How Michelle Obama's flexing her soft power
Why Obama’s uncommon authenticity is a source of her appeal and power

Liberated from the constraints of her husband’s presidency, former first lady Michelle Obama is building a new kind of post-FLOTUS platform and she’s more popular than before.
First ladies are historically well liked, but it wasn’t until 2018 that Obama became Gallup’s most admired woman. It’s a position she’s held every year the polling company has asked since (Gallup hasn’t asked the past two years, but Obama topped YouGov’s 2021 survey, edging out Angelina Jolie and Queen Elizabeth II), and it speaks to her growing influence.

During former President Barack Obama’s time in office, “all they gave us were pictures and videos,” said Ajia Meux, an assistant director of campaign leadership at the University of Oklahoma Foundation who’s researched the Obamas’ visual communication. She said she noticed how the former first lady has evolved from her husband’s first term to today.
“Michelle Obama’s whole aesthetic started to change the second term,” Meux said. “She started becoming and centering the aesthetic of her identity in ways that I don’t think were possible for her in the first term, and since they’ve left office, she’s embraced that even more.”
[Previously: Michelle Obama is redefining the possibilities of post-FLOTUS fashion]
In her new book The Light We Carry, Obama writes about the pressures of her former role. “For eight years as first lady, I’d been vigilant and cautious, deeply aware that Barack and I and our two daughters had the eyes of the nation upon us, and that as Black people in a historically white house, we could not afford a single screwup.”
Since leaving, though, she’s discussed challenges she’s faced, from a miscarriage and undergoing fertility treatment to attending couples counseling. She’s now giving more than just photos and videos, which she admits in the book get a lot of attention.
“People often reach out to me seeking relationship advice,” she writes. “They remark on photographs they’ve seen of me and Barack together … [but] I’ve made a fairly deliberate effort to blow holes in the myth that my husband is a perfect man, or ours is a perfect marriage, or that love, in general, is any sort of breezy endeavor.”
Before Obama, the rawest a modern FLOTUS got was Betty Ford. Thrust into the role suddenly in 1974 — Richard Nixon selected her husband Gerald Ford as his new vice president after his then-veep Spiro Agnew resigned while facing a criminal investigation, only for Nixon to resign the following year — it wasn’t one she sought.
Ford was diagnosed with breast cancer just weeks after her husband took office. At the time, cancer was referred to as the “C word,” per Kate Anderson Brower’s First Women, and no one dared utter the word “breast,” making Ford’s openness about her mastectomy revolutionary.
“The president’s political advisers had told Betty that she didn’t have to go public with such a personal matter, but she insisted,” Brower writes. “Once she found out the number of women who were dying from the disease, she told staffers that if it was cancer they should release a statement while she was on the operating table saying that she was having a mastectomy, instead of something amorphous like she was dealing with a ‘health issue.’”

Ford received more than 50,000 letters after announcing her procedure and inspired women to get examined for breast cancer themselves, with diagnoses increasing by 15% in the U.S., according to the National Archives. The year after leaving the White House, Ford admitted to being addicted to alcohol and medication she took for her arthritis and entered a treatment center. Her disclosure was similarly impactful, and she co-founded the Betty Ford Center in 1982. More than 90,000 people have received treatment there as of 2011.
Obama’s agenda — from her Let’s Move! public health campaign as FLOTUS to her Get Her There initiative today to educate and empower girls — is built on issues that “connect to people’s soul,” Meux said, and her deft handling of her pioneering role as the first Black first lady has won over devoted fans.
“I don’t know how to say it any other way, but this subtlety of how she negotiates the identity of being a Black woman but every woman, such that people trust her, they love her,” Meux said. “She is a global treasure because of her ability to be both honest and vulnerable in ways we have never seen a first lady do. We’ve never seen this before.”
Obama’s uncommon authenticity is not just a source of her appeal and power, but it’s something she encourages others to pursue themselves.
“Self-worth comes wrapped in vulnerability,” Obama writes. “We only hurt ourselves when we hide our realness away.”
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