Remember the good ol’ days when we would talk about what policies the First Lady was proposing instead of what she was wearing? Yeah those were fun but we won’t have those until…Michelle Obama becomes the next President? Who knows if that rumor is true at all, but who knows.
What is true is these following 11 facts that even I hadn’t heard of before I looked them up.
11. When Barack and Michelle were first dating, she asked her brother and Barack to play a game of basketball. In her brother’s memoir he wrote that, “He’s very confident without being cocky. He had passed the test with a definitive thumbs up on his playing and his character.”
10. Before committing to the life of public service, Michelle was a corporate lawyer. After being done with litigation she began as an assistant to the Chicago Mayor. Afterwards, she was a executive director for the city’s Office of Public Allies.
9. Michelle’s great-great-grandfather was a slave. Back in 2008 the Washington Post learned of this fact while campaigning in South Carolina. The slave, Jim Robinson, was born in 1850 and was a slave working on a plantation until the Civil War.
She spoke about this during a campaign speech, touching on the fact that the White House was built by slaves and now she was living in it.
8. When going in for an interview to work for the University of Chicago hospital, she brought 4-month-old Sasha. Michelle couldn’t find a baby sitter, and Barack wasn’t available too. She recounted the event to ABC News saying:
“Look, this is-this is who I am; I got a husband who’s away; I got two little babies, they are my priority. If you want me to do the job, you gotta pay me to do the job, and you’ve gotta give me flexibility.”
PS, she got the job!
7. Her middle name is LaVaughn. Yeah that’s a bit different than the traditional first lady middle name like Jane or Alice or something like that. Her full name before she married Barack was Michelle LaVaughn Robinson. Like Barack, she was from the Southside of Chicago before the Presidency.
6. She had some poignant advice to her husband before the Democratic National Convention. She told him, “Just don’t screw it up, buddy.”
5. Only two other First Ladies have a graduate degree. Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush are the only others in history.
4. She was smart in school, but her teachers still doubted her. Michelle and her brother skipped the second grade because she had already learned to read by four years old. She worked tirelessly in school and she detailed the reason was she said, “I was willing to do that because I was willing to do whatever it took for me to go to college.”
3. Another record, Michelle is tied with Eleanor Roosevelt as the tallest first lady at 5’11″.
2. Michelle is known for her warm embraces. She has hugged people from Queen Elizabeth to kids of all ages.
1. She first saw Barack in a law firm directory and wasn’t a fan, claiming his nose was too big.