Love and Presidents: The Difference Between Michelle and Ann

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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/09/love-and-presidents-did-michelle-obama-answer-ann-romney.html



“We were so young, and so in love, and so in debt,” Michelle Obama told the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday night. She had been talking about how, when she first married Barack Obama, their combined student-loan payments were greater than that for their mortgage. It was meant to be funny, and it was—the audience laughed—a self-deprecating note in a strong speech in which the First Lady, in a pink-and-gold sleeveless dress, appeared both adoring and adored, charming and exhorting. But talk of debt and love ran through the speech: the connection between the two was its great theme, and pointed to the deepest contrast between Michelle Obama’s convention appearance and that of her counterpart on the Republican side, Ann Romney, and, in many ways, that between their two parties.

Both Michelle and Ann were there to testify about love, a word each used freely. Each also presented herself, fairly explicitly, as a proxy for voters. Michelle raised the question of whether she loved her husband as much as she did the first time he ran (“I didn’t think it was possible, but today, I love my husband even more than I did four years ago”); Ann had to answer the one of whether her husband was lovable at all (“I could tell you why I fell in love with him; he was tall, laughed a lot…. But more than anything, he made me laugh”). They were in agreement that their husbands should be regarded as romantic figures; they diverged, first, on the romance of politics itself, and also when it came to talking about money.

How is love related to power, and how is it compromised by it? Michelle, when talking about her husband and his values, four years later, said this:

'Well, today, after so many struggles and triumphs and moments that have tested my husband in ways I never could have imagined, I have seen firsthand that being President doesn’t change who you are—it reveals who you are.
That power does not necessarily corrupt, but “reveals,” is a formulation that Robert Caro, through four volumes of a biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, made a refrain. It seems to have echoed with the First Lady. And what it revealed, according to Michelle, was a sense of heartfelt indebtedness: her husband knew, she said, that America had been built by “sacrifice, and longing, and steadfast love.” It was a “the story of unwavering hope grounded in unyielding struggle.”


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