Michelle a 'tyrant' in White House

09 January 2012 - 10:05 By The Sunday Telegraph
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LISTEN UP: US first lady Michelle Obama gestures before a book reading at the Children's National Medical Centre in Washington last month Picture: YURI GRIPAS/GALLO IMAGES
LISTEN UP: US first lady Michelle Obama gestures before a book reading at the Children's National Medical Centre in Washington last month Picture: YURI GRIPAS/GALLO IMAGES

She might appear charming, fashionable and diplomatic.

The White House machine likes to portray images of Michelle Obama tending her organic vegetable garden or visiting the families of servicemen posted overseas.

But behind the scenes she has repeatedly clashed with top presidential aides - over everything from tactics on healthcare reform to her taste in designer clothes.

A new book claims Barack Obama's White House was plagued by feuds and pitched battles as his wife fought his pragmatic aides for the heart and soul of his presidency .

In The Obamas, Jodi Kantor, a respected New York Times reporter, draws on interviews with 33 current and former White House insiders to depict an administration riven by in-fighting during its first two years.

Michelle's withering criticism did not spare her husband and their marriage, although loving, suffered under the strain, Kantor writes.

The First Lady battled chief of staff Rahm Emanuel for influence and was corrected on protocol by former spokesman Robert Gibbs.

The president, "who felt guilty about the sacrifices his wife was making, was unwilling to tell her what she could not do . so Gibbs took on the task".

The book says Gibbs was forced into the "unenviable role" of "internal enforcer of the rules of the political world, issuing a steady stream of warnings and no's".

He had to tell her she could not tack a private holiday onto a state visit, lavish money on White House redecoration or spend heavily on designer outfits.

Kantor writes that Michelle tried to persuade her husband not to employ Emanuel, a famously foul-mouthed Democrat known for political horse-trading and tirades littered with the f-word.

Emanuel then rejected her request to join his morning staff meetings where the day's agenda was shaped.

The biggest source of friction was her husband's attempts to pass healthcare reform. She also turned on her husband.

"She feels our rudder isn't set right," the president later told aides, who had a sense that this was not the actual language she had used," Kantor wrote.

Michelle "made it clear she felt her husband needed a new team".

Gibbs later quit to run in, and win, Chicago's mayoral election.

The White House responded disdainfully to the book, which goes on sale tomorrow, saying the accounts were "exaggerated".

The book tells of Michelle's e-mails to long-time staffer Valerie Jarrett complaining about news coverage. When she was unable to fit into her husband's schedule, she sent angry e-mails to scheduling director Alyssa Mastromonaco. The e-mails were "so stern, Mastromonaco showed them to colleagues, unsure how to respond to her boss's wife's displeasure", Kantor wrote.

Her office became so isolated that her aides began referring to her base in the East Wing as America's Pacific island territory of "Guam - pleasant but powerless". - ©The Sunday Telegraph

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