michelle obama leadership essay

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First lady or fearless leader michelle obama’s 10 most admirable leadership qualities.

Last updated: 4 August 2020

Here’s a fun fact for you about the Obamas:

When they left the White House in January, Michelle was more popular than former President Barack Obama.

Don’t believe us? Check out the results of the final Gallup poll published in the Washington Post to get a better idea of their “popularity” at the moment they were packing up their bags and leaving the White House.

Surveys aside, there was clearly something about Michelle many people loved and admired.

Some of her celebrated qualities? She stood out as one of the most passionate and accomplished First Ladies in history because of her charisma, compassion and powerful speech-making.

That said, even before Michelle’s rise to fame during her time in the White House, she was already an accomplished lawyer, writer and community activist.

Once in the White House, her special mix of talents and accomplishments made Michelle a role model for millions of women around the world.

Especially given that First Ladies have the freedom to define their roles as they see fit, during her 8 years in Washington, Michelle chose to address racism, women’s rights and public health.

She called herself “Mom-in-chief,” and applied herself to issues ranging from children’s education to the needs of military families.

This included launching the Let Girls Learn initiative to fund girls’ education projects tackling everything from leadership to poverty.

She was also a risk-taker and stepped outside traditional first lady stereotypes.

Given her achievement and clear leadership skills, rumor says many Democrats wanted Michelle to run for office after her husband’s presidency ended in January 2017.

Although for now, the Obamas have ruled out a political career for Michelle… that said, it pays never to say never.

After all, Hillary Clinton went from First Lady to within an eyelash of becoming the first female president in U.S. history.

The Obamas have been an inspiration to many, and the legacy they leave behind is partly owed to Michelle.

Regardless of your political beliefs, it’s hard not to feel inspired by Michelle’s achievements as First Lady… but also as a leader.

So why don’t we take a look Michelle Obama’s 10 greatest leadership qualities to see how they’ve shaped her legacy and inspired millions.

1. Strong Character

We said it before – Michelle Obama wasn’t your typical First Lady. Her capacity to motivate, inspire and call others to action was rooted in her strong personality.

Her strong character helped her fight for social issues, regardless of how controversial they were.

She was also vocal and honest about some of the harsh realities faced by minorities in America.

This came to a head in a 2015 commencement speech at Tuskegee University where she reminded black students to stay strong and persevere against the odds.

Michelle’s stance on social issues made her an iconic figure – and will remain her legacy.

To truly lead and inspire others means standing up for what you believe in and living by your values – regardless of opposing views or fear of rocking the “status quo” boat.

This is what will inspire courage in others to do the same. Plus, you’ll build a sense of purpose by sticking by your convictions when the going gets tough.

2. Compassionate

“All of us driven by a simple belief that the world as it is just won’t do — that we have an obligation to fight for the world as it should be.” – Michelle Obama

When it comes down to it, leadership is about much more than having a “type-A” personality. It’s about being compassionate to people from all walks of life.

Before Michelle was First Lady, she was a practicing lawyer and fought against injustice through her work at Chicago City Hall where addressed her community’s social issues.

Later, she went on to establish the Chicago chapter of Public Allies, a national service network to help prepares youth for a career in the civil service.

But being a successful leader is more than just having good business skills. You also need empathy and compassion in order to build healthy relationships within an organization.

Make no mistake: compassion is your ticket to people’s hearts. It will also help you earn the trust and respect of your employees – which is essential if you want to be an influential and inspiring leader.

3. Self-Confidence

“One of the lessons that I grew up with was to always stay true to yourself and never let what somebody else says distract you from your goals.” – Michelle Obama

Michelle Obama demonstrated her self-confidence in numerous ways. Whether it was her uplifting DNC inauguration speeches or championing courage and self-esteem for women , Michelle never shied away from standing up for what she believes in.

Biographers say Michelle’s willingness to speak her mind goes all the way back to her college years, where she criticized one of her professor’s teaching methods. She credits her parents and older brother for helping her find her “voice” at an early age.

That voice would later resonate with the hearts and minds of millions of people around the world.

While not everyone is as fortunate as Michelle to have had a strong support network growing up, the great thing about confidence is that it can be improved once you make the decision to do so and start appreciating who you are and what unique qualities you have to offer.

Yes, these efforts take time – but most worthwhile pursuits in life usually do.

The former First Lady’s example showed that everyone matters and everyone has a voice that can change the world.

But remember, it all starts with one thing… your choice to believe in yourself. Once you do, your capacity as a leader will rise ten fold.

4. Powerful Speaker

Michelle Obama had an uncanny way of captivating her audience during her husband’s 8 years in office.

She had an amazing way of making people feel as if they were part of something bigger. And she did it by relating her own experience.

As First Lady, she also gave powerful speeches about her experience as a black woman competing in academia, as well as the need to stand up for women’s rights.

She also didn’t shy away from calling out lewd behavior, including sexist remarks by politicians. And when doing so, she never lost her cool.

Some of her most inspirational speeches include:

2012 DNC Speech:

International Women’s Day speech:

5. Perseverance

michelle obama inspiring quotes challenges

Here’s a simple fact: life isn’t always easy. Many great accomplishments take a significant amount of time and hard work. As the saying goes:

The only time “success” appears before “work,” is in the dictionary.

So to achieve amazing feats, perseverance is key.

Michelle became the first African-American First Lady in U.S. history – all while the odds were firmly stacked against her and her husband.

She also achieved several important milestones while in the White House, such as passing a bipartisan School Lunch program to provide free and reduced-price meals to more than 20 million low-income children.

In 2014, she also launched the Reach Higher Initiative to inspire young people across the country to put their education first.

Even her life before becoming First Lady was filled with accomplishments that demonstrated her perseverance.

This included graduating cum laude from Princeton University before finishing up her law degree at Harvard.

Michelle’s life story shows us how a strong commitment to one’s values can lead to tremendous change in the world.

Not all of us will get to influence public policy like Michelle, but you can all learn to stay committed to your goals regardless of what life throws at you.

To sum it up, the art of perseverance sets great leaders – and great organizations – apart.

6. Inspirational

“You may not always have a comfortable life and you will not always be able to solve all of the world’s problems at once but don’t ever underestimate the importance you can have because history has shown us that courage can be contagious and hope can take on a life of its own.” – Michelle Obama

Needless to say, the former First Lady’s life story has inspired millions of people.

Her ongoing efforts to fight poverty, inequality and obesity gave her a sense of purpose that transcended political lines and racial divides.

Michelle was adamant in her claim that the power of the individual is paramount, and why you shouldn’t underestimate your ability to inspire real change in your community.

“We learned about honesty and integrity – that the truth matters… that you don’t take shortcuts or play by your own set of rules… and success doesn’t count unless you earn it fair and square.” – Michelle Obama

Great leaders are honest about their strengths, weaknesses and expectations. This applies to the business world and any other life endeavour.

Michelle Obama was dedicated to many important social causes before and during her husband’s presidential tenure.

And authenticity was one of her most valued leadership traits . Michelle’s success can largely be attributed to her honesty as well as her dedication to show up each day and work towards her goals.

So here’s a tip: if you want to be an inspiring leader – start off by being honest. Honesty is more than just telling the truth – it’s about creating a culture of transparency.

8. Graceful Under Pressure

A lot of attention has been paid to Michelle Obama’s sense of style. But her sense of style was more than just fashion.

She spoke eloquently, walked with grace and portrayed herself in a positive and respectful light.

Whether you supported her husband or didn’t agree with him at all, it was difficult not to like the former First Lady.

Make no mistake: the way you carry yourself says a lot about you and your values.

Make it your aim to carry yourself with confidence and composure, even when no one is watching – and as if everyone was watching.

9. Relatable to Others

“My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‘blackness’ than ever before. I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong.” – Michelle Obama

As you can imagine, when you’re the First Lady, it’s very easy to become detached from reality.

Not Michelle Obama.

Throughout her husband’s 8-year term, she talked openly about her personal life. Everything from her experience at school to her first date with Barack – her story resonated with millions of women across the country.

She also empowered African-American women to fight against stereotypes. She did all this by being relatable. Many women saw some of themselves in Michelle Obama.

Although your business or passion might not be political, your ability to inspire others to action is an important leadership quality.

That’s why it’s important to speak from the heart and show vulnerability when expressing your hopes – and even your weaknesses. Effective leaders inspire others to see their vision – so when it comes to relating to others, remember to be genuine!

10. Time Management

“My first job in all honesty is going to continue to be mom-in-chief. Making sure that in this transition, which will be even more of a transition for the girls… that they are settled and that they know they will continue to be the center of our universe.” – Michelle Obama

From her dozens of accomplishments to raising Malia and Natasha, Michelle made it a priority to manage her time so she could focus on what was most important to her – with her children always at the top of the list.

The fact of the matter is – there often aren’t enough hours in the day, so you need to define your non-negotiables and be realistic about what you can manage – and what you need to delegate or say no to.

So there you have it. Our pick of Michelle Obama’s top 10 most inspiring leadership qualities and how she used them to inspire change.

Inspiring Leadership Now

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — My Heroes — My Hero: Michelle Obama

My Hero: Michelle Obama

Categories: My Heroes Someone Who Inspires Me

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Published: Dec 16, 2021

Words: 556 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Michelle Obama: Empowering Leadership and Inspiring Advocacy

Works cited:.

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Freedman, J. (2014). Anime in America: The emergence of a global pop culture. A&C Black.
Gale, D. (2015). Drawing anime and manga characters: step-by-step guide to creating your favorite characters. Chartwell Books.
Hart, C. (2012). Manga for the beginner kawaii: how to draw the supercute characters of Japanese comics. Watson-Guptill Publications.
Hernandez, J. (2013). Manga: Introduction, genres, global impact. ABC-CLIO.
Koletnik, M., & Zupančič, T. (2017). The effects of Japanese anime on the drawing of Slovenian high school students. Educational Studies, 43(3), 341-354.
Lamarre, T. (2009). The anime machine: A media theory of animation. University of Minnesota Press.
Lunning, F. (Ed.). (2011). Mechademia 6: User enhanced. University of Minnesota Press.
Miyake, K. (2017). What makes Japanese anime unique? A comparative analysis between American and Japanese animation. Journal of Media and Communication Studies, 9(5), 57-67.
Napier, S. J. (2016). Anime from Akira to Howl's Moving Castle: Experiencing contemporary Japanese animation. St. Martin's Press.

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Transformative Leadership Characteristics of Michelle Obama

April 19, 2021 by csp5295

Transformational leadership is defined in the lesson commentaries as a form of leadership that “serves to change the status quo by appealing to followers’ values and their sense of higher purpose…[they] engage with followers and create a connection that raises the level of motivation and morality in both the leader and the follower (Hamel, 2021).” One iconic member of society that is famously known for their transformational leadership style is former First Lady Michelle Obama. She held the qualities of a transformational leader by having vision, rhetorical skills, image and trust building, and personalized leadership.

In her latest documentary she was shown having a meaningful discussion with young women, empowering them to become leaders in their own ways and stressing how important education was for herself, and for them. Through this, she was able to depict the vision characteristic, or known amongst leaders as those able to “recognize the problems of a present system and offer a vision to overcome these problems (Hamel, 2021).” She discussed the issue of the lack of female leaders, and ways to fix this issue by stressing the importance of education for women around the world. Additionally, this demonstrated her rhetorical skills as a transformational leader, as she was able to share her vision across her followers and across the country of women empowerment and working hard to achieve one’s goals. From this, her followers were able to embrace her vision and share it with others.

Michelle also represented qualities such as image and trust building. This characteristic states that transformational leaders “build trust in their followers through an image of self-confidence, moral conviction, and personal example and self-sacrifice (Hamel, 2021).” She fulfills this characteristic through her story of coming from a low-income neighborhood in Chicago, where neither of her parents had the opportunity to achieve a higher education. Her story of self-sacrifice, hard work and dedication to receive the prestigious education she had has been shared everywhere and has inspired millions. Her image is known globally as a woman who leads by example and who radiates self-confidence in herself and in her work.

Additionally, Michelle continues her work as a leader through personalized leadership, the final characteristic described in the lesson commentary as transformational leaders that “share strong, personal bonds with followers,” and “are sensitive to the emotional states of followers and are adept at picking up social cues (Hamel, 2021).” In many of her speeches, she spoke on race and the discrimination she faced an African-American. She was able to empathize with the Black community and other marginalized groups about their experiences and created a strong, personal bond with them because of this.

With all these characteristics satisfied, it is clear that Michelle was a prominent transformational leader that paved the way with her foundations, books, and historical achievement as the first African-American First Lady for eight years. Her advocacy for poverty awareness, education, nutrition, and other important issues led to her being a role model for all and a leader for her followers to admire and follow her vision.

Hamel, R. (2021). Lesson 11: Servant Leadership, 2021

Northouse, P.G. (2019). Leadership: Theory and Practice. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.

April 19, 2021 at 8:04 am

Michelle Obama is a great example of a transformational leader. She has so many admirable qualities and has influenced so many people throughout the world. The vision she had for the country and all the issues she wanted to focus on was something that stood out as her time as First Lady. I really like how you described her life story and went into detail on why she was such a great leader. She is very well respected and someone that people look up to as a leader and one that is very impactful on people’s everyday lives.

Leadership Lessons From Michelle Obama’s Best-Selling Memoir

For at least an hour before Michelle Obama graced the stage at Barclays Center in Brooklyn in December 2018, just one stop on her tour to promote her book, “Becoming,” videos featuring her best moments played on the big screen.

A soulful playlist curated by Questlove blasted. The show was sold out. The 19,000-seat stadium had the energy of a rock concert. The message: Michelle Obama’s a larger-than-life woman with a life story and message to match. In swag shops outside the arena, her quote “When they go low, we go high” was emblazoned on shirts and hats and mugs.

The former first lady understands she has a unique and powerful platform. So, while her jab at President Trump and her vivid re-telling of her romantic courtship with President Obama have gotten the most attention, a careful read reveals that “Becoming” is a call to action.

Drawing on inspiration from her ordinary beginnings, Obama uses her story to inspire others to lead. Her book offers a blueprint for those who aspire to rise out of places that lack privilege and guidance.

Here are some of the leadership lessons from her new book that can help you navigate your career, relationships and life in general.

Lesson No. 1: Leadership Begins at Home

Michelle Obama was raised on Chicago’s South Side with modest means. Her father, Fraser, was a blue-collar worker, her mother, Marian, a stay-at-home mom. She gives full credit to her loving parents and the stable home they provided as the foundations of the lessons that emboldened her.

On stage, Obama spoke about her father’s deep commitment to her and her brother, Craig. She called on the fathers in the audience to be mindful of how they treat their daughters, never as possessions or delicate beings that need protection but as equal and capable members of the family.

She recalled that her father always taught her the same skills that he would teach her older brother. When he learned to catch baseballs, so did she. She also writes with pride and love about her father’s twenty-year tenure tending boilers for the city of Chicago.

“Even as his multiple sclerosis made it increasingly difficult for him to walk, he never missed a day of work,” she writes.

From her mother, it seems, Obama learned a deep understanding of personal responsibility. She and her brother were raised to become adults, not babies, according to Obama. All the important lessons of leadership — tenacity, dignity, resilience, commitment and worth ethic — Obama learned at home.

Lesson No. 2: The Greatest Lessons Are in Our Differences

Whenever Obama is asked about the polarization and deep division in the United States, she insists she has experienced a completely different America. “It’s much harder to hate up-close,” she has said in many interviews . She believes there’s strength in differences and that we are more alike than we think.

“The problem is we don’t know each other, we don’t let each other in,” she writes in her book. In “Becoming,” she tells the story of her college friend, Suzanne, who was “Ernie to her Bert, Laverne to her Shirley.”

From Suzanne, she says she learned about joy and wild abandon. But also that there was more than one way to live a life. She spent no energy trying to change her friend’s more chaotic ways. Instead, she learned from her and, as a result, became a more well-rounded person.

Unifying any group of people is one of the biggest and most challenging tasks of a leader. Effective leadership, gleaned from Obama’s stories, means taking our differences and using them to make us stronger.

Lesson No. 3: Don’t Be Afraid to Swerve

Leaders in our technological and constantly changing age must learn how to adapt and evolve. Before she met her husband, the future president, Obama confessed to being a box-checker. She didn’t reflect so much on what she wanted to be as much as she just wanted to get things done.

While this commitment can lead to some success, when innovation and creative problem solving are needed instead, swerving becomes a necessary and important skill.

Obama credits her husband for teaching her how to swerve, to go off the beaten path in order to find your destiny. In swerving, she discovered another path that she could not have planned or envisioned.

Leadership is as much about accomplishments as it is about inspiration and imagination. If you’re hoping to get your team to tackle a big idea that requires unconventional methods, take a cue from the former first lady and get ready to swerve when circumstances call for it.

Lesson No. 4: Find Your Community

Obama learned early that you can’t do anything alone. She speaks fondly of mentors who helped her navigate the many bumps in her journey. In her book, she tells the story of a woman at Princeton who took Obama under her wing when Obama was a student there, giving her the space to find her footing in an environment that was foreign to her upbringing.

When deciding to switch careers mid-life she looked to mentors for guidance. She had a network of them that she had built throughout her working life. The mentors were sounding boards and sources wisdom when she faced big decisions.

While at the White House, Obama recalls pulling together retreats and boot camps for her girlfriends so she could let off steam in a safe and supportive environment. Without a community, a leader is unlikely to sustain the energy required to see any endeavor through its ups and downs.

It’s also unlikely that a leader can remain in power without the support of a community. Obama’s lesson is clear — gathering like-minded people who are invested in your success is crucial to a leader’s performance.

Lesson No. 5: Serve Your Community

It says a lot about Obama’s popularity that she can fill thousands of seats in a stadium, at a ranging from $150 to $1300. But, to serve her community, she gives away 10 percent of the seats, often to young people making a difference in their community.

It’s just one of the many ways Obama tries to walk her talk. Since the early days of their relationship, when former President Obama was still a community organizer, serving the community has been at the center of their partnership.

Post-presidency, the couple started the Obama Foundation with a mission to spread civic engagement around the world. In her book, Obama writes about why she chose to open the White House to as many ordinary citizens as possible, even hosting kids from all walks of life for campouts and sleepovers. She wanted to make the White House the people’s house.

Obama echoes the wisdom of many great leaders, that your work can only become meaningful if it helps others. And only through meaning, can work rise above the mundane to become a calling. Having purpose can differentiate a weak leader from a strong one.

Lesson No. 6: Never Lose Your Integrity

To be a leader is to experience risk, reward and criticism in their most extreme forms. The former first lady’s tenure at the White House was no different.

Her patriotism has been called into question. She’s been called names. Rumors swirled around her family, from the mundane to the extremely troubling. In her book, Obama writes about a lesson her mother taught her early in life that didn’t resonate until she was in her early forties, campaigning for her husband. A little boy punched her in the face when she was in first grade. When her mother met the boy, she told her daughter, “That boy was just scared and angry about things that had nothing to do with you.” It was a lesson in standing up for yourself when necessary, but mostly never letting another person’s action change or influence you.

All leaders face challenges and harsh critics, but the great ones never waver from their mission. In one of President Obama’s farewell speeches, he referred to his wife as the girl from the South Side, implying that their incredible journey has not changed who she is and what she believes in.

Leaders may gain popularity in many different ways, but often they earn respect through integrity.

Lesson No. 7: Lead by Example

On the night of the 2016 election, Obama went to bed before the official results came in. By the time she woke up, Donald Trump had been elected president. Many on Obama’s staff, a diverse group of people that generally feared a Trump presidency, wept for the future.

“We had to be the moral compass for our staff first and foremost,” Obama said in an interview with Stephen Colbert , part a round of interviews she gave promoting her new book. Always for the Obamas it was about leading by example.

In her book, she talks about the high bar set for the first African American family in the White House. Rather than shirk from the expectations, they chose to meet them. Obama writes about how thoughtful and intentional they had to be with every decision and every action. They felt there was no room for mistakes.

Obama explains in her book that she and her husband embraced this responsibility in order to make sure they could keep the door they walked through open for generations to come.

Heavy-handed leadership has been an example of power throughout history, but the kind of power that seems the most sustainable is the one prescribed by Obama — lead by example.

Lesson No. 8: Eat Well and Exercise Regularly

If there’s an image of Michelle Obama that could stand as the symbol of who she was in the White House, it would be one where she’s doing push-ups. In “Becoming,” she recalls zeroing in on a mission to advocate for healthy lifestyles when she sat down in her kitchen with a chef she hired to cook for her family, Sam Kass.

Kass was young, eager and full of ideas. Reluctant at first, she hired Kass in order to roll back the unhealthy habits that her family was falling into, as a result of an extremely busy lifestyle. While we may get on with our daily lives, completing tasks and showing up for work, according to Obama’s message, we can’t reach our potential without taking care of our health.

Her eight years in the White House were a testament to the importance of a healthy lifestyle for any leader. Despite her grueling schedule, the first lady didn’t seem to lose energy.

Boundless energy and a zest for a life that can come from a healthy lifestyle are obvious superpowers for leaders.

Lesson No. 9: Feed Your Potential

In Michelle Obama’s South Side home, there was plenty of love and stability and food in the fridge. But, outside of those provisions, Obama knew she had to work hard for everything else, including her Ivy League education.

She didn’t limit her dreaming based on the limitations of her circumstances. Neither did her family. Obama writes about an instance when she didn’t tell her parents about a school trip to Paris, coming to the conclusion that it would be too much money. When they found out, they sat her down and told her that this was not something she needed to decide for herself. Even on meager salaries, her parents found a way to pay for the trip.

The lesson is clear: Invest in your own potential.

Lesson No. 10: Expect Excellence

Obama may not have grown up in a fancy neighborhood, but it was clear, she writes in “Becoming,” that excellence was expected of her and her brother. Few things can be more detrimental to a team than low standards from a leader.

Obama’s upbringing, as detailed in her book, sets a great example of how to support excellence. She writes about gaining confidence to go to Princeton after seeing her brother succeed in the endeavor.

Her parents also taught their two children about having high standards and seeking it out in both people and life choices.

While Obama confesses in her book to wondering, “Am I good enough?” when she was young, it does seem that at every major milestone in her narrative she was able to answer that question with a resounding yes.

Leadership is often about self-mastery. In the pages of “Becoming,” Obama’s stories inspire people to strengthen their inner convictions, raise their standards and to work daily to meet them.

Lesson No. 11: Celebrate Small Victories

To celebrate the legalization of same-sex marriage, Obama snuck out of the White House with one of her daughters. She writes about having a tunnel vision plan to escape her Secret Service detail and celebrate with the people that had gathered in the streets.

It’s a fun story — she’s been getting a lot of mileage out of it on the talk-show circuit — but in it is a deeper lesson for anyone leading a team through stormy days or uphill battles. You must celebrate victories, big or small.

Obama says her small act of defiance was a response to a funeral they attended on the same day, where nine African Americans were murdered by a white supremacist who opened fire in their church. She writes about her feeling of desperation to join the celebration about same-sex marriage, if only to provide a brief reprieve from the heartbreaking tragedy that constantly touched their lives.

It’s a poignant lesson in leadership: Celebrating small victories can help fuel the hard battles ahead.

Lesson No. 12: Never Underestimate the Power of Warmth

Leaders can get lost in the importance of their daily tasks. But for Obama, taking care of the big stuff meant also giving space for the warmth of the ordinary.

She describes in the book her family’s near daily routine of having dinner together, a time for easy banter and no policy talk. While the White House seemed intimidating at first, full of formality and opulence, Obama said she grew to appreciate the people who made the place run. Butlers and aides at the White House have been taking care of first families for decades.

“Life was better, always, when we could measure the warmth,” she writes. This could be translated as soft skills, intangible values that can add a lot depth to a leader or a team.

For Obama, keeping both feet on the ground meant daily interactions with the people around her. “These interactions were quick but in some small way they made life feel a little more normal,” she writes. For leaders who are facing complicated problems, a path to a solution might only come if they’re grounded in a welcoming environment, full of familiarity and warmth. That certainly seems to be the case for the former first lady.

Lesson No. 13: Own Your Story

A powerful narrative can be the difference between a forgettable leader and one with lasting impact. President Barack Obama was a master storyteller, taking his personal story and turning it into an inspiring symbol for unity and progress.

His wife took notes.

“Becoming” barely hit the shelves and before earning honors as the best-selling book of 2018. Leaders can take note that a well-told story is one of the most powerful ways to connect to your audience, whether that’s your team or your customers.

Obama says she learned quickly that if she didn’t own her story, someone else would tell it for her. Sure enough, she describes in her book the multiple narratives in the media that didn’t accurately portray who she knew she was. The same thing can happen to leaders who are too busy to check in on what’s being said about them.

Owning your story means safeguarding your leadership from becoming misunderstood or misrepresented.

Lesson No. 14: Become

No one likes a stale or stagnant leader. How to counter this might just be the best lesson in Obama’s memoir.

Obama says she chose” Becoming” as the title of her book because she hated the idea that journeys are finite. She hated the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” To Obama, growing up isn’t an end destination.

Leaders can take a lot of insight and wisdom from this. In the information age, we no longer trust that there are guardians of knowledge, power and expertise. We are all just learning as we go along. Leaders who don’t accept this or try to hide from it might seem out of touch, feigning authority and appearing inauthentic.

At Barclays Center, Obama had a stadium full of people hanging on her every word. The stage was sparse, just Obama and long-time friend and poet Elizabeth Alexander talking about life. But it was a masterclass in leadership: Share your journey of becoming and others will want to follow. Or even better, walk alongside you.

A virtual museum of his presidency

Through a collection of deeply reported stories, videos, photographs, documents and graphics, experience Barack Obama’s historic time in office: as the first black president , as commander in chief , as a domestic and foreign policymaker, and as a husband and father .

Continue to the gallery of stories or keep reading: How Michelle Obama became a singular American voice .

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How Michelle Obama became a singular American voice

Three weeks after Inauguration Day in 2009 and still a long way from crafting an agenda, Michelle Obama climbed into her motorcade and paid a visit to Mary’s Center, a Latino community services agency a few miles north of the White House. She read “ Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? ” to the young children and met with teenagers who asked why she had come.

The first reason, she said, was that Washington was now the Obamas’ home and they had always been taught to listen and not just pass on by. The second reason identified the audience and framed the approach that would define this most uncommon first lady’s agenda for the next eight years.

“I think it’s real important for young kids, particularly kids who come from communities without resources, to see me, not the first lady,” she said. “To see that there is no magic to me sitting here. There are no miracles that happen. There is no magic dust.”

With the 13 teenagers seated in a semicircle, Obama shared the setbacks and self-doubt she faced as the daughter of black working-class parents in Chicago. When people told her she couldn’t achieve something, she set out to prove them wrong. One step at a time, she climbed, and now she felt an obligation to share.

“When you get, you give back,” she said.

Obama would give much bigger speeches on much bigger stages as she became one of the most famous people in the world. For many Democrats, she was the moral voice of the 2016 presidential campaign, calling out Republican Donald Trump for trafficking in “prejudice, fears and lies.” For other fans, she was simply the first lady who went viral, making them smile with her eclectic fashion choices and her energetic, sometimes goofy pitches for healthier eating.

The heart of Obama’s efforts, however, was a message about the persistent inequities of race, class and gender in America. In scores of speeches and projects, she turned again and again to the stacked deck. These were the themes and conundrums that animated her work before she reached the White House and now seem certain to shape her choices after she departs.

For all the grief she took from critics who conjured radicalism, grievance or, bizarrely, racism from her finely tuned remarks, Obama’s antidotes were fundamentally timeless and conservative. More than anything, she used the strength of her own Chicago-to-Princeton-to-the-White-House narrative to urge kids to believe in themselves and never quit. She mastered the levers of popular culture and harnessed the convening power of her office and her carefully curated brand to establish partnerships with the private sector.

Obama addressed obesity, which disproportionately affects low-income families and children of color. She worked to increase arts education in poorly performing schools and ease the path for aspiring first-generation college students. She dispensed hugs to thousands of children, saying in a simple embrace that she believed in them. At a BET special, she called out, “Black girls rock!”

A straight-talker by temperament, she modulated her tone in deference to the role. Eternally disciplined and pragmatic, she never swung for the fences. Critics on the left chided her for not being bold enough, as she acknowledged last year. Her answer: “These were my choices, my issues, and I decided to tackle them in the way that felt most authentic to me — in a way that was both substantive and strategic, but also fun and, hopefully, inspiring.”

When Obama took up her unpaid job three days after her 45th birthday, she faced vast and conflicting expectations. She was the first African American first lady in a country that was anything but post-racial. She was the magnetic campaigner who told audiences that power concedes nothing without a struggle. She was the highly educated, professionally accomplished mother of two young daughters who smilingly adopted the moniker of “mom in chief.”

“From the moment we walked in the door, people have wanted to get inside her head and figure her out. ‘Is she in this box or that box? Why isn’t she doing this or doing that?’ ” said Jocelyn Frye, a Harvard Law School friend who became Obama’s first policy adviser. “She’s not a person who lives in boxes. It’s just not that simple.”

The personal story that Obama carried into the White House in January 2009 was enough to etch her name in the history books even if she did not accomplish anything more. She called herself “the little black girl from the South Side of Chicago.” As she would say later, her ancestors had arrived in the United States in chains and now she and Barack Obama were living in a home that slaves helped build.

But in other ways, too, Obama brought a set of experiences markedly different from her modern-day predecessors. Of the previous eight presidents, four had been governors, four had been vice presidents. Their wives had lived in the public eye. Obama was a young Chicago professional, a working mother in a big city who spoke openly about juggling jobs, chores and child-rearing with her increasingly famous and preoccupied husband.

By upbringing, she was urban and attuned to issues of prejudice, hardship and inequality. She adored her father, Fraser C. Robinson III, a gregarious aspiring artist who spent his working life as a shift worker in the city water plant. A swimmer, boxer and soldier as a young man, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in his 30s. His health deteriorated, and he went from one crutch to two to a motorized cart. He died in 1991 at age 55, still working at the plant.

Both of Obama’s grandfathers had come north in the Great Migration, and many members of the Robinson and Shields families lived nearby. Purnell Shields, a talented carpenter and Obama’s maternal grandfather, was barred as an African American from the labor unions that claimed the highest-paying jobs. Fraser C. Robinson Jr. spent much of his career as a postal worker. If he had been born white, Obama once said, he would have been a banker.

Obama spent time with this extended family. She knew them all, from those who were prospering to those who were ailing or just getting by. She also knew countless schoolmates who seemed hardly different from her, yet had fallen short of their ambitions. When Barack Obama met her in 1989, he detected a sense of vulnerability that he traced to Michelle’s sense that life was “terrifyingly random.” She called herself “a statistical anomaly.”

After ditching the prosperous law firm, where she found the work soulless and many colleagues narrow, she spent two years doing economic development work at City Hall with future White House adviser Valerie Jarrett. Next, in what she described as the happiest phase of her working life, she built the Chicago office of Public Allies, a nonprofit leadership training program with roots in community organizing.

Next, she spent a dozen years as an administrator at the University of Chicago, where she elevated the interests of neighboring African American communities. Much as she would in the White House, she searched for ways to connect a powerful and often remote institution with communities where it could do some good. Comfortable and connected in both worlds, she saw herself as a bridge.

In 2001, protesters seeking more construction jobs for African Americans at the university medical center said she should be fired. One said Obama and her colleagues were looking out for themselves and did “not have the best interests of blacks at heart.” Obama persisted. In the next seven years, 42.9 percent of the hospital’s spending on new construction, or $48.8 million, went to firms run by minorities or women, according to university figures.

The focus was not new. At Harvard Law School, where the tenured faculty was 96 percent white and 92 percent male, Obama spoke up for greater diversity. Charles Ogletree, a mentor and professor, pinpointed her passions early.

“Everything she wrote, the things that she was involved in, the things that she thought about,” he recalled of her law school years in the mid-1980s, “were in effect reflections on race and gender. And how she had to keep the doors open for women and men going forward.”

One of Obama’s signatures was the push for a seat at the table — or in “the room where it happens,” to borrow from “Hamilton,” the Broadway musical the Obamas admire. A few years ago, she told a gathering of White House interns that if they were not prepared to risk their power when they claimed that seat, they needed to make room for someone who would.

In reaching the most rarefied of tables, she figured she had four years, maybe eight, to make something happen, to “move the needle,” as she put it. As the media made a fuss over a new hairstyle, she once explained how she saw the role of first lady: “We take our bangs and we stand in front of important things that the world needs to see. And, eventually, people stop looking at the bangs and they start looking at what we’re standing in front of.”

Obama saw early that she could connect with disadvantaged young people by describing her South Side upbringing and the choices she made in her life. Even as the Obamas set out unambiguously to be the president and first lady for the entire country, they were determined “to look out for people who historically have not had people looking out for them,” Valerie Jarrett said in an interview. “Certainly, African American women and girls see themselves in her in a unique way.”

The White House portfolio included Let’s Move, her childhood obesity project, and efforts to open the White House and its grounds to kids who barely knew where it was and never imagined stepping inside. She established Joining Forces to help the military and their families with jobs and workplace issues and started a small mentoring program that became a personal cause.

She worked on homelessness among veterans and pushed Reach Higher, seeking to increase post-secondary education for low-income adolescents. Finally, she launched Let Girls Learn, an international initiative designed to improve access to secondary school for millions of girls around the world who found themselves on the outside looking in.

Throughout, Obama made clear to her staff that she favored coherent projects backed by creative but realistic thinking. She sought buy-in from federal agencies, state governments and private partners, and she wanted to make use of every opportunity. She told her aides, “Don’t just put me on a plane, send me someplace and have me smile.”

“She never looked at things esoterically or theoretically. It was practical and real,” said Democratic strategist Stephanie Cutter, who advised her at key moments. “Her focus was never ‘How do I move Washington?’ It was much bigger than that. It was ‘How do you mobilize a country? How are real people outside of Washington going to see things?’ ”

At the White House, she staged arts events, from dance, music and spoken word to food and design workshops. She made sure that artists who were performing for well-heeled East Room audiences at night were teaching children at the White House or local schools during the day. Her tastes tilted to designers, artists, playwrights and directors of color, choices that alerted millions of Obama-watchers to work they might not have seen or heard.

In 2011, she helped launch Turnaround Arts, a program designed to deliver arts teaching, inspiration and supplies to some of the worst-performing schools in the country — often in places where arts programming was a budget casualty. From eight pilot programs in 2011, the project now reaches 68 schools, with 20 to be added in 2017.

“She knows the power of the arts. It’s visceral and it’s who she is,” said Megan Beyer, executive director of the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities. “Every time we do an event, she’ll look at the audience and she’ll say, ‘This is not a fluke. This is what happens when you invest in these kids.’ ”

To critics on the right, including former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, who mocked or denounced new science-based standards for school lunches as overly intrusive, Obama urged them to look more closely. She pointed to the millions of low-income children who depend on those meals and the federal government’s help in paying for them.

“We simply can’t afford to say, ‘Oh, well, it’s too hard, so let’s not do it,’ ” Obama said in 2014. When lobbyists persuaded Congress to count one-eighth of a cup of tomato paste in pizza sauce as the equivalent of a half-cup of vegetables, she wrote dismissively in the New York Times, “You don’t have to be a nutritionist to know that this doesn’t make much sense.”

Inside the East Wing, Obama commanded intense loyalty from her staff and set her own agenda, down to the number of public days on her schedule — two at first, while Malia and Sasha were getting settled, and later three. She stayed closer to home than Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton, who each traveled abroad more than twice as much, and put limits on her campaign trips, especially when not campaigning for her husband.

She tightly controlled her message. In eight years, she never gave a news conference, although she held a select few roundtables with reporters. She rarely granted interviews to the beat reporters who knew her work the best. More often, and more strategically, she granted face time to grateful personalities and comedians, along with media outlets carefully chosen for the audiences they reached.

Aides and friends were barely more accessible. When reporters called, former chief of staff Jackie Norris once said, Obama expected her friends to “check in and have conversations and make sure that it’s good for her.” Mostly, the friends did.

Since the beginning of the first presidential campaign nearly 10 years ago, Obama has credited her girlfriends with keeping her grounded amid the maelstrom. “When you’re isolated, that’s when you need your girls. They can keep you together when no one else can,” said Angela Kennedy, a D.C. public defender and former Princeton roommate who sees Obama regularly. “She’s smart. She recognized that.”

Not trailed by the presidential press pool, Obama escaped to the gym, restaurants, theaters and her friends’ houses, as well as the occasional trip to the presidential retreat at Camp David. It helped to have her mother, Marian Robinson, now 79, living on the third floor of the White House. “I can always go up to her room and cry, complain, argue,” Obama said. “And she just says, go on down there and do what you’re supposed to do.”

Obama spoke often of what it meant to have normal family dinners and activities with Malia and Sasha, talking about the girls’ doings and keeping things light. She has always been able “to stay above the fray,” said Frye, her Harvard friend, in part by “meeting with real people and talking about real-world problems. At the end of the day, she has kept her head.”

Obama’s ascendance — as mother, mentor, leader and critic — carries many meanings in American culture, particularly as an African American woman, said Nell Irvin Painter, an emeritus professor of American history at Princeton.

“Her power is a symbolic power,” Painter said, noting the way Obama “has conducted herself as first lady. She has grace, there is no question, but I would add elegance. It’s a kind of assurance that is also something new for a black woman in public life. She is the symbol of what an American can be. Michelle Obama has presented a universal American identity.”

On May 9, 2015, Obama took the stage at Tuskegee University in Alabama and delivered the most thorough and personal speech about race and racism of her tenure. As a speechmaker, said author Garry Wills, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his study of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, “I don’t know that she has any competitors in women’s history.” She wowed millions of fans with keynote addresses at three successive Democratic National Conventions, but she also had a serious body of work that received less attention in mainstream circles.

Many times before her Tuskegee appearance, she had spoken about the country’s history of violence and discrimination against African Americans. She did it in Orangeburg, S.C., in 2007 to woo black support for her husband’s candidacy. She did it in Nashville during the 2012 reelection campaign, and in Topeka, Kan., in 2014 to mark the 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education . And she did it at other historically black universities, including Bowie State, Jackson State and North Carolina A&T.

Together, the talks reflected a lifetime of thinking about the shifting landscape of racism, the advances and the setbacks. At Tuskegee, she spoke of slights and hurdles while suggesting strategies — tested by her own experience, as always — to block out the noise and navigate a path forward.

“Here’s the thing: The road ahead is not going to be easy,” she told the graduates in an address that tracked the history of the Tuskegee Airmen, a storied black flying squadron in World War II. “It never is, especially for folks like you and me. Because while we’ve come so far, the truth is that those age-old problems are stubborn and they haven’t fully gone away. So there will be times, just like for those Airmen, when you feel like folks look right past you or they see just a fraction of who you are.”

“Too many folks feel frustrated and invisible,” Obama said. She cited worries about being pulled over “for absolutely no reason,” or being overlooked for a job “because of the way your name sounds,” or sending children to schools “that may no longer be separate, but are far from equal.” Above all, she said, there is the “realization that no matter how far you rise in life, how hard you work to be a good person, a good parent, a good citizen, for some folks, it will never be enough.”

The Obamas were not immune, despite their efforts, their achievements, their conduct. For years, Donald Trump sowed doubts about Barack Obama’s birth and citizenship, while talk show host Rush Limbaugh told his millions of followers that Michelle suffered from “uppity-ism” and called her “Michelle My Butt.” Foes likened her to a character from Planet of the Apes, a Star Wars Wookiee and a gorilla, a racist slur with a particularly long and ugly history. They challenged her patriotism and even questioned her gender.

But no matter how grim the outlook and how significant the structural challenges, Obama said at Tuskegee, despair and anger are “not an excuse to just throw up our hands and give up.” Instead, she proposed the measured, practical, traditional responses that had worked for her. Study, organize, band together, be a mentor, help a cousin fill out a financial aid form and “vote, vote, vote.”

“You have got everything you need to do this. You’ve got it in you,” she said in her best I-believe-in-you tone. “Most of all, you’ve got yourselves and all of the heart, grit and smarts that got you to this day.”

It was never Obama’s style to summon people to the barricades. She drew criticism from some African American intellectuals and activists for perpetuating a bootstraps narrative that said black people must be twice as good to do just as well as whites. Painter recognized the critique but saw Obama’s message differently.

“She also says you can figure it out. That’s a crucial part,” Painter said. “Her commentary to black kids is, ‘You can do it. It’s not just lecturing and shaking her finger in their faces, but an encouragement. It’s pragmatic, but the way she phrases it, it is full of empathy and I think there is still a lack of empathy in the way the United States speaks to black people.”

The response to Obama’s remarks provided proof aplenty. Conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham saw “a litany of victimization.” Media comment boards filled with talk of a “tirade” and an “America-hater” and an “angry woman who has no appreciation for the many gifts our country has bestowed on her.” Someone wrote, “Can she or her husband ever just be Americans? Why do they always have to focus on their skin color? Repulsive.”

But also, “Michelle for President!” — something that Obama, whose favorability ratings routinely topped 60 percent, has said will never happen. “No. Nope. Not going to do it,” she said earlier this year.

Michelle Obama was dismayed by the rise of Donald Trump. She perceived danger in the candidacy of an unstudied Republican who lied with abandon and routinely mocked and disparaged rivals, critics and entire swathes of the American populace, all the while vowing to wreck much of what the Obama administration spent eight years building.

“This is not normal. This is not politics as usual,” Obama declared at an October rally in New Hampshire after a tape surfaced of Trump boasting about grabbing women by the genitals. A growing number of women said they had been accosted. “I know it’s a campaign, but this isn’t about politics. It’s about human decency. It’s about right and wrong.”

Obama said repeatedly during the campaign that Trump was dangerous, undeserving and lacking “any idea what this job takes.” In Philadelphia, she pointedly recalled Trump’s leadership of the birther movement, referring to the “hurtful, deceitful questions deliberately designed to undermine” her husband’s presidency.

The attacks on Trump were the strongest, sharpest words Obama uttered in public during the White House years. Whatever her anger or dismay, she never said she was surprised, for these were the regressive forces that she had seen in action her entire life.

On a weekday morning, with not many people watching, Obama delivered her take on the political moment. To a rapt church audience — men and women, white and black — she said in a tone more suited to a seminar than a rally, “My fear is that we don’t know what truth looks like anymore.” She spoke of her hard-won understanding of the world, drawing on her Chicago life, where persistence and good intentions came with no guarantees.

Politicians had become expert at turning doubt into fear, she said, as life got “harder, progressively harder, for regular people.”

“We’re still a nation that’s a little too mean,” Obama said. “I wish mean worked, because we’re good at it. Our tone is bad and we’ve grown to believe that, somehow, mean talk is tough talk . . . and we reward it. Not just in politics, but we reward it in every sliver of our culture. We look on people who are tough and say, ‘That’s what we need.’ ”

Obama spoke those words in South Carolina in January 2008. As Trump makes his way to Washington with his gilded pitchfork, her assessment rings true for more than 62 million Americans who supported him and millions more who didn’t care enough to vote. She is leaving the White House with work unfinished and fresh troubles brewing. She was right that day at Mary’s Center, in her first weeks on the job, when she offered a verdict that applied as much to the nation as to herself. There are no miracles, no magic dust.

What Obama offered was something else. To audiences great and small, she presented conviction, savvy, a dose of inspiration and a certain faith that the battles were worth waging and the effort would pay off in the end.

Peter Slevin, a former Post national correspondent, is the author of “ Michelle Obama: A Life .”

This story is part of a virtual museum of President Barack Obama’s presidency. In five parts — The First Black President , Commander in Chief , Obama’s America , Obama and the World and The First Family — we explore the triumphs and travails of his historic tenure.

A hopeful moment on race
A soliloquy in Philadelphia
The beer summit
The other trailblazers
On a bridge in Selma
In his own words
The backlash
A new aesthetic
Kids on Obama
Crime, justice and race
Obama in Africa
The Obama electorate
Your Obama presidency

Barack Obama’s watershed 2008 election and the presidency that followed profoundly altered the aesthetics of American democracy, transforming the Founding Fathers’ narrow vision of politics and citizenship into something more expansive and more elegant. The American presidency suddenly looked very different, and for a moment America felt different, too.

The Obama victory helped fulfill one of the great ambitions of the civil rights struggle by showcasing the ability of extraordinarily talented black Americans to lead and excel in all facets of American life. First lady Michelle Obama, and daughters Sasha and Malia, extended this reimagining of black American life by providing a conspicuous vision of a healthy, loving and thriving African American family that defies still-prevalent racist stereotypes.

But some interpreted Obama’s triumph as much more.

The victory was heralded as the arrival of a “post-racial” America, one in which the nation’s original sin of racial slavery and post-Reconstruction Jim Crow discrimination had finally been absolved by the election of a black man as commander in chief. For a while, the nation basked in a racially harmonious afterglow.

A black president would influence generations of young children to embrace a new vision of American citizenship. The “Obama Coalition” of African American, white, Latino, Asian American and Native American voters had helped usher in an era in which institutional racism and pervasive inequality would fade as Americans embraced the nation’s multicultural promise.

Seven years later, such profound optimism seems misplaced. Almost immediately, the Obama presidency unleashed racial furies that have only multiplied over time. From the tea party’s racially tinged attacks on the president’s policy agenda to the “birther” movement’s more overtly racist fantasies asserting that Obama was not even an American citizen, the national racial climate grew more, and not less, fraught.

If racial conflict, in the form of birthers, tea partyers and gnawing resentments, implicitly shadowed Obama’s first term, it erupted into open warfare during much of his second. The Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in the Shelby v. Holder case gutted Voting Rights Act enforcement, throwing into question the signal achievement of the civil rights movement’s heroic period.

Beginning with the 2012 shooting death of black teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida, the nation reopened an intense debate on the continued horror of institutional racism evidenced by a string of high-profile deaths of black men, women, boys and girls at the hands of law enforcement.

The organized demonstrations, protests and outrage of a new generation of civil rights activists turned the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter into the clarion call for a new social justice movement. Black Lives Matter activists have forcefully argued that the U.S. criminal justice system represents a gateway to racial oppression, one marked by a drug war that disproportionately targets, punishes and warehouses young men and women of color. In her bestselling book “ The New Jim Crow ,” legal scholar Michelle Alexander argued that mass incarceration represents a racial caste system that echoes the pervasive, structural inequality of a system of racial apartheid that persists.

Obama’s first-term caution on race matters was punctured by his controversial remarks that police “acted stupidly” in the mistaken identity arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard University’s prominent African American studies professor, in 2009. Four years later he entered the breach once more by proclaiming that if he had a son, “he’d look like Trayvon.”

In the aftermath of racial unrest in Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore, and a racially motivated massacre in Charleston, S.C., Obama went further. In 2015, Obama found his voice in a series of stirring speeches in Selma, Ala., and Charleston, where he acknowledged America’s long and continuous history of racial injustice.

Policy-wise Obama has launched a private philanthropic effort, My Brother’s Keeper, designed to assist low-income black boys, and became the first president to visit a federal prison in a call for prison reform that foreshadowed the administration’s efforts to release federal inmates facing long sentences on relatively minor drug charges.

Despite these efforts, many of Obama’s African American supporters have expressed profound disappointment over the president’s refusal to forcefully pursue racial and economic justice policies for his most loyal political constituency.

From this perspective, the Obama presidency has played out as a cruel joke on members of the African American community who, despite providing indispensable votes, critical support and unstinting loyalty, find themselves largely shut out from the nation’s post-Great Recession economic recovery. Blacks have, critics suggested, traded away substantive policy demands for the largely symbolic psychological and emotional victory of having a black president and first family in the White House for eight years.

Others find that assessment harsh, noting that Obama’s most impressive policy achievements have received scant promotion from the White House or acknowledgment in the mainstream media.

History will decide the full measure of the importance, success, failures and shortcomings of the Obama presidency. With regard to race, Obama’s historical significance is ensured; only his impact and legacy are up for debate. In retrospect, the burden of transforming America’s tortured racial history in two four-year presidential terms proved impossible, even as its promise helped to catapult Obama to the nation’s highest office.

Obama’s presidency elides important aspects of the civil rights struggle, especially the teachings of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. King, for a time, served as the racial justice consciousness for two presidents — John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Many who hoped Obama might be able to serve both roles — as president and racial justice advocate — have been disappointed. Yet there is a revelatory clarity in that disappointment, proving that Obama is not King or Frederick Douglass, but Abraham Lincoln, Kennedy and Johnson. Even a black president, perhaps especially a black president, could not untangle racism’s Gordian knot on the body politic. Yet in acknowledging the limitations of Obama’s presidency on healing racial divisions and the shortcomings of his policies in uplifting black America, we may reach a newfound political maturity that recognizes that no one person — no matter how powerful — can single-handedly rectify structures of inequality constructed over centuries.

Peniel Joseph is professor of history and director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy and the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas.

Being number one means nothing until there’s a number two.

If i had a son, he would look like trayvon., some young americans have known only one president in their lifetime..

On war and leadership
The parade of generals
A tour of duty
One enemy after another
Words of war and peace
The last convoy
The rise of ISIS
Weighing intervention
An army of drones
Struggle after service
Fear at home
Your fight, your stories

Has he failed to understand the nature of war or shown the virtues of patience to win the long game?

We won some good fights and we lost the war., no matter how justified, war promises human tragedy..

Eight turbulent years
Economic brinksmanship
The price of Obamacare
A new state of unions
Shots fired
A cultural shift
‘Healing the planet’
Making presidential comedy
A mark in the wilderness
American reactions
Your America

Anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline is peddling fiction.

What is it like to be the last black president.

Determined restraint
For Muslims, unanswered prayers
Open hand, clenched fist
Talking to Tehran
Closer now – and cigars!
Standing in the world
Friends, adversaries
A pivot to Asia
Air Force One miles
Your worldview
The new modern family
White House, black women
The first lady’s last stand
It’s an Obama thing
In the cultural mix
White House parents
The most popular of them all?
The O’Bidens
The first dogs

The Obama family has really uplifted the image of the black family from the moment we saw them.

He does not walk. he strolls with a black man’s head-up posture..

Share this series

What President Obama’s executive actions mean for President Trump

Terence Samuel, project editor
Allison Michaels, project manager, digital editor
Shannon Croom, multiplatform editor
Courtney Rukan, multiplatform editor
Emily Chow, graphics assignment editor
Seth Blanchard
Emily Yount
Suzette Moyer, art director
James Steinberg, illustrator (The First Black President)
Brian Stauffer, illustrator (Commander in Chief)
Thandiwe Tshabalala, illustrator (Obama’s America)
Jasu Hu, illustrator (Obama and the World)
Erin K. Robinson, illustrator (The First Family)
Dalton Bennett
Gillian Brockell
Bastein Inzaurralde
Claritza Jimenez
Ashleigh Joplin
Whitney Leaming
Osman Malik
Zoeann Murphy
Erin O’Conner
Sarah Parnass
Mahnaz Rezaie
Jorge Ribas
Whitney Shefte
Peter Stevenson
Stephen Cook
Robert Miller
Kenneth Dickerman
Wendy Galietta
Bronwen Latimer
Derek Chollet
Elliot Cohen
Christian Davenport
Ivo H. Daalder
Mike DeBonis
Karen DeYoung
Juliet Eilperin
Michael Fletcher
Thomas Gibbons-Neff
Robin Givhan
Will Haygood
Sari Horwitz
Peniel Joseph
Wesley Lowery
David Maraniss
Greg Miller
Steven Mufson
David Nakamura
John Pomfret
Peter Slevin
Kevin Sullivan
Krissah Thompson
Neely Tucker
William Wan
Vanessa Williams
Darla Cameron
Scott Clement
Emily Guskin
Stephanie Stamm
Aaron Steckelberg
Elise Viebeck

Michelle Obama as an Administrator: Reflections

First Online: 18 August 2018

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Barbara J. Edwards 4

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Too often, the overall professional experiences of former First Lady Michelle Obama are overlooked. In this essay, Edwards addresses Obama’s background and experiences as an African American administrator. Mrs. Obama’s acquired management and leadership skills propelled her to become one of the most effective First Ladies to implement her agendas to address childhood obesity, education, veteran and family affairs on a national and international level. Mrs. Obama’s impact on girls and women of color will go down in history as one of her many outstanding achievements.

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Edwards, B.J. (2018). Michelle Obama as an Administrator: Reflections. In: Duster, M., Seniors, P., Thevenin, R. (eds) Michelle Obama’s Impact on African American Women and Girls. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92468-7_3

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‘Becoming,’ by Michelle Obama: A pioneering and important work by Allyson Hobbs

Reading Michelle Obama’s memoir, “Becoming,” feels like catching up with an old friend over a lazy afternoon. Parts of her story are familiar, but still, you lean in, eager to hear them again. Other parts are new and come as a surprise. Sometimes her story makes you laugh out loud and shake your head with a gentle knowingness. Some parts are painful to hear. You wince and wish that you could have protected her from an unkind world.

Obama has sworn to tell her readers everything, and she delivers on that promise. From the silly to the surreal, from the momentous to the mundane, from the tragic to the transformative, she tells it all. As she shares her story, you are struck that every word is honest, brave and real.

“Becoming” explains how Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, “girl of the South Side,” came to be. It is a story that is as much about becoming as it is about belonging.

Obama invites us into the upstairs apartment of the red brick bungalow to experience the camaraderie and closeness that she shared with her parents, Marian and Fraser, and her older brother, Craig. She details her drive, her pursuit of achievement, her desire to check the right boxes and to prove that she was, in fact, “Princeton material,” despite the wrongheaded assessment of her high school college counselor. She would wrestle with the stubborn question — Am I good enough? — that lodged itself in her mind for years to come.

As first lady, Obama shattered the mold. Americans had never seen a life like Obama’s. She did not fit the dominant cultural frame that has been mounted around African American women.

“Becoming” shatters the mold, too. Not only because Obama writes in her signature tell-it-like-it-is style, but because she steeps her story in the richness and complexity of African American history that seldom reaches national audiences.

She is the descendant of enslaved people, a grandchild of the Great Migration, and the product of the storied black community on Chicago’s South Side. She is an observer of segregated housing, restrictive covenants and the exodus of white families to Chicago’s northern and western suburbs. She bears witness to the dashed dreams of her great uncle and grandfather who wished for greater educational and employment opportunities at a time when few if any existed for black men.

Through humor and poignant storytelling, Obama captures the joys of growing up in the neighborhood that writers have called “the capital of black America”: the sound of jazz blasting from her grandfather’s house around the corner, the barbecues where countless cousins gathered, and the feeling that, as Obama writes, “everyone was kin.”

There is a universality in the themes that “Becoming” addresses that many readers will recognize and appreciate, but at its heart, this is a story about the complexity of black women’s lives told firsthand by a black woman. This is a pioneering and important work that helps fill a gap in the literature on African American women’s lives.

“Becoming,” by Michelle Obama.

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First Lady Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama is a lawyer, writer, and the wife of the 44th and current President, Barack Obama. She is the first African-American First Lady of the United States. Through her four main initiatives, she has become a role model for women and an advocate for healthy families , service members and their families , higher education , and international adolescent girls education .

When people ask First Lady Michelle Obama to describe herself, she doesn't hesitate to say that first and foremost, she is Malia and Sasha's mom.

But before she was a mother — or a wife, lawyer, or public servant — she was Fraser and Marian Robinson's daughter.

The Robinsons lived in a brick bungalow on the South Side of Chicago. Fraser was a pump operator for the Chicago Water Department, and despite being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at a young age, he hardly ever missed a day of work. Marian stayed home to raise Michelle and her older brother Craig, skillfully managing a busy household filled with love, laughter, and important life lessons.

A product of Chicago public schools, Michelle Robinson studied sociology and African-American studies at Princeton University. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1988, she joined the Chicago law firm Sidley & Austin, where she later met Barack Obama, the man who would become the love of her life.

After a few years, Mrs. Obama decided her true calling was working with people to serve their communities and their neighbors. She served as assistant commissioner of planning and development in Chicago's City Hall before becoming the founding executive director of the Chicago chapter of Public Allies, an AmeriCorps program that prepares youth for public service.

In 1996, Mrs. Obama joined the University of Chicago with a vision of bringing campus and community together. As Associate Dean of Student Services, she developed the university's first community service program, and under her leadership as Vice President of Community and External Affairs for the University of Chicago Medical Center, volunteerism skyrocketed.

Mrs. Obama has continued her efforts to support and inspire young people during her time as First Lady.

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Michelle Obama

By: History.com Editors

Updated: March 4, 2021 | Original: November 6, 2009

Michelle Obama (1964-), the wife of 44th U.S. president Barack Obama, served as first lady from 2009-2017. An Ivy League graduate, she built a successful career, first as a lawyer, and then in the private sector, which she maintained throughout her husband’s early political career. Concerned about the effect the campaign would have on their young daughters, Michelle was initially reluctant to support the idea of her husband’s run for the presidency. Despite her initial misgivings, she proved to be an effective surrogate for him on the campaign trail. After her husband’s election, she chose a number of causes to support; advocating for support for military families and encouraging healthy eating to solve the epidemic of childhood obesity. As a young mother, a fashion icon and the first African American first lady, Michelle Obama became a role model to many Americans.

WATCH: Michelle Obama

Michelle obama's childhood.

Michelle LaVaughn Robinson was born on January 17, 1964, in Chicago , Illinois , to parents Marian and Fraser Robinson. Although Fraser’s modest pay as a city-pump operator led to cramped living in their South Shore bungalow, the Robinsons were a close-knit family, with Michelle and older brother Craig pushed to excel in school. Both children skipped the second grade, and Michelle was later chosen for a gifted-student program that enabled her to take French and advanced biology courses.

Making the lengthy daily trip to attend Whitney M. Young Magnet High School, Michelle became student council treasurer and a member of the National Honor Society before graduating as class salutatorian in 1981. She then followed her brother to Princeton University, where she created a reading program for the children of the school’s manual laborers. A sociology major with a minor in African-American studies, she explored the connections between the school’s black alumni and their communities in her senior thesis, graduating cum laude in 1985.

Career and Life Before Becoming First Lady

After earning her J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1988, Michelle joined the Chicago office of the law firm Sidley Austin as a junior associate specializing in marketing and intellectual property. Assigned to mentor a summer intern named Barack Obama , she deflected his initial romantic advancements before they began dating. They were engaged within two years, and married at the Trinity United Church of Christ on October 3, 1992.

Michelle left corporate law in 1991 to pursue a career in public service, enabling her to fulfill a personal passion and create networking opportunities that would benefit her husband’s future political career. Initially an assistant to Chicago mayor Richard Daley , she soon became the city’s assistant commissioner of planning and development. In 1993, she was named executive director for the Chicago branch of Public Allies, a leadership-training program for young adults. Moving on to the University of Chicago as associate dean of student services, she developed the school’s first community-service program.

When Obama decided to run for Illinois state senator in 1996, Michelle proved a disciplined campaign aide by canvassing for signatures and throwing fundraising parties. However, their victory presented the family with new challenges; following the births of daughters Malia (1998) and Sasha (2001), Michelle often had to juggle the demands of work and child-rearing alone with her husband tending to business in the state capital of Springfield.

Successful despite the difficulties, Michelle was named executive director of community relations and external affairs for the University of Chicago Hospitals in 2002. She was promoted to vice president after three years, and served on the boards of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, but eventually scaled back her work hours and commitments to support Obama’s entry into the U.S. presidential race.

Tenure as First Lady

Initially criticized for her candor, Michelle soon proved an asset on the campaign trail with her knack for delivering relatable stories about her family. In addition to becoming the first African American first lady upon Obama’s Election Day victory in 2008, she became the third with a post-graduate degree.

Michelle sought to tie her own agendas to her husband’s larger legislative goals, notably targeting the epidemic of childhood obesity while the Affordable Care Act was being created. In 2009, she worked with local elementary school students to plant a 1,100-square-foot vegetable garden on the South Lawn of the White House . The following year she launched the Let’s Move! initiative to promote healthy eating and physical activity.

In 2011, Michelle co-founded the Joining Forces program to expand educational and employment options for veterans and to raise awareness about the difficulties plaguing military families. After helping Obama win a second term in office, she formed the Reach Higher initiative to inspire young people to explore higher education and career-development opportunities.

Continuing the family theme of her campaign speeches, the first lady stressed the importance of remaining a diligent parent and brought her mother to live with her in the White House. She was also recognized for an ability to connect to younger generations by remaining attuned to popular culture. Embracing the use of social media, she encouraged fans to follow her progress on her Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts, and proved willing to bring her messages to audiences by appearing in humorous sketches online and on television.

WATCH: The Best Photos of Obama's Presidency

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8 writing lessons from Michelle Obama’s DNC speech

Great oratory magnifies the lessons of great writing. Written for the ear, memorable speeches tend to use certain rhetorical devices — such as parallelism or emphatic word order — in greater measure than less dramatic forms of communication. The language strategies rise to the surface, so you may not even need a pair of X-ray reading glasses to see them.

Related: The Power and Persuasion of the Spoken Word

Last night I listened to Michelle Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention. It has been widely praised, even by Hillary Clinton’s archrival, Donald Trump . Some commentators ranked it among the best such convention speeches in decades.

What is it about the First Lady’s words that worked for so many? If we can answer that question, we can store those writing strategies in our toolbox.

I am relying on a transcript of the speech published by Vox. Here it is if you prefer to read the whole thing first. If you prefer, follow my lead through some of the most significant parts of Michelle Obama’s speech, beginning with its first paragraph:

“It is hard to believe that it has been eight years since I first came to this convention to talk with you about why I thought my husband should be president. Remember how I told you about his character and his conviction? His decency and grace? The traits we have seen every day as he served our country in the White House.”

Lesson one: Liberate your pronouns. Use first person, second person and third person to create specific effects. Look at all the pronouns in that paragraph — and throughout the speech — each one doing its job. “I” or “me” or “my” makes a personal appeal. “We” or “us” proclaims collective power. “You” makes prose sound conversational. The third person points the camera away from the speaker.

“I also told you about our daughters, how they are the heart of our hearts, the center of our world, and during our time in the White House we have had the joy of watching them grow from bubbly little girls into poised young women.”

Lesson two: Unlock your diction — your word hoard — to choose language most appropriate to your topic and mission. Michelle Obama’s words seem chosen as an antidote to what some have described as Donald Trump’s dystopian vision of America and the world. When he speaks, bats flap their wings in caves. When she speaks, little birds chirp and alight on her shoulders. Every key word here has a positive connotation: daughters, hearts, center, world, joy, grow, bubbly little girls, poised young women.

“I will never forget that winter morning as I watched our girls, just 7 and 10 years old, pile into those black SUVs with all those men with guns.”

Lesson three: Find a visual image to help you tell the story. This anecdotal image moves the speech closer to narrative and imprints itself on the memory of the audience. The juxtaposition of elements — little girls with noses pressed against the glass in a scary car filled with men with guns — creates a tension that can be vicariously experienced.

“How we urged them to ignore those who question their father’s citizenship or faith. How we insist that the hateful language they hear from public figures on TV does not represent the true spirit of this country. How we explain that when someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you don’t stoop to their level.”

Lesson four: Unleash the power of three. Notice how often the speaker relies upon a pattern of three to make her point. This is one of the oldest tricks in the orator’s book. In literature, three is always the largest number. “Of the people, by the people, for the people.” Four examples or 40 become an inventory. Three encompasses the world, creating the illusion we know everything we need to know.

“Our motto is, when they go low, we go high.”

Lesson five: Express your best thought in a short sentence. This is one of the best lines in the speech for a number of reasons. It’s a short sentence, only seven words. Each word is a single syllable. There is parallelism between “they go low” and “we go high,” emphasized by the repetition of the word “go.” The sentence is complex, that is, it begins with a subordinate clause “When they go low,” which describes the opponent’s weak move, followed by a main clause that gives greater weight to the speaker’s values.

“Kids like the little black boy who looked up at my husband, his eyes wide with hope, and he wondered, Is my hair like yours?”

Lesson six: Find a focus. Stick with it. In the story “The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson, the winner of the town’s annual lottery gets stoned to death. It is a surprise ending, but there are several mentions of the word ‘stones’ as foreshadowing — never “rocks.”

If I had to choose one word to describe the speech, it would be “kids.” It is repeated five times on a single page. She also uses words like children, sons and daughters, but the informality of kids draws you in: “So, how are the kids?” There is a significant literature in African-American culture about the issue, the problem, the glory of hair. Of “good” hair, and “bad” hair. It feels almost daring for Michelle Obama to refer to this incident, to turn a taboo into a parable and a blessing.

“Somebody who knows this job and takes it seriously. Somebody who understands that the issues of our nation are not black or white. It cannot be boiled down to 140 characters. Because when you have the nuclear codes at your fingertips and the military in your command, you can’t make snap decisions.”

Lesson seven: Let the shark swim under the surface. Remember “Jaws?” Remember how long it took for you to see the shark jump out of the water? Until then, you only heard creepy music and saw the consequences of humans being attacked.

In the “Harry Potter” series, we don’t often get a direct look at the Dark Lord, the evil Voldemort. Wizards fear to speak his name. The weird-coiffed Donald Trump looks nothing like the reptilian Voldemort, but there is a bit of “He Who Shall Not Be Named” in this critique, as if even uttering his name would pollute the language and meaning of her oration.

“This is the story of this country. The story that has brought me to the stage tonight. The story of generations of people who felt the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation, who kept on striving, and hoping, and doing what needed to be done. So that today, I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves. And I watch my daughters — two beautiful intelligent black young women — play with the dog on the White House lawn.”

Lesson eight: Place the emphatic words at the end. This, for me, was the dramatic climax of the speech, a moment of catharsis. It brought a tear to my eye, when I first heard the speech, and again the next morning when I watched highlights.

I feel the mojo in this paragraph. The alliteration. The triple use of three examples: story, story, story; lash, shame, sting; striving, hoping, doing. Two powerful sentences follow, one which ends with a great passive construction, “a house that was built by slaves”; the next placing the wonderfully familiar (girls playing with dogs) up against the symbolically majestic (the White House lawn).

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Michelle Obama’s embodied authentic leadership: Leading by lifestyle

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The Republican Party’s Decay Began Long Before Trump

In the past, the g.o.p. could’ve prevented a candidate like donald trump from running. but daniel schlozman and sam rosenfeld argue the party structure has been “hollowed out” over the years..

From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

For all that Donald Trump’s politics are soaked in nostalgia, his political career could only exist right now. That’s partly because of the media forms that led to his 2016 campaign. He is a creation of modern reality television. That really flowers in the ‘90s. He joins with “The Apprentice” in 2004. He’s a creation of Twitter, which launches in 2006. He joins in 2009.

Donald Trump, celebrity candidate — people know that story. But at most points in American history, he still couldn’t have succeeded. Even if Trump had all that notoriety, all that money, he never could have become a major party’s nominee for president because the party would have stopped him. That would have been its job. Until the 1970s, there was one way, and one way only, to win a presidential nomination.

He had to win delegates at the convention. And you actually had to win them. They didn’t walk into the convention committed to vote for you. Delegates were members of the party, party regulars, party politicians. They were gatekeepers. And over and over and over again in American history, they locked the gates against people like Donald Trump.

But by the time Trump ran in 2016, those days were over. There were no gatekeepers at the convention. There was no gate. If you won the primaries, you won. That change in rules reflected something larger, a hollowing out of what political parties were, a collapse in the legitimacy of what they once did. Americans, we’ve never liked parties. George Washington’s farewell address was a lengthy warning against their predations.

He said, quote, “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual.”

So that’s an argument that parties create so much disunion, so much dissension, so much fury that eventually, they lead to a despot, a monarch, a strongman. There’s obviously a feeling of prescience in that now. But in an important way here, Washington was wrong. The founders were wrong. Their arguments against parties were, at the very least, unrealistic.

Washington warned that parties bring disunity. But the disunity, it’s already there. Parties, when they work, what they do is they make disunity manageable. They turn political conflict into politics. It’s when they fail that political conflict becomes violence or collapse.

The Republican Party is failing. Donald Trump is not a uniquely dangerous person. A few years ago, he was a comic figure in American life. He was of interest to tabloids and television executives who might want him for a Comedy Central roast. Donald Trump is dangerous now because he’s taken over the Republican Party. It’s his control over a political party that controls the Supreme Court, that controls the House of Representatives, that controls dozens of governorships and statehouses and so many local election boards.

That he has been able to bend that party, and through it so many of those institutions, to his will, That is what makes him dangerous. That, in March, he installed his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, to run that party, that is what makes him dangerous. That he could ride the Republican Party’s support and money and supporters and ballot access back to the White House, that is what makes him dangerous.

That is why he matters. The problem is not Donald Trump. The problem is the Republican Party. It always has been. But how did the Republican Party get so weak that he could take it over? That’s not a story that begins in 2016 or 2015. It’s a story that begins decades ago. It’s a story that the political scientist Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld tell in their new book, “The Hollow Parties: The Many Paths and Disordered Present of American Party Politics.”

We happen to have our interview fall on the morning after Donald Trump’s conviction as virtually every major figure in Republican Party politics was lining up to defend him. We really couldn’t have picked a better day to talk. As always, my email — [email protected].

Sam Rosenfeld, Daniel Schlozman, welcome to the show.

Great to be here.

So we’re talking here the day after Donald Trump was convicted on 34 counts in the hush money trial. This is, excitingly, only one of the four trials he is facing. So let me start by asking a question that I know the answer to, not how I normally try to begin. Will the Republican Party replace him on the ticket, Sam?

Ooh, I got that one. No.

To the extent that in 2016, the “Access Hollywood” tape provided a moment of seemingly contingent point in which elites could have made one move or another to coordinate around Trump, eight years later, we are far, far down a line of development where you saw every single Republican leader from Congress, from statehouses, line up yesterday, articulating the notion that this is, just as Trump says, in fact, aping more and more the language and rhetoric of Trump himself, that this is the work of a cabal out there of them that are after your leader. And if they can go after your leader, they can go after you. And they’ve been absolutely uniform in that position.

Let me ask you the same question, Daniel. I mean, there’s some way in which what is a party for, if not before a convention has even happened, to replace a candidate who is both relatively unpopular and is now under criminal conviction?

That would require that the party, apart from its leader, if we can call Donald Trump that, and I think he certainly thinks of himself that way, and most Republicans think of him that way, to exercise collective capacity to do that. And they haven’t done that in 2016. There’s no reason, as Sam just said, that having made all those choices — and as we’ll talk about having reached a point where he was even nominated, that the party got to the point where he would be the nominee — that magically now so very, very, very long into this process that that would happen.

You all are party scholars. What did you think when you saw Lara Trump get elected as R.N.C. chair in March?

It was part and parcel of the 2020 decision by the Republicans to just not have a party platform. They just copied and pasted what they that from 2016 and then said, what Trump would like is what we stand for. A party platform passed by quadrennial conventions, for a long time people make a punchline out of how meaningless it is or how much it doesn’t bind anybody. That’s a perennial problem with American parties.

But that is a perennial thing that dates back to the 1830s. It is a truly venerable institution. And they just got rid of it. It’s a very short step from that kind of dissolving of all the attributes of parties as actual organizations that go beyond an individual to become something entirely personalized, and at this point, patrimonialized around his literal family.

You have a quote in the book from William Rusher, the longtime publisher of The National Review. And he says — and this is decades ago — “Conservatism is the wine. The G.O.P. is the bottle.”

Now, it feels like Trumpism is the wine, or, I don’t know, the moonshine, the bleach, the something. And the G.O.P. is the bottle. For people who have grown up in modern party politics, the idea that the party would be anything but the bottle for whoever is in charge of it.

I mean, I would say the Democratic Party was more or less the bottle into which Barack Obama poured his presidency. I would say that that was not untrue for George W. Bush. What would it look like, what did it look like — because this is a big part of your book, Sam — what did it look like when parties were more than a bottle?

There was an ethos, a principle articulated explicitly going back to Martin Van Buren and the other architects of the first mass political party in the world in the 1820s and 1830s, the Jacksonian Democratic Party, that they served this really important value. And Van Buren saw party as protecting the Constitution, protecting Jefferson’s vision of the country from strongmen and demagogues.

They articulated the idea that parties subsume individual ambition, that you commit to the party and to the cause, never to the man. That’s what inculcates a lot of discipline, a lot of the attributes of the 19th century party model that fall under a lot of strain by the 20th century. But it’s in part a principle that political scientists tend to try and instill in students, with varying success, and to other normal people out in the world, that there’s something about political parties that is valuable in and of themselves as an essential mediating institution between atomized individuals and the government, and that you actually want to protect and strengthen that form above and beyond whatever particular ideology or particular leader happens to be at a given moment.

Let me hold on that quote for a second — the party and the cause, not the man, because it gets at something that was on my mind reading the book, which is this question of what gives a party meaning. You hear in that two things, the cause. So, I mean, I think most people now think of the Democratic Party as a liberal party. Republicans are theoretically conservative, maybe a little less obviously ideological right now.

Then there’s the party, the people in it. I think we understand this as machine politics or somewhat corrupt, people there who want to get something out of being part of the party. They work for it. They get some kickbacks from it, or they get a job from it, patronage. Early on, patronage was a very important part of parties.

You can imagine constituencies as one of them. Parties are an organizer of different groups into coalitions. And because we have a two-party system, you need to do that. So it’s really about the coalitional groups in them. I think that has felt true on the Democratic side. What are the sources of meaning are there for parties? And at what points have different ones been dominant?

Part of the argument we make is that there are profound variation in party formations across American history, and it’s kind of irreducibly historically contingent. So there’s not one thing that we say is party organization and you see it all across, and that there’s always this bottle, and then it just depends on what kind of ideas you pour in as the wine.

In fact, form and substance are inextricably linked. And one of the things we talk about is different party formations at different times have different what we call privileged partisan actors. Sometimes they are the kind of party activists you’re mobilizing through patronage, and that’s the quintessential machine politics. Other times, you have much more —

You have a great quote. I just want to stop for a minute because I love this quote from the book, where somebody from Tammany Hall is basically saying about him and a guy in the opposite machine, he’s like, look, we disagree on everything, but we agree that if you work in politics, you should get something for it.

Yeah, exactly.

George Washington Plunkitt.

Other times, there was the short-lived Progressive Party, state-level reformists, postwar Democratic parties in the North. Policy-oriented, issue-driven activists actually have a real driving force. The McGovern-Fraser reformers had a vision of social movements as much more permeable and influencing parties, but giving them strength.

Different formations at different times are acting at the behest of different kinds of actors. And sometimes they’re more what we think of in 21st century terms as ideological and programmatic. And sometimes they’re not.

So I got into covering politics. I came and worked at The American Prospect with Sam in another life in 2005. And the conventional wisdom was that the Republican Party was a stronger and more ideological party than the Democratic Party. And if you think of the Obama era, there’s this idea then that the Republican Party has become maybe extreme, but its extremism is ideological. It will not compromise on cutting taxes for the rich.

People are very upset about the anti-tax pledge Republicans all take. They’re extreme compared to other modern conservative parties across the world in terms of their approach to the welfare state, in terms of their approach to economics. And then within a matter of just a couple of years, this party that seems like it is uncompromising on behalf of its ideology — there’s a whole big important political science book, “Asymmetric Parties,” written about this — becomes, I don’t want to say nonideological, but becomes uncompromising in service of, I think, what you would identify as conflict.

Trumpism is — Trump himself is a candidate of conflict. How do you understand that? Because the rapidity of that change, what the Republican Party was about, I still think is somewhat unremarked in politics.

You know, the aughts, when we were starting out, had an air at that time of an electoral juggernaut on behalf of a rigidly and impressively programmatic, disciplined ideological agenda. And it was just bestriding the country. That was pretty temporary, it turned out. It all kind of fell apart due to Iraq, due to Social Security privatization, due to Katrina, et cetera. And I think post-Bush, you see how much to a certain extent that moment was a bit of an aberration and that there is more continuity to this politics of populist socialist resentment in coalition with what we call the pro-capital strand, getting tax cuts, getting what you can get out of government economic policy.

And that coalition is much more haphazard and not electorally efficient and all-powerful and much more of a careening beast than what we saw in the peak Bush-Rove

There’s not a Rove of — Trump has been electorally successful without a Rove. Steve Bannon does not have, in the way Rove did, a sense of what are the demographics who are going to power my majority? It’s, let’s throw a lot of resentment at the wall and see what sticks.

I go in for zero, zero of the liberal strange new respect for George W. Bush and Karl Rove. And I’m glad they come into this because I blame them and their presidency for where we are now. There’s this moment, this very weird moment, where after George W. Bush loses the popular vote and gets in based on some chicanery with butterfly ballots in Florida but then is president during 9/11, and there’s a strong “rally ‘round the flag” effect. They have a strong 2002 midterm where Rove, with their ideological plasticity, tax cuts, but they’re going to do Medicare prescription drugs for seniors, they’re going to do immigration reform to win over more Hispanic voters, there’s this weird idea that they’re going to pass three or four or five of these big bills, and that’s going to be the end of the Democratic Party.

What actually happens is they fail at governance so unfathomably catastrophically in invading Iraq, in mismanaging financial regulations so there’s a huge financial crash, that my read of Republican Party politics to some degree since then has been that — I don’t want to call them like the center, but what you used to think of as mainstream Republicans have been functionally discredited.

And there were some gasps of it still. Mitt Romney won the nomination in 2012, but part of why he loses is Republicans are still blamed for the financial crisis and all the Republican views on it are attached to him. And Obama runs against those views. And then Donald Trump emerges and runs against George W. Bush. He doesn’t just run against Barack Obama. He runs against the Iraq War. He runs against all these idiots who sold out the country. He runs against free trade. And you’re historians. History is at least somewhat contingent. It does seem to me that a lot of our history turns on the failures of George W. Bush, and particularly a lot of the Republican Party’s history turns on the failures of George W. Bush and what emerges as the actual disgust and willingness. Republicans have to see somebody come in and destroy their own establishment, theoretically, on their behalf.

I would say two things. On the mismanagement story, that’s in part the wages of and the costs of a party program that has been dominated by a conservative movement, what we call a party blob of think tanks, activists in the Republican side. Media is a huge force, even in the early aughts. That infects how decision-making happens in the Bush administration, both in terms of ideologically extreme and politically disastrous efforts to do things like privatize Social Security in a technocratically unsound way, deciding to invade a country for no reason and do it in an incompetent and disastrous way.

All the stuff we used to talk about in the aughts, about the groupthink that seemed to be infecting everybody, the inability to hash out and put things to the test of reality as they were making decisions, that is in part the story of a conservative movement that had gotten very bad at coming up with an agenda that was actionable.

On the flip side, though, and here it’s less contingent on competent management, a lot of that agenda — you see it much more clearly with Romney and Ryan — the agenda of elite movement conservatives had become so detached from the priorities of their own Republican base, particularly the economic agenda of that party, even as they were making deft moves with prescription drugs, et cetera.

It was Trump sniffing out this huge gap that had emerged between what it is that movement conservatives who had controlled the commanding heights of the Republican Party by the 2000s wanted and pursued in office and what their actual voters cared about.

I would have called the Republican Party — I have called the Republican Party an engine for turning social resentment into tax cuts. That’s what it looked like to me for a long time. How much of what we’re seeing is simply that that uneasy and somewhat illogical equilibrium broke, and the ability to keep the social resentment power in service of the tax cut end, while it might still happen — in fact, Donald Trump made clear that he’s going to keep cutting taxes — there is still an effort to make tax cuts happen. So that part of the party still gets served.

But it does feel like the social resentment energy now serves social resentment conflict. It’s not cleanly moved into conservative economics in the way that Paul Ryan or, in an earlier guise, Mitt Romney was trying to do.

Go back another round, go back to, let’s say, Newt Gingrich, the key figure in, from his first election in 1978 to Congress, through the speakership, and he has all these ideas. He’s a font of everything. He’s a futurist.

But what he wants is power. Here’s Newt Gingrich. This is 1978. He’s talking to college Republicans. “You’re fighting a war. It is a war for power. But what’s the primary purpose of a political leader above everything else?

In this system, it’s to build a majority capable of sustaining itself. Because if we don’t do that, we don’t make the laws. We don’t write the taxes. We don’t decide how to start war. We don’t keep the country strong. We don’t do nothing except carve from these people’s ability. And in my lifetime, we have not had a single Republican leader capable of doing that.”

But even in the quote you give from him, he’s saying, you get power to do these things. You get power to make tax policy. You get power to make budget policy. You get power to be the person who decides whether or not — or the party that decides whether or not we’re going to go to war and in what way. And by the time you get to Trump — I’m not saying there’s no policy content. And I think it’s easy to underestimate his policy content. He really does have policy content on immigration, on trade, but it feels a lot more flexible than it was under Gingrich. It does feel like the policy structure of the party has become unsettled, even as its level of resentment, its appetite for conflict, its sense of embattlement has become stronger.

So I’m curious first, if, Dan, you agree with that, and if you do, what you think is the force that is leading the party’s policy impulses to weaken.

One thing we haven’t talked so much about is the role of media and the increasing role of right-wing media, the quote, “third generation of conservatives,” as they titled themselves begins in the 1980s. And they see themselves as media figures first and conservative ideologues second. And the extent to which conservatives see themselves as engaged in the public game of lib owning with that as the real forum rather than the forum of policy I think is an important piece of that.

The other is just the sheer unpopularity of a lot of the substantive agenda. And so as they are looking more plastically, then if lib-owning works in a system that is geared toward conflict, that’s where you go.

You had described the mobilization of social conflict into tax cuts, and it continues to be the test that was never in the first term — and it doesn’t sound like it’s going to be for his potential second term — the test that was never exercised was would, in fact, this decaying remnant of a Republican establishment and their big donors have, in fact, revolted against Trump if it turned out he wasn’t lying about raising taxes on hedge funders or something?

If he had pivoted on taxes, it would be a measure, a test of the true plasticity of this post-policy era we’re in if, for whatever reasons, whether it was going after his enemies or it was electorally beneficial, he actually did that.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Let’s go back another round, because I think Gingrich is a great figure to bring into this. And I also want to bring Nixon into this. Because when you’re thinking of Republican presidents who do criminal acts, I think Nixon comes pretty quickly to mind. But Nixon is conducting Watergate in the context of a very different Republican Party and a Republican Party that sounds very different.

So I mentioned earlier, Lara Trump is — again, I really want to keep emphasizing this now — the chair of the Republican National Committee. But back then, it was George H.W. Bush. And this is how George H.W Bush talked about Watergate as R.N.C. chair.

Here’s the key on this Watergate thing. The criminal justice system in the United States is going to work. It is working. It takes some time. In the meantime, the rights of individuals must be assiduously protected. And I’m confident that the guilty will be found guilty. I’m confident that the innocent will be proved innocent.

And long after the cast of characters of Watergate has been forgotten, what will be remembered is, and what’s fundamental to our system is, is that the criminal justice system works. And there’s no partisan advantage in that.

And Watergate has this other feature, which is that congressional Republicans participate in a very serious way in the investigation. They ultimately participate in a serious way in the impeachment. Nixon is convinced to resign by a delegation of Republican senators that includes Barry Goldwater. So, Sam, why is the Republican Party, at this point in the ‘70s, willing to treat the crimes of its own president as a matter worthy of investigation?

I mean, the simple answer is, you have in the early 1970s a Republican Party that has not been captured or predominated by the conservative movement. Conservative movement actors were much more staunchly on board defending Nixon come what may. But like George H.W. Bush is very much an actor in Republican politics who doesn’t come out of the conservative movement and what we call the Long New Right, a tendency and an approach that is more ideologically plastic, that is more populist, and that is much more ruthlessly instrumental towards all sorts of institutions, political parties, the rule of law.

That’s a continuity that just comes to be, by ideological sorting and party polarization, far more predominant by the 21st century. So Larry Hogan is one of the very few Republicans yesterday who came out with a statement that was not full-throated pro Trump. And there was a pile on among co-partisans about his statement. I mean, there are far fewer Larry Hogans in the Republican Party now than they were —

Which is funny, too, because Republicans should be — I mean, maybe piling on him is actually good for them in this way. But they should want Larry Hogan to attack Trump as hard as possible because he’s the popular former governor of Maryland. He is running as a Republican for Senate. If Hogan can pick up a Senate seat for Republicans in Maryland right now, that’s like Joe Manchin holding the Democratic Senate seat in West Virginia.

It’s a very unlikely thing to have happen, and you need to really sharply break with the party. But it increases Republican power in the Senate and over politics really dramatically if it happens.

I mean, here you see the politics of social resentment, also the politics of what we call the populist strand, a tradition of approach to politics in the US that cleaves society between a people and their enemies and that holds up the only person standing between the people and their enemies is a leader, a strong leader. Here, you see that commitment to a strong leader, and the incapacity of a party to act like a party in any kind of strategic way, swamp even their own short-term mercenary electoral incentives.

Donald Trump’s not interested in having Larry Hogan bash him to maximize the seats of Republicans in the Senate, because Donald Trump wants an entire party subservient to his own personalist ends.

And an effective party, a party that has some kind of capacity, apart from its leader, in fact, will have some of its members deviating from the party line, as it were, so that they can maximize their electoral advantage, because that’s the system we operate in, in which candidates are elected individually on a party label rather than some kind of party list.

But there’s also an — I don’t want to call it an aesthetic, but something that really struck me as true but I want you to expand on, Daniel, in your book, is your association with the politics of the New right, the right that ultimately does take over the Republican Party. As a politics built around conflict, not a politics built around ideology, I do think of that as a different story than is often told.

I think that when many people tell the story of conservatives taking over the Republican Party, they tell it as a story of ideological fanatics for low taxes and anti-communism and so on taking over the Republican Party. When you separate out conflict as almost an end unto itself or a politics unto itself, what are you separating out?

So in 2016, in her final presidential endorsement, months before her death, Phyllis Schlafly, who’s been involved in politics on the right for well more than half a century, prominent for Barry Goldwater, lead Stop E.R.A., she endorses Trump, not Ted Cruz. Donald Trump.

Why? she says, because Trump is the only one who can stop the kingmakers. So she has the same analysis in 2016 that she had of Goldwater, that there are these mysterious kingmakers, and they are the key to the Republican Party, and they need to be stopped. And if you think about stopping the kingmakers, then each of these moments we’ve been talking about of what’s happening on the right looks a little different because you see a through-line that is not how ideological are they and then what’s an ideology of how do all issues come together, but what comes together is that they are using issues to get what they want. And that is to stop the kingmakers and to put their vision to power.

I don’t think I understand the kingmakers idea here. And I mean that on two levels. So one, during much of this time, I would call Phyllis Schlafly a kingmaker, a conservative elite in a period where conservatives have taken over the Republican Party. But it also brings to the center this question. When you say the Republican Party is taken over by people for whom the point is conflict, conflict with whom and based on what?

William F. Buckley wrote a book called “Up From Liberalism” that articulated the case for fusionism, bringing together moral traditionalists, free marketeers, and anti-communists into a new conservative movement. And there’s all sorts of work to try and make that intellectually and ideologically coherent.

But his argument was entirely about what all three of these tendencies share is a common enemy, liberals and liberalism, that at the very essence of this project is owning the libs. And that’s where you get a very, in terms of policy and ideology, a plasticity. And you also get Schlafly feeling like she’s the aggrieved victim fighting the kingmakers as late as 2016 is of a piece with the Republican Party continually not being able to hold on to a speaker of the house of their own party because you get this endless cycle of recrimination. Whoever is in charge and has to do anything to govern immediately falls victim to this same sort of story.

There’s also this period, and I think this is interestingly embodied actually by Buckley, where one of his first books, and a book you spend some time on in your book, is a, I would call it a defense of Joe McCarthy. And this defense of Joe McCarthy is particularly angry at pearl-clutching Republicans who agree with McCarthy’s hunt for communists in the American government but don’t agree with the crudeness, the rudeness, the brashness of his methods. It presages a lot of what we end up hearing about Donald Trump.

How much is this desire to have a Republican Party that treats liberals aesthetically as the enemy versus a Republican Party — maybe you could associate this more with the sort of George W. Bush compassionate conservatism approach, certainly what he ran on in 2000, but a lot of members of the Republican Party, just like members of the Democratic Party, who want to compromise, who understand party politics as a legitimate contestation of ideas, who, as George H.W. Bush had in that clip I played, a kind of attachment to the institutions of American governance, there are political styles that are fundamentally — that fundamentally believe in both the legitimacy of the system and of the antagonists in the system.

And then there are political styles that are more the Flight 93 election. This whole thing is going to crash. We’re in the final years of Rome, and either you functionally wipe the other side out, maybe permanently, or you’re going to lose everything you hold dear. This is a more apocalyptic style of politics.

The Long New Right, the continuity of the Long New Right is a continuity of style and approach. And that approach is always, it does not go in for thinking of parties as articulating partial visions, that you have a vision for the common good but ultimately other people disagree. You’re going to win some, you’re going to lose some, and the system is about a clash of partial visions.

It rejects that. It rejects the norm of mutual toleration, and it is prone to existential, apocalyptic rhetoric about what the other side is going to do. And so “McCarthy and His Enemies,” that’s the name of the book William F. Buckley writes with a guy named Brent Bozell, who becomes a major movement conservative as well. Also, his grandson got arrested at January 6. So —

A storied political family.

Yes, exactly. And it is so instructive, that book, that does not deign to directly defend McCarthy but instead makes what we call an anti-anti argument, that it is politically bad. It is morally cowardly to have all these namby-pamby hand-wringers siding with the enemies of the republic rather than standing by this guy who might have crude tactics but is on the core right side of the political battles of the day.

That anti-anti approach to argumentation is all over the Trump era. I mean, you saw it just last night. Some conservative lawyer tweeted that he has not voted for Trump in either election, but he’s going to crawl through broken glass to vote for him in November because of this conviction, because of how much of an illegitimate abuse of the law this conviction of covering up a porn star dalliance was. That’s an anti-anti politics.

And the Trump campaign says it raised — I mean, by the time we walked into the studio at 11:00 a.m. the day after the conviction, it says it raised $35 million in small donor donations, which is just an absolutely huge haul.

And another piece of the Long New Right is to understand just how much small donations have been, especially in the online era, But back to direct mail king Richard Viguerie, who’s really important for putting the infrastructure of this together. The power of the right and that small dollars giving by direct mail, often with various pieces of grifting involved, advertisements for gold coins, that much more than the much discussed Kochs and Mellons and Scaifes and Coorses, are the financial forces behind the Long New Right.

Well, wait, expand on that. I think that’s an important point. When I hear liberals complain about what the Republican Party is or assign blame for it, they tend to think about the big donors, the Kochs, the Adelsons, et cetera. When you say small donors were a more important force in hollowing out the Republican Party and making this possible, lay that out for me.

So Richard Viguerie is an important figure here. He arrives in 1961 from Houston as executive secretary of Young Americans for Freedom, which is this group founded at William F. Buckley’s estate of right wing activists. And the Yaffers, as they’re known, their descendents are everywhere in modern Republican politics. And Viguerie decides that he’s going to go into direct mail.

And what he does is starts off and copies by hand all the donors to Barry Goldwater’s campaigns, and then he seeds single-issue groups. And what he does is, using new magnetic tape technology — that’s the big thing in the 1970s — he figures out how donors to one right-wing cause can give to another. And so he gets George Wallace’s donors, and he will send you an anti-abortion mailer. He’ll send a mailer to individual right-wing candidates and seed all these different causes.

And the people who are sending money through the mail, this is not Mellon and Scaife money. This is little old ladies who see a mailer and give. And that is the motor of the single issue politics of the Republican Party in the 1970s. Karl Rove gets his start by beating Viguerie at his own game in direct mail. That’s his origin story.

And the scammy quality of this direct mail is absolutely part and parcel with its success. And so the gimmicky stuff, when read now you have to give automatically every month unless you uncheck some box, and all these poor people are, why am I giving Donald Trump 10 months in a row? Sam and I laugh and think ah, plus ca change, these techniques — I mean, they’re often with — there’s gold coins. There’s subscription by mail, multilevel marketing.

This is the technology that powers the right. And for whatever reason, the kind of popular story of rise of the right has missed it. And yet just inductively, when you want to figure out any given puzzle of how did this person come to prominence, what was the source of that person’s success, the stories of direct mail, grift.

Small donors just keep coming and keep coming and keep coming to prominence. And just in addition to the scamminess, the quintessential style of direct mail is appeal to emotion, appeal to negativity and conflict. That’s what works. And that continues to this day in endless online small donors.

Endless appeals with lots of conflict, so that by the end you might turn off. I mean, I think that was the Trump speech that we were watching this morning before we started recording.

And fear, right? I mean, one thing about all direct mail — not all, but a lot of it — and now direct email, is the apocalyptic tone, which also, I think is a reflection of having to stand out in a mailbox, or in an email inbox. I mean, everything now has sirens in the subject line.

Oh, my god, did you see this? And then you realize it’s from the D.C.C.C.?

Yeah, and it’s from Democrats, sure. Like, Ezra, I’m on my knees begging. And it’s like Chuck Schumer. I’m like, I don’t think Chuck Schumer is on his knees begging.

Liberals and conservatives learn from this. Morris Dees, later at the Southern Poverty Law Center, invents some of this stuff for the McGovern campaign, and Viguerie picks it up. But it is the right much more than liberals who are able to take these direct mail appeals and really make something of them ideologically.

The McGovern campaign, that brings something up here. So 1968, there is a devastatingly violent, catastrophic Democratic Convention. This is what leads in part to Richard Nixon becoming president. After that convention, there are a series of reform commissions, but very importantly, McGovern-Fraser, which changes American history.

I’ve been thinking a lot about political conventions this year for a number of reasons, but changes in American political not just history but structure. Because before that, presidential candidates are chosen by party regulars at conventions. And after that, they are chosen at primaries. So, Sam, tell me a bit about McGovern-Fraser, what it actually says and does, and also how its effects maybe are not exactly what was anticipated.

Sure. So this is the pre-reform era is what’s known as the mixed convention system, because quadrennial conventions been with us since the middle of the 19th century. They bring together delegations sent by state parties. Well into the middle of the 20th century, it just varied how they selected those delegates.

Some states had what we think of as direct primaries. Other states had state party conventions that chose the delegates that went to the convention. Others is just the state party leadership just chose it. After the divisive primary battles of 1968, in which Hubert Humphrey ends up winning the nomination famously without having contested any actual primary because he had all these other delegates, their support locked up, the antiwar candidates’ forces, as they lose trying to get an antiwar platform plank, they lose the nomination. As a sop to them, the Humphrey forces agree to this commission that the D.N.C. is going to authorize and give a pretty forceful mandate to, to reform nominating procedures into 1972.

Long story short, what that commission institutes is uniform national base line requirements for all state party delegate selection, that they have to be procedures that are transparent, that are open to participation from anyone who wants to participate. You have to actually have clear procedures publicized so people know when these decisions are being made. Unintentionally, inadvertently, the practicalities of implementing and adhering to these rules lead to a total proliferation of just direct primaries.

But Donald Fraser, the chairman of the commission after McGovern leaves the commission to go run for president, is on record saying, I think primaries are terrible. He comes out of Minnesota in a tradition of issue-driven activists powering actual formal party conventions at the state level, and they make these decisions. And that’s what he has in mind. And a lot of McGovern-Fraser reformers have in mind of not getting rid of parties and just having a big free-for-all direct election for who the nominee should be but empowering social movements to really influence and issue-driven activists to influence these decisions at the state level.

But what you get instead is first among Democrats. And then because this is a creature of state law and it ends up applying to Republicans as well, a pretty rapid transformation of the system to one in which formal party actors no longer have any say in this at the state level. The conventions no longer perform any meaningful deliberative function because the delegates are all pledged to particular candidates based on who won the primaries and open caucus — or open caucus in their state. And you get the modern nomination system, which is a completely open, free-for-all, uncoordinated gauntlet of one state primary or caucus after another.

This is a part I’ve never understood, and you just maybe explained it to me, but I still don’t understand why this would be true. Which is, OK, you have the McGovern-Fraser Commission. The next election, which is the first under these new rules, McGovern wins the Democratic nomination. He wins it through primaries, and then he gets completely annihilated in the general election. I mean, one of the worst runs in modern political history.

And meanwhile, the Democrats don’t go back to the old system or cap the new one. And the Republicans seem to adopt the same primary structure. And I’ve never quite been sure why it spreads to them.

Well, on the first point, what the political scientists critical of this as it’s happening, led by Nelson Polsby, say, is the old system, sure, it wasn’t democratic, but it was a mechanism by which the national party could arrive at a lowest common denominator point of consensus within the party for a nominee. And you’re going to get mainstream nominees that way.

This new system is going to be good for ideological extremists or just outsiders who can ride media momentum and potentially capture a nomination. In ‘72, you get a good example of a more ideologically extreme candidate capturing the party based on the enthusiasm of movement activists. Then he loses very badly.

You then get an outsider who wins. In 1976, Jimmy Carter and his presidency lays bare the costs of someone who has no relationship with key factions in the party and didn’t have to build those relationships to win the nomination. He becomes an ineffective president. And so Democrats do — people forget, Democrats do learn from this. And through another commission, the Hunt Commission, in 1981, they implement this thing called superdelegates, which is the idea there was it’s important to think of a national party as an institution that has actors, including elected officials, who have some knowledge about how to read the electorate and long-term party loyalists and stalwarts who have been leaders in the party.

They should be a part of the decision-making process. So we should incorporate a fraction of delegates at the convention and empower them to be unpledged and perform a kind of deliberative gatekeeping function. And there we go. They got a really popular thing that we all love, superdelegates. That was very popular. So — but then the story of the superdelegates is one we can keep talking about.

But I to pick up on the gatekeeping function in a second. But why does this spread to the Republicans? You said it’s because it’s a function of state law. I don’t understand why that would be.

There’s not truly fascinating answer, but mechanically, that parties are this complicated amalgam of their — Leon Epstein, political scientist terms — private utilities. And they are therefore amalgams of state law and party rules that are outside the jurisdiction of the courts. And parties are least subject to state or federal law at the national convention because states can’t govern what happens at a convention that has delegates from all the states.

So as states set rules for primaries to meet the requirements of McGovern-Fraser, those rules apply both to the Republican Party as well as to the Democratic Party, that state legislators would enact, we’re going to have a primary. It’s going to be open to all comers. It will have delegates who will be pledged, and those apply to both parties. That’s the mechanical answer.

There’s a, I think, deeper and more important side of what happens on the right. And that goes back to kingmakers and Schlafly, which is Republicans have their own and much more powerfully set of actors who do not want the long-established figures at the top of the party to have too much influence in delegate selection. And therefore, they are perfectly happy with a system that takes away the old state chairs and time servers who had been electing, in their view, too moderate candidates and hadn’t paved the way for real movement conservatives.

And so in a world in which Democrats do not have McGovern-Fraser, it’s hard to imagine the mixed system surviving with such forces on the right.

And with McGovern-Fraser implemented, you get Ronald Reagan’s very potent challenge to Gerald Ford in the 1976 primary.

And so then you have the loss of, I think, a couple things here. I mean, I’m not somebody who believes the old eras in American politics were great. Machine party politics were very corrupt. You really did have this hammerlock of the party regulars. But these things have their virtues as well as their vices. And one virtue might be that there is a tendency to try to choose candidates who you think will appeal to a broad part of the electorate.

But the other tendency is the gatekeeping tendency. The other virtue is the gatekeeping virtue, a point that Levitsky and Ziblatt make in “How Democracies Die,” which is big book a couple of years ago that, at least as lore, in part, leads Joe Biden to run for president. They make this point that you’ve always seen figures like Donald Trump in American life.

You can think about Henry Ford. You can think about Father Coughlin. You can think about Huey Long. But figures like that couldn’t make it through the convention. And so even if you had these people who had an intense adoration of 30 percent of the electorate, they couldn’t make it through the convention. And so they didn’t rise to the top of American politics.

And that absent the gatekeeping function, the gatekeeping function of the conventions, obviously, there’s a real irony in Trump winning through the Electoral College because the Electoral College was also meant to be a gatekeeper against a Trump-like demagogue. But absent the gatekeepers of parties and, arguably, the Electoral College, you now have this vulnerability to Trump-like figures. Did we lose too much in losing conventions?

Well, look, you’re talking to two political scientists. Political scientists, generally speaking, much more skeptical of open primaries and. freewheeling systems, much more supportive of parties that actually have the ability to make their own internal decisions as to who is going to be their nominee. Political scientists tend to adhere to some version of E.E. Schattschneider’s claim that democracy exists between the parties. It should not exist inside the parties.

And so, yeah, I think you did lose something. Now, one thing we try and make clear in the book is that we don’t think the mechanical changing of the rules over the course of the mid-1970s is the decisive, pivotal point. That on the one hand, what’s going on with the right is eroding. In a much more fundamental way, the legitimacy of the very ideas of gatekeepers, the very idea of drawing lines against extremism or outside anti-democratic elements within the conservative movement.

They’re eroding their own capacity to make those arguments regardless of what the rules are, and which is why we think there’s a real force unto itself that would have broken through whatever the rules were, whether or not McGovern-Fraser actually got implemented. But on the Democratic side, the problem is parties are only capable of doing things if there’s some degree of legitimacy and trust and respect and loyalty among their own members.

And what you see with the superdelegates, which I think we would be perfectly happy to say we thought were a good idea, they never exercised actual, pivotal decision-making. They never proved to be the decisive block that gave the nominee to someone who wasn’t the pledged delegate winner. And they didn’t because they knew if they ever did that, it would just tear the party apart.

They didn’t have legitimacy.

Yeah, they didn’t have any legitimacy.

And in turn, party actors never did it. The political scientists are not powerful enough to defend parties. If party actors believe in parties —

They’d have to do it.

It’s always struck me — it’s always struck me as very telling that between 2016 and 2020, so after watching Donald Trump capture and take over the Republican Party, that the way Democrats changed their rules is to weaken the superdelegates, the exact group of people who could, in theory, prevent something like Donald Trump on the left, Democrats — and I mean, they’re doing this because of the Bernie Sanders experience and the anger of Bernie Sanders supporters.

But what Democrats do is weaken the party’s gatekeepers.

And this could be a story for a different kind of left that said, maybe in a Corbynite way, although that didn’t end very well for them, that we are going to take over this party, and we are going to make sure that the superdelegates, all the members of the D.N.C., are our people. Instead, it was tear it all down.

In 2016, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, then D.N.C. chair — it was in 2016, right?

February 2016.

Democrats are having discussion about superdelegates and the legitimacy. The head of the party, if anyone’s going to speak on behalf of the party and its rules, presumably it should be the Democratic National Committee Chair. How did she defend or describe what superdelegates even were?

She said that there were so many grass roots activists who wanted to be delegates, and having superdelegates give more of them the chance to go to the convention, which is completely fake, phony, stupid. She did not say, members of the party with long-term interests, members of the D.N.C., members of Congress, big city mayors, governors, should have a right to and the party is better off when they have their voice at the convention.

She knows that. She wouldn’t say it.

This has all been on my mind this year because I have argued [LAUGHS] for an open Democratic Convention. I think I really liked Joe Biden as a president in a bunch of different ways, but I think he’s at this point a quite weakened candidate. Obviously, I think Republicans are picking their functionally weakest candidate. Like if the Republican Party were any kind of functional organization, they would not be going into war with this guy.

That Nikki Haley or any number of other Republicans would win this election easily. And so Republicans cannot, on the one hand, and will not change course from Donald Trump. I think we see that. Donald Trump is weakened but dangerous and in the lead. We’ll see what this does, if anything, to his poll numbers.

Democrats, I think you could easily imagine a convention in another age, choosing a candidate well suited to taking advantage of Trump’s particular weaknesses. One thing I heard back after the convention piece I did was just from a lot of Democrats who are superdelegates or would be the kind of Democrat who would have power at a convention, just saying, we don’t have the muscle for that now. We don’t know who the delegates are. We haven’t done that in a long time.

Even if I agree with you that there’s a real weakness here, I don’t trust a convention because we just have not run one in the memory of functionally any of the people who would be there. And it just feels like a year to me when the hollowness of the parties to make strategic decisions late in a election year is really on view.

I mean, it just — that we are going to end up here with someone as dangerous and flawed and compromised as Donald Trump running against somebody who is as weakened as Joe Biden, with the stakes being what they are for Donald Trump winning again, it really speaks to parties not acting strategically any longer in a way that has, I think, now become a genuine danger to American democracy.

But I find it’s almost hard to even put it in those terms because people hate the party so much, and they’re angry at them for this. The idea that you would then give them more power, it feels like empowering the very culprits of the thing you’re mad at. But that’s where we are.

Why write a book that is in so many ways a defense of party? It is to say that, no, these guys are good. And why have a chapter about the glories of free labor Republicanism? It is to say that the best thing this country ever did since the founding, to save the Union, free the slaves, reconstruct the Constitution, was fundamentally a party project.

And all these ways through American history that we’ve seen parties do vital, important work, to give ardor to supporters of parties. More specifically on the challenges of this year, ever since — this is Daniel Klinghard’s book, a political scientist at Holy Cross. Ever since presidents took over national committees at the end of the 19th century, presidents who want to win renomination have won renomination. However, the circumstances under which the parties restrained them, the choices that they make, cognizant of the possibilities of renomination, those have all changed. And so we have not seen anything like the world of 1944, where the high figures of the Democratic Party told a dying Franklin D. Roosevelt that Henry Wallace was not going to work and Harry Truman turned out to be, with great consequence, the one figure who could bring together Southern conservatives, labor, the famous clear with Sidney Hillman of the C.I.O., Northern machines.

And maybe Sam can talk to this. The circumstances of Joe Biden’s nomination in 2020 set up the party for failures that were not apparent in 2020 and I think very apparent in 2024.

Yeah, I mean, you articulated a great sales pitch for our book. If anyone wants to make sense of both why we’re at a point where the parties are so — have such glaring incapacity to do things like nominate their most effective candidates and also why, unfortunately, it’s not a book that’s a how-to in the next couple of weeks, how to put all of it back together again because it’s the product of decades now of eroding capacity, eroding trust, eroding legitimacy that puts us in this state.

Which is to say, the specifics right now with Biden do date back to contingent developments in 2020. I think there’s come to be the idea that Biden managed to capture the nomination in 2020 as a reflection of the Democratic establishment being strong and in control. But I remember that as much more of a haphazard drift and stumble of Joe Biden. People could count. They knew how old he was in 2020 and could think ahead where —

It was a demonstration of hollowness in 2020, where there’s a complete — there’s 20 candidates. There’s some potential moderates out there, but they either have crazy lack of background, like Pete Buttigieg, or for whatever reason, no one gets a signal to coordinate who the non-Sanders candidate is going to be.

And then you get in a period of a weekend, this scramble after South Carolina for Buttigieg and Klobuchar to drop out. Maybe it was because Barack Obama made a phone call. And then all of a sudden, there’s a cascade towards Biden as a coordinating function. That’s real late in the game. To the extent there was any coordination, it was held up as illegitimate.

Like oh, my god, did you hear Barack Obama made a phone call? What kind of a smoke-filled room, anti-democratic system is this? And then we get the president we get. Then he chooses the running mate he chooses. And — Chooses without the long-term interests of the party. He has some short-term reasons that he wants someone with Harris’s background. But this is not a pick that is made a la 1944 thinking about what are the factions that I need to assuage in my party, and how is this going to work after I’m gone? And then —

Well, I think it might have been. I think they might have just gotten what factions were going to need to be worked with wrong. I mean, I will say about the Joe Biden moment in 2020, I give everybody involved a little more credit. I do think it reflected something that you don’t see in the Republican Party in this period, which is party activists converging, if in a haphazard way, and party regulars listening.

The voters wanted — they were looking for a signal.

The voters were looking for a signal, and they took the signal. And I also think, though, and this to me is one of the places where I’m a little bit more frustrated with Biden and his team than other people, there were a series of signals sent very clearly that he was going to very seriously consider not running for re-election.

There were all these stories written where, in fact, people named as advisers to him, said that he was going to only serve one term. It was not a pledge he made. People talked about him making that pledge. He didn’t. But the expectation, I think, among Democrats and Democratic elites was that if age became an issue, a significant issue for him, he was not going to run.

Everybody knew how old he was. Running an 81-year-old is going to be a very risky endeavor. And things have teetered on the edge of that. He is able to fulfill the job of the presidency, and he has trouble routinely and effectively performing the job of the presidency in front of cameras in a way that has become a huge and so far not really solvable political liability for them.

And given that they have not done the thing I think they signaled they would do, which is take that seriously and either figure out a way to solve it or he doesn’t run, the fact that Harris didn’t work out as a V.P. politically that well, and they have not figured out a way to make her work that well or replace her, has also created a lot of static about what to do.

I think people could see that this would happen, but they expected Biden and his team and some of these other party elites to do something about it if it happened. And the thing is, they didn’t. And then nobody else was able to.

Right, you say they and —

There’s no “they.”

That’s right.

There’s just Biden.

There’s just Biden. And it turns out politicians, they’re driven to lead, and they want to keep leading. And they’re not going to listen to people telling them not to lead.

And we go back to Martin Van Buren, then. Having leaders who are unconstrained by party, even when they are fundamentally responsible leaders, is dangerous. And in a lot of ways, “The Hollow Parties” is an argument against the presidentialisation of our politics.

I try to end every podcast on Martin Van Buren. So I think that’s the place to finish here. Always our final question — what are three books you’d recommend to the audience? I think we said we’re going to give each of you one and then a joint pick.

I’ll start with, speaking of the Jacksonian era, Aziz Rana was a law professor. He has a giant new book out about Americans’ views of the Constitution. But he, in 2010, wrote a very substantial and brilliant book called “The Two Faces of American Freedom.” That is a good synthesis of a master theme in American history that goes back in scholarship to people like Edmund Morgan. That grapples with the idea that it’s precisely in a settler society that creates mass democracy in the world, pioneers it — it’s precisely the commitment to equality and freedom among a country’s citizens that intensifies and sharpens the violent subjugation and exclusion of those who are outside of that citizenry.

And so it’s precisely the most small D democratic forces across American history that are also often the advocates of the most eliminationist, genocidal, or tyrannical treatment of those not included. And grappling with that duality is a huge part of making sense of 19th century America, but it’s a kind of duality that plays through all the way through American history.

We’ve talked today plenty about, as conversations about party politics tend to do, the political machine, which is typically alluded to more than it’s actually understood, whether as the kindly ward healer giving away Thanksgiving turkeys or as the nasty engine of patronage. And to actually understand what the political machine did, wonderful book by Steven Erie, “Rainbow’s End: Irish-Americans and the Dilemmas of Urban Machine Politics, 1840-1985.”

What a great title.

It is a great title, and it also has the all-time best academic book cover I’ve ever seen, which is it’s a St. Patrick’s Day parade in Chicago. And there are all these patriots guys with, just after Richard J. Daley dies, and they all have posters and they say, with Daley’s image, our friend and in our hearts and minds forever with the shamrock. And so when we were asked to come up with ideas for a cover, we said like “Rainbow’s End.”

And it’s a real model for us.

They didn’t listen to you, I guess.

We’re happy with this. But alas, what “Rainbow’s End” offers is a claim of what the machine actually did, which is to direct its benefits, not sprinkled around to everybody, but to core Irish constituencies, that Irish Americans rewarded their co-ethnics and that there was actually less patronage to go around than one might have imagined. But to understand what machine politics is.

And then our third pick is 1968 is much in the air. The best, to our mind, book about an American political campaign ever written is “An American Melodrama: The Presidential Campaign of 1968” by Lewis Chester, Godfrey Hodgson and Bruce Page. And want to talk about it?

Yeah, three British reporters from The Sunday Times. It’s a breezy 800 pages, but it is not only — there’s a lot of books written about 1968. It’s an incredibly dramatic year. This one managing —

A new good one, “The Year That Broke Politics.”

Yeah, exactly. It combines a fly-on-the-wall, all the kind of novelistic attention to the inside players with a really profound grasp of the bigger stakes, the deeper history, what’s going on in Vietnam and the American Empire as a kind of context for all this. It brings it all together. It’s a great read. And it is unfortunately out of print.

So if anyone wants to publish a new edition, we’d be delighted to write a foreword.

Sam Rosenfeld, Daniel Schlozman, thank you very much.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Elias Isquith. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker, Kate Sinclair and Rollin Hu. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing by Aman Sahota and Efim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon.

The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin and Kristin Lin. We have original music by Isaac Jones, audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

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Produced by ‘The Ezra Klein Show’

After Donald Trump was convicted last week in his hush-money trial, Republican leaders wasted no time in rallying behind him. There was no chance the Republican Party was going to replace Trump as their nominee at this point. Trump has essentially taken over the G.O.P.; his daughter-in-law is even co-chair of the Republican National Committee.

How did the Republican Party get so weak that it could fall victim to a hostile takeover?

[You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio App , Apple , Spotify , Amazon Music , YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts .]

Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld are the authors of “ The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics ,” which traces how both major political parties have been “hollowed out” over the decades, transforming once-powerful gatekeeping institutions into mere vessels for the ideologies of specific candidates. And they argue that this change has been perilous for our democracy.

In this conversation, we discuss how the power of the parties has been gradually chipped away; why the Republican Party became less ideological and more geared around conflict; the merits of a stronger party system; and more.

You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio App , Apple , Spotify , Google or wherever you get your podcasts . View a list of book recommendations from our guests here .

(A full transcript of this episode is available here .)

A portrait of Sam Rosenfeld (left) and Daniel Schlozman (right)

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show’‘ was produced by Elias Isquith. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker, Kate Sinclair and Rollin Hu. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota and Efim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

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This essay seeks to use the theories of sexual difference to understand how the term leader is defined, within the context of contemporary western society. ... (0 'lIsin!, on sl ren!,t hHril l hl' r I h;lI) w 'nk n 'ss 's (Avolio and others, 158 THE EMBODIMENT OF LEADERSHIP MICHELLE OBAMA'S EMBODIED AUTHENTIC LEADERSHIP 2004; Seligman, 2002 ...
Arcadia University ScholarWorks@Arcadia
Michelle Obama Camille Menns Arcadia University. Abstract This research paper discusses Michelle Obama as a feminist who broke barriers in the media and in the White House. Her contributions as a Black Feminist and an advocate for the global education of young women have propelled her to be one of the most notable feminist figures of today.
Ethical Challenges Of Leadership In First Lady By Michelle Obama
Her commitment to set high standards is an effective leadership trait that promotes her courage. According to the Ethical Challenges of Leadership, the author reveals that leaders with courage "Move forward despite the risks and costs" (Johnson, C. E. Pg.72). The barriers that Michelle has broken as the first African-American First Lady ...
What Can We Learn From Michelle Obama
Obama portrayed integrity and confidence, which enable the people around her to be confident in themselves. Obama's high levels of empathy* also contributed to her sociability and let people believe they were seen. (* Empathy is not a trait but a skill that can be learned.) Having looked at Michelle Obama's leadership traits, we can ...
Michelle Obama Leadership Essay.docx
MICHELLE OBAMA THE EPIDEMY OF LEADERSHIP 4 Michelle Obama the epidemy of leadership A great leader is a rare quality that is not easily obtained. It takes a great leader to command the respect and attention of the world. Michelle Obama is the epidemy of leadership. She exemplifies herself as an iconic woman that has shown extortionary poise and strength under pressure.
PDF AP English Language and Composition
Sample 2C (1 of 1) In her last speech, Michelle Obama uses comparing and contrasting to convey her message about her expectations and hope for young people in the United States. She compares and relates to her and her husband's life leading up to their spot in the White House to an ordinary citizen.
The Republican Party's Decay Began Long Before Trump
In the past, the G.O.P. could've prevented a candidate like Donald Trump from running. But Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld argue the party structure has been "hollowed out" over the years.