With Speech, Michelle Obama
Seeks Reintroduction
Unsettles Others;
Family Snapshot
DENVER -- Accompanied by her two young daughters, Michelle Obama took on a big challenge Monday night, to make the country more comfortable with her husband and her.
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| Joe Fornabaio/The Wall Street Journal |
| Michelle Obama, wife of presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama, speaks during the first day of the Democratic National Convention at the Pepsi Center in Denver. |
Her speech at the Democratic convention sought to humanize a couple that supporters fear may seem distant to many Americans. "I come here as a mom whose girls are the heart of my heart and the center of my world. They're the first thing I think about when I wake up in the morning, and the last thing I think about when I go to bed at night," she told a cheering throng on the opening night of the convention.
She tried to find a connection with working-class families that Sen. Obama has struggled to reach, adding: "And I come here as a daughter, raised on the South Side of Chicago by a father who was a blue-collar city worker, and a mother who stayed at home with my brother and me."
Mrs. Obama wasn't subtle in her effort to make the Obamas seem like, as one aide put it, the family "next door." Upon meeting her husband, she said, "What struck me...was that even though he had this funny name, even though he'd grown up all the way across the continent in Hawaii, his family was so much like mine ... Like my family, they scrimped and saved so that he could have opportunities they never had themselves."
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Mrs. Obama also used her opening-night speech to try to begin a week of healing rifts in the Democratic Party. She inserted a tribute to Hillary Clinton, whom her husband defeated in a bitter primary fight. Mrs. Obama praised the vanquished candidate for having "put those 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling, so that our daughters -- and sons -- can dream a little bigger and aim a little higher.
Wearing a simple, green jersey dress, Mrs. Obama spoke in a relaxed, conversational style. She received her biggest applause when she praised Sen. Clinton and when she declared that "we have an obligation to fight for the world as it should be ... That is why I love this country."
Sen. Barack Obama watched his wife's speech with a white family in a Kansas City, Mo., living room and then appeared on a large video screen by satellite to congratulate his wife. "Now you know why I asked her out so many times," he said.
Mrs. Obama's speech initiated a critical convention goal: to reintroduce Sen. Obama and identify him more closely with middle-class values and struggles. The speech showcased the Obamas as "an American family," said one Obama campaign aide.
Many black women hail Mrs. Obama as an icon. She is a Princeton- and Harvard-educated lawyer who works as a hospital executive. She is also the mother of two young girls, and is seen as both stylish and outspoken on the campaign trail.
But many whites remain uneasy. In the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, 29% of voters said they had a negative view of Mrs. Obama, almost twice as many as said they had a negative view of John McCain's wife, Cindy. Mrs. Obama's positives were also higher than Mrs. McCain's, with 38% saying they had a positive view of her, compared with 29% for Cindy McCain. (The rest were neutral or didn't have an opinion.)
Mrs. Obama has become a lightning rod for Republicans in their attempt to portray the would-be first couple as racially polarizing, and even her allies concede she has helped fuel that reputation with certain remarks.
In one sign of the importance attached to Mrs. Obama's role, the Obama campaign's senior strategist of communications and message, Robert Gibbs, came off the campaign trail, where he typically stays by Sen. Obama's side, to meet Monday with network-television management and anchors. He pitched her personal story, of a father with multiple sclerosis who worked in a water plant and managed to send two children to Princeton. Her brother, a college basketball coach, introduced her Monday night.
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WASHINGTON WIRE"Michelle has been caricatured," says Charles Ogletree, who taught both Obamas at Harvard Law School and is an adviser to the campaign. "What people will see now is Michelle's poise, the depth of her love and commitment to this country, her embracing vision of a first lady who serves the needs of women, family and children."
Obama advisers say that Mrs. Obama's sound bites made famous by Republicans aren't reflective of her life story or her personality. Several months ago, she told voters that her husband's political success made her "proud" of her country for the first time, and she has been criticized for greeting her husband with a fist-bump following his late primary victories.
As part of the effort to soften her image in recent weeks, she appeared on the TV show "The View" in June. Sales soared the next day for the $148 dress she wore during her appearance.
Mrs. Obama is far more rooted in the traditional black U.S. experience than her husband. She grew up on the black South Side of Chicago in a working-class family. Her father worked as a precinct captain for the city's Democratic machine in Chicago, and her connections to the Jesse Jackson family and other black politicians helped her husband when he began to get involved in Chicago politics.
"It never would have surprised me to see her one day run for state senator, mayor of Chicago, or even U.S. senator," Mr. Ogletree says.
Instead, Mrs. Obama took a job at a high-powered Chicago law firm, where she later met her husband. She subsequently worked for the city of Chicago and the University of Chicago hospital system, where she is a vice president of external affairs.
Mrs. Obama talks frequently about the Obama family's financial struggles, including paying off student loans. She was earning more than $300,000 a year when she took a leave of absence from her University of Chicago hospital post. She received a raise to $316,000 from $121,000 in 2005, shortly after her husband was elected to the Senate. Hospital officials have said the raise reflected a broadening of her responsibilities and matched the salary of other vice presidents of the not-for-profit institution.
Aides say Mrs. Obama wrote her speech two weeks ago. "It's very, very personal, so she wrote it herself," an adviser said. When Mrs. Obama brainstormed with her staff before writing it, she made it clear that she wouldn't respond point-by-point to Republican attacks, a campaign aide said.
"Michelle just wants people to get to know and trust her husband so they'll feel comfortable voting for him," another campaign aide said. "This isn't about revamping her image. She's going to keep doing what she's done for 19 months."
Mrs. Obama's effectiveness on the campaign trail first became evident in South Carolina, where she was widely credited with bolstering Sen. Obama's support among black voters who initially backed Hillary Clinton. Since then, some of her most popular appearances have been with working women at roundtable discussions about juggling jobs with raising a family.
She offers her own experiences, such as "running into Target to buy toilet paper" and making business meetings with a daughter in tow. She will hold another such roundtable Tuesday in Denver.
On Diplomacy, Biden Knows Who and How
Barack Obama's selection of Joseph Biden as his vice presidential running mate is being analyzed for whether it will unite the Democratic Party or help the ticket win in November.
But the larger question is, what will Mr. Biden bring to the job if elected? We've seen over the past eight years with Richard Cheney how a smart, aggressive and experienced vice president who is respected by the president can have a major impact on our lives. Mr. Biden is clearly all of those things. So if the Democrats win the White House, how would Mr. Biden approach the job?
I got a chance to see his leadership style up close in September 1999. I was then ambassador to Romania, and we were dealing with the aftermath of NATO's successful efforts to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. American officials were stopping in Bucharest to thank the Romanians for their support, and to figure out where the Balkans were headed in the coming years.
Unlike other visitors, whose approach was helpful but remarkably relaxed, Mr. Biden was a whirlwind of inquiry from the time he landed at Otopeni airport. On the 20 minute drive into the city, he quizzed me on Romanian attitudes, the status of various government leaders, and the inside story on Romania's foreign policy toward Slobodan Milosevic, who was still in power next door in Yugoslavia. Because Mr. Biden has known all the major Romanian leaders since before the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was ousted in 1989, the questions were Ph.D. level, not Romania 101.
In his meetings with President Emil Constantinescu and others, he thanked them for supporting NATO and then drilled in on Milosevic. How strong did they think he was in Yugoslavia after the war? How did they evaluate the various leaders of the democratic opposition there (whom he asked about name by name, since he knew them personally, too)?
He exuded a passion for helping Serbs move toward a democratic future. I also got a running commentary on his talks with President Bill Clinton over how much military force to use during the war. In the end, air power and diplomacy won the day for NATO. There was no ground invasion. Not a single U.S. soldier died in combat.
But Mr. Biden was already concerned that the U.S.'s use of precision munitions would create destabilizing fear in China and other countries. He was looking around the next corner.
In most of our meetings, Romanian leaders reiterated their strong interest in joining NATO. At lunch in my house with opposition party leaders, one of them said that NATO membership was important to their country for a reason I'd never heard before.
"If we're in NATO, we won't have to worry about NATO attacking Romania over our relations with our Hungarian minority the way you attacked Yugoslavia," he said. "Since Turkey has been in NATO for decades, you let them do what they want with the Kurdish minority."
Mr. Biden, visibly angry, rose from his chair, leaned across the table and said: "If that's why you want to get into NATO, I'll make sure you never do!"
Cooler heads assured Mr. Biden -- and me -- that the gentleman had misspoken and that Romanians were committed to good relations with their Hungarian minority. And they were right. When the opposition party came to power a year later, the Hungarian party supported the new government. In 2004, Romania joined NATO -- with Mr. Biden's support.
What struck me was the frankness and passion Mr. Biden brought to U.S. foreign policy. He knew when to say the right thing in the right way. And the Romanians respected him for it.
The most extraordinary meeting we had was with Petre Roman, president of the Romanian Senate. He had been prime minister in the early 1990s, so Mr. Biden met him before. Mr. Biden grilled him on Serbian politics, a subject Mr. Roman knew a lot about. In fact, the Serbian democratic leader Mr. Roman had urged the U.S. to work with helped defeat Milosevic in the 2000 elections. Those elections brought pro-Western democrats to power. Mr. Biden asked the right questions of the right guy.
But as we came out of the meeting, Mr. Biden said to me, "What's that guy so upset about? He looks the way I felt when I chaired my last Judiciary Committee meeting." He was referring to 1994, when the Republicans won control of the U.S. Senate, relieving Mr. Biden of his committee chairmanship.
"He's got some big problem on his mind. Do you know what it is?" he asked me.
I was amazed. Without knowing the latest inside politics, Mr. Biden had read Mr. Roman's body language and knew he was under incredible stress. Mr. Roman was under great pressure because public support for the coalition government which included his party was plummeting. Several months later, he brought down the government, replaced the prime minister and took over the foreign minister's job himself. Mr. Roman's party ended up surviving the next election, but found itself out of power in the opposition.
Mr. Biden has better intuition about other politicians, American or foreign, than any elected official I've ever met. That gift will help a President Obama with his ambitious domestic program as much as it will help in protecting America's security.
Mr. Rosapepe, a Democratic state senator in Maryland, was U.S. ambassador to Romania from 1998-2001.
Bad Labor Law Is a Path to Economic Ruin
I recently said that America "would become France" if a certain bill now in Congress -- which would virtually guarantee that every company becomes unionized -- ever became law. Deceptively named the Employee Free Choice Act, this bill would in most cases take away an employee's right to a secret ballot in a union election and give unions the option to have federal arbitrators set the wages, benefits, hours and all other terms and conditions of employment.
Countries other than France have suffered the consequences of bad labor laws. When I was CEO of Handy Dan, the precursor to Home Depot, I traveled to England in the 1970s to take a look at a chain of stores we were considering for acquisition. When I arrived in London, the airport workers, bus drivers and garbage collectors were all on strike. The major shareholder of the company asked me to interview three employees. He informed me afterward that he wanted me to hire them at Handy Dan "because the U.K. was finished." He explained that his tax rate was 75% and there were no incentives to grow.
When I asked what he and his company were doing about it, he told me that the media would attack the company if it got involved politically. I jumped all over him and the company's CEO for letting this happen without a fight. Needless to say, Handy Dan did not buy these stores. Fortunately for Britain and thanks to the courage of Margaret Thatcher, both tax rates and the power of labor unions were reduced in later years.
My advice today about the Employee Free Choice Act is the same as I gave in England: You better fight to stop this undemocratic bill. I'm not the only one who thinks the proposed law violates long-established principles of democracy. In these pages, George McGovern, a former Democratic senator and a champion of organized labor, called this bill what it really is -- "a disturbing and undemocratic overreach not in the interest of either management or labor."
To my astonishment, most CEOs in America are unaware of this planned hostile takeover of their human resources. I am retired, so this is not business for me. It's strictly personal. I care deeply about the competitiveness of American companies and our system of free enterprise.
I know that labor-union contributions are the lifeblood of many in the House and Senate. But I just cannot understand how so many in Congress are willing to sell out America for political dollars. When the bill came up for a key vote in 2007, all Senate Democrats voted yes and only two Democrats in the House had the courage to vote no. While the bill passed the House, it failed in the Senate because the Democrats were unable to get the required 60 votes to stop a Republican filibuster.
If the Democrats have a good November, the measure could become law early next year. Bill co-sponsor Barack Obama has said: "We will pass the Employee Free Choice Act. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. We may have to wait for the next president to sign it, but we will get this thing done."
Those who support the bill claim that it will "protect workers." This doesn't pass the straight-face test. Mr. McGovern saw through the false rhetoric of the bill's sponsors, saying that the measure "runs counter to ideals that were once at the core of the labor movement. Instead of providing a voice for the unheard, [it] risks silencing those who would speak."
It's time to stand up and fight. America's competitiveness, jobs and right to a secret ballot are at stake. CEOs, employees who want to keep their jobs in America -- and those retirees like me who would not be where we are today but for our system of free enterprise -- must stop this anti-democratic legislation.
Mr. Marcus is the founder and first CEO of Home Depot.
We Can Help China Embrace the Future
The Beijing Olympic Games were a powerful spectacle, stunning in sight and sound. But the moment that made the biggest impression on me came during an informal visit just before the Games to one of the new Chinese Internet companies, and in conversation with some of the younger Chinese entrepreneurs.
These people, men and women, were smart, sharp, forthright, unafraid to express their views about China and its future. Above all, there was a confidence, an optimism, a lack of the cynical, and a presence of the spirit of get up and go, that reminded me greatly of the U.S. at its best and any country on its way forward.
These people weren't living in fear, but looking forward in hope. And for all the millions still in poverty in China, for all the sweep of issues -- political, social and economic -- still to be addressed, that was the spirit of China during this festival of sport, and that is the spirit that will define its future.
During my 10 years as British leader, I could see the accelerating pace of China's continued emergence as a major power. I gave speeches about China, I understood it analytically. But I did not feel it emotionally and therefore did not fully understand it politically.
Since leaving office I have visited four times and will shortly return again. People ask what is the legacy of these Olympics for China? It is that they mark a new epoch -- an opening up of China that can never be reversed. It also means that ignorance and fear of China will steadily decline as the reality of modern China becomes more apparent.
Power and influence is shifting to the East. In time will come India, too. Some see all this as a threat. I see it as an enormous opportunity. But we have to exercise a lot of imagination and eliminate any vestiges of historic arrogance.
The volunteer force that staged the Games was interested, friendly and helpful. The whole feel of the city was a world away from the China I remember on my first visit 20 years ago. And the people are proud, really and honestly proud, of their country and its progress.
No sensible Chinese person -- including the country's leadership -- doubts there remain issues of human rights and political and religious freedom to be resolved. But neither do the sensible people -- including the most Western-orientated Chinese -- doubt the huge change, for the better, there has been. China is on a journey. It is moving forward quickly. But it knows perfectly well the journey is not complete. Observers should illuminate the distance to go, by all means, but recognize the distance traveled.
The Chinese leadership is understandably preoccupied with internal development. Beijing and Shanghai no more paint for you the complete picture of China than New York and Washington do of the U.S. Understanding the internal challenge is fundamental to understanding China, its politics and its psyche. We in Europe have roughly 5% of our population employed in agriculture. China has almost 60%. Over the coming years it will seek to move hundreds of millions of its people from a rural to an urban economy. Of course India will seek to do the same, and the scale of this transformation will create huge challenges and opportunities in the economy, the environment and politically.
For China, this economic and social transformation has to come with political stability. It is in all our interests that it does. The policy of One China is not a piece of indulgent nationalism. It is an existential issue if China is to hold together in a peaceful and stable manner as it modernizes. This is why Tibet is not simply a religious issue for China but a profoundly political one -- Tibet being roughly a quarter of China's land mass albeit with a small population.
So we should continue to engage in a dialogue over the issues that rightly concern people, but we should conduct it with at least some sensitivity to the way China sees them.
This means that the West needs a strong partnership with China, one that goes deep, not just economically but politically and culturally. The truth is that nothing in the 21st century will work well without China's full engagement. The challenges we face today are global. China is now a major global player. So whether the issue is climate change, Africa, world trade or the myriad of security questions, we need China to be constructive; we need it to be using its power in partnership with us. None of this means we shouldn't continue to raise the issues of human rights, religious freedoms and democratic reforms as European and American leaders have done in recent weeks.
It is possible to hyperbolize about the rise of China. For example, Europe's economies are still major and combined outreach those of China and India combined. But, as the Olympics and its medal tables show, it is not going to stay that way. This is a historic moment of change. Fast forward 10 years and everyone will know it.
For centuries, the power has resided in the West, with various European powers including the British Empire and then, in the 20th century, the U.S. Now we will have to come to terms with a world in which the power is shared with the Far East. I wonder if we quite understand what that means, we whose culture (not just our politics and economies) has dominated for so long. It will be a rather strange, possibly unnerving experience. Personally, I think it will be incredibly enriching. New experiences; new ways of thinking liberate creative energy. But in any event, it will be a fact we have to come to terms with. For the next U.S. president, this will be or should be at the very top of the agenda, and as a result of the strength of the Sino-U.S. relationship under President Bush, there is a sound platform to build upon.
The Olympics is now the biggest sporting event in the world, and because of the popularity of sport it is therefore one of the events that makes a genuine impact on real people. These Games have given people a glimpse of modern China in a way that no amount of political speeches could do.
London 2012 gives Britain a tremendous chance to explore some of these changes and explain to the East what the modern West is about. One thing is for certain: Hosting the Olympics is now a fantastic opportunity for any nation. My thoughts after the Beijing Games are that we shouldn't try to emulate the wonder of the opening ceremony. It was the spectacular to end all spectaculars and probably can never be bettered. We should instead do something different, drawing maybe on the ideals and spirit of the Olympic movement. We should do it our way, like they did it theirs. And we should learn from and respect each other. That is the way of the 21st century.
Mr. Blair, former prime minister of Great Britain, is teaching a course on faith and globalization at the Yale Schools of Management and Divinity.
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