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life to him. She gave him the kind of unconditional love that he had never received from his mother, who frequently abandoned him as a child.
    Several biographers have pointed out that as a child, Obama felt he had to earn his mother’s love; it was never unconditional. He won her approval by proving through his achievements that he was destined for greatness. Failure was regarded as a catastrophe; it made him feel worthless and contemptible. In his book The Audacity of Hope , he wrote about losing the race for a congressional seat from the South Side of Chicago in 2000 to Bobby Rush. “It’s impossible not to feel at some level as if you have been personally repudiated by the entire community,” he wrote, and that “everywhere you go, the word ‘loser’ is flashing through people’s minds.”
    In Michelle Obama, he chose a wife who was in many respects like his mother. He had to win Michelle’s approval by living up to her exacting standards, and when he fell short, he suffered her devastating criticism, sarcasm, and cold rejection—a psychological replay of his mother’s abandonment.

    Although there was no question that Barack Obama loved his wife, their relationship was fraught with tension. To begin with, Michelle never let him forget that it was she, not he, who had made all the sacrifices in the marriage, and that she’d had to accommodate to a life that was not what she had envisioned for herself.
    “She has to put up with me. And my schedule and my stresses. And she’s done a great job on that,” Obama said with noticeable overtones of guilt. “But I think it would be a mistake to think that my wife, when I walk in the door, is, Hey, honey, how was your day? Let me give you a neck rub . It’s not as if Michelle is thinking in terms of, How do I cater to my husband? I think it’s much more, We’re a team, and how do I make sure that this guy is together enough that he’s paying attention to his girls and not forgetting the basketball game that he’s supposed to be going to on Sunday? So she’s basically managing me quite effectively.”
    Early in Obama’s first term, while he and Michelle were growing accustomed to living in the White House pressure cooker, they were frequently at each other’s throats. They had trouble sleeping and agreed to use separate bedrooms—an arrangement that continues to this day. They discussed their problems with a physician, but they refused his suggestion to take antidepressants to reduce their stress and anxiety.
    During their early months in the White House, the Obamas gave a joint interview to Jodi Kantor of the New York Times . “It was clear that the perfect-seeming couple that had glided across the dance floor at the inaugural balls nine months earlier were still privately grappling with the very fact of being president and first lady,” Kantor later wrote.
               Michelle Obama said she still asked her husband, whenever she found him seated behind John F. Kennedy’s desk, a few feet away, “What are you doing there? Get up from there!” When I asked how it was possible to have an equal marriage when one person was president,the first lady let out a sharp “hmmmpfh,” as if she were relieved someone had finally asked, then let her husband suffer through the answer. It took him three stop-and-start tries. “My staff worries a lot more about what the first lady thinks than they worry about what I think,” he finally said, before she rescued him with an answer about how their private decisions were made on an equal basis.
    Most of the problems stemmed from the fact that Michelle has a high opinion of herself and is very controlling.
    “Michelle treats Barack like a lesser star,” said a woman who had spent a good deal of time with them. “She has always pushed him around and taken credit for his best ideas, which drives Barack to distraction.
    “Michelle constantly second-guesses Barack,” this person continued. “When he makes a