According to the new book “The Obama’s” by Jodi Kantor, bad blood between the first lady and then Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel
resulted in strains between the first lady and the president.
Kantor, who interviewed 33 White House staffers for her new book, reveals that the first lady and Rahm Emanuel began fighting for influence over the president’s policies even before the election. The book also reveals that Michelle Obama had “doubts” about Emanuel from the start and, maybe as payback, Emanuel initially rebuffed her attempts to bring on Valerie Jared as White House advisor.
Friction increased between the two when Rahm Emanuel rejected a request by the first lady’s chief of staff to be included in the daily staff meetings. According to the book, Emanuel totally cut off the first lady’s office from the power grid to the point where, as Kantor writes, those in the Obama administration began “referring to the East Wing as ‘Guam’ — pleasant but powerless.”
After First Lady Obama was totally cut off, she began sending emails to Valerie Jared when she had a complaint. She would also send emails to the president’s scheduler, who would show the emails around to other staffers because they were so angry and stern that the scheduler did not know how to handle them.
There were other run ins as well. Kantor says that Rahm Emanuel scheduled the first lady, without her permission, to campaign for Rep. Allen Boyd. However Emanuel left the first lady out of the loop because, according to Kantor, “Michelle flew down to Florida and spoke at the event, introduced by Boyd. He got his picture and his hug with her. East Wing aides never told Michelle she was being used to head off a potential black challenger for Boyd’s seat — they did not know that themselves. Her staff did know that Boyd was planning on voting against the health care bill, but they did not tell her so, they said later, because they were too afraid of how she would react.”
The first lady’s disappointment apparently hit a fevered pitch during the push for Obama’s health care bill. Kantor wrote, “to her, the Scott Brown victory provided grim evidence for what she had been saying for months, in some cases years: [her husband] had been leaning on the same tight group of insular, disorganized advisers for too long; they were not careful planners who looked out for worst-case scenarios.”
And also, according to Kantor, the first lady did not want the president to scale back his health care bill. Kantor writes, “more fundamentally, the chief of staff was trying to convince the president to scale back his health care efforts, but the first lady wanted him to push forward. Emanuel wanted to win by the standard measures of presidential success: legislative victories, poll numbers. Michelle Obama had more personal criteria: Was her husband fulfilling their mission?”
