A ‘Wild Card’ Question Prompts Michelle Obama to Open Up About Ambition
Plus, a top aide to Jill Biden is subpoenaed and Usha Vance is 'not plotting' for first lady.
This week the audience of NPR’s Wild Card with Rachel Martin may have gotten the closest explanation to what really has been simmering behind former First Lady Michelle Obama’s highly speculative absences from President Trump’s second inauguration and, before then, former President Jimmy Carter’s funeral—a desire for personal autonomy.
Those paying attention have heard before how the 61-year-old former first lady swatted down divorce rumors in a trickling of social media posts and on various podcasts including her own that she co-hosts with her brother—IMO With Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson.
But this week, particular insight came when Mrs. Obama, sitting across from Martin, was asked to select from three oversized cards held and fanned in Martin’s hand. The former first lady selected the middle card and Martin asked the prompt printed on the card: “Has ambition ever led you astray?”
Obama, carefully considering the question, first “flipped” it back to the host. But when it was her time to answer the question, Obama paused and took an audible breath.
“I don’t know if my ambition has ever fully been able to actualize itself,” Obama said, explaining it was because of her husband’s two-term presidency.
“It was the team ambition,” she said. “I went along, arguably kicking and screaming.”
Of that time in her life, Obama went on to say, she cut her ambitions short because of her support for her husband’s political ambitions and because of her desire to prioritize their two daughters.
“I don’t know if I can afford to be ambitious right now,” Obama recollected. “So, I have to take a step back even though ambition is there.”
For women across the country of a certain age and of somewhat similar circumstances—married to a breadwinner husband and mother to their children—Obama’s remarks have a stinging resonation. As marriage ages and children launch their own lives, Obama’s contemplation about her “squelched” ambition can’t help but conjure up the mixed societal emotions of many women who have made the same choices.
The role of first lady is held up by the media and public as “models of American womanhood” and serves as a “symbolic negotiation of female identity,” Editor Lisa M. Burns writes in the introduction of The Cambridge Companion to U.S. First Ladies. Closing in on 10 years since the Obamas left the White House and even as a former first lady, Obama’s remarks capture the complex decisions of women, work and family.
Then, again, Obama addresses those publicly scrutinized absences.
“To stay put and not attend funerals and inaugurations—that was me using my ambition to define what I want to do apart from what I’m supposed to do; what the world expects from me,” Obama said, adding that she owned those decisions. “But, I didn’t regret it. It’s my life now and I can say that now.”
And like many mothers of grown children who find themselves at the same stage of life, Obama underscores the opportunity of shifting the focus back onto themselves and to reconsider the pursuit of ambition that, perhaps, hasn’t, yet, given her the chance to lead her “astray.”
“I think I’m just now fully stepping into my own ambition,” she said.
And to Martin’s initial question? Obama responded:
“Maybe the answer is ‘we’ll see.’”
The Weekly Wrap
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