his death.” He saw his precinct responsibilities “as a way to do good works,” helping people “as a go-between with the city.”
Soul Searching
Decades later, Chicago’s City Hall also represented public service for Robinson’s daughter, who came there from a highly paid job as a corporate lawyer attained with some help from her Princeton connections. Describing her rationale for taking an almost 50 percent cut in salary in spite of having significant student loan debt from her years at Princeton, she mentions asking herself, “Can I go to the family reunion in my Benz and be comfortable, while my cousins are struggling to keep a roof over their heads?” In a 2012 speech quoted by Slevin, a Princeton graduate himself, she refers to the deaths of her father and a friend: “Just like that I’d lost the two people I loved most in the world …. And I began to do a little bit of soul searching. I began to ask myself ….’If I die tomorrow, what did I really do with my life? What kind of mark would I leave? How would I be remembered?’ And none of my answers satisfied me.”
The most consequential aspect of her tenure with the law firm was when she was asked to advise a first-year law student from Harvard named Barack Obama. Her first impression, based on a photograph, was that he was “not much of a looker” (“It was the ears”); in person, she found him charming and handsome (“We were attracted to each other because we didn’t take the whole scene as seriously as a lot of people do”). Not that she intended to date him. “She had sworn off romance that summer,” having dated “an array of young men all the way back to high school”: “My family swore I would never find a man that would put up with me.”
The future president had made career choices much like hers, spurning “coveted judicial clerkships and six-figure law firm positions even though he could have had his pick,” much “to the frustration of his mother and grandmother, who had both known financial hardship.” Not that Obama’s plans were apolitical. He planned at that time to be mayor of Chicago. He figured it might take him ten years.
Princeton Roommates
Michelle’s time at Princeton formally began with University President William Bowen’s opening address to the Class of 1985 in which he made, as Slevin puts it, “explicit reference to the racial divide that plagued Princeton and the country at large.” Michelle experienced the divide first hand when the mother of her white roommate “demanded a room change,” telling the student housing office her daughter was from the South and wasn’t “used to living with black people.” No beds being available, the roommate stayed on for the first semester and by the time she moved out “had come to admire and enjoy Michelle, although they traveled in entirely different circles.”
The girl’s departure helped enable “the community within a community” Michelle formed with her African American roomies, an “inseparable” threesome whose dormitory rooms were limited to “the workaday desks, dressers, and single beds provided by the university. No sofa, no television,” just “pillows on the floor” and a stereo on which “they listened to a lot of Stevie Wonder.”
Music Hath Charms
It’s likely those Stevie Wonder records belonged to Michelle Robinson. Speaking at a White House award ceremony for the singer in February 2009, the newly elected president declared, “I think it’s fair to say that had I not been a Stevie Wonder fan, Michelle might not have dated me. We might not have married. The fact that we agreed on Stevie was part of the essence of our courtship.” As Slevin notes, the maid of honor at the Obamas’ wedding sang “You and I” from the album Talking Book, the first record Michelle ever owned, and the first one Barack “bought with his own money.” Wonder’s 1970 hit “Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours” was also being played Wednesday night in Philadelphia as the president and Hillary Clinton shared the stage.
The same song surfaces in a carpool karaoke video featuring James Corden. To be fully appreciated, the video should be seen from the beginning: Corden arrives at the White House gates for a tour and after being greeted by a no-nonsense security guard who seems not to recognize the host of The Late Late Show, Corden does as directed and pulls over. He’s huddled in the car looking guilty and apprehensive when the door on the passenger side opens and a pretty woman in a sleeveless summer dress slides in next to him and straps on the seat belt — it’s his tour guide Michelle Obama, free and easy as a schoolgirl on a lark. After a few perfunctory tour points (“This the White House … this is the Oval Office — my husband’s in there.”), she asks if they can hear some music (“I rarely get to listen to music in the car”), and it so happens Norden has Stevie Wonder. I won’t try to describe how good it feels to watch the First Lady (“I love Stevie Wonder! I know every Stevie song on the planet!”) clapping and singing and doing the moves to “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” with Corden. It has to be seen and so does her speech at last week’s convention. I recommend a dose of each for the bouts of DTs accompanying Trump Anxiety Disorder. Take as needed between now and Election Day.