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did not care for her husband’s hard-charging speechwriter Robert Hartmann. Laura Bush was not a fan of Bush’s senior adviser and campaign guru Karl Rove. And Michelle Obama did not mesh well with her husband’s first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. Emanuel, who is notoriously irascible and, as one former Obama staffer put it, “cultivates an asshole vibe,” wanted Michelle, whose approval ratings surpassed her husband’s (on the road during the 2008 campaign, people ran up to Obama campaign staffers excitedly and asked them, “Have you ever met Michelle?”), to make more political appearances than she was willing to do. But she does not like campaigning. According to a former White Houseofficial, Michelle said that during the 2008 campaign she was assigned a small and uncomfortable plane compared with her husband’s. “Typical, isn’t it, how women get treated?” she said.
    Michelle’s Chicago-based hairstylist, Michael “Rahni” Flowers, remembers how annoyed she was that every detail of her appearance was obsessed over. She used to have highlights before the campaign, Flowers said, but campaign aides decided they were “too racy.” Michelle’s frustration grew with each superficial critique. At a 2013 summit in Africa with Laura Bush, Michelle talked about the power that comes with being first lady and the absurdity of all the attention placed on trivial things, like her decision to get bangs in 2013. (There was even a backlash when her long bangs got in her eyes during a speech at the G8 Summit and the hashtag #bangsfail quickly popped up on Twitter.) “While people are sorting through our shoes and our hair and whether we cut it or not . . . whether we have bangs . . . We take our bangs and we stand in front of important things that the world needs to see, and eventually people stop looking at the bangs and they start looking at what we are standing in front of.”
    In the end, the First Lady would not allow Emanuel to bully her. She resented some Senate Democrats for not supporting her campaign to end childhood obesity and she was not about to go out of her way to help them. “She doesn’t particularly like politics, which is why you rarely see her on the trail campaigning for Democratic candidates. She doesn’t love doing the fund-raisers or events, even for the President,” said one former Obama aide. Hillary Clinton, however, campaigned hard for Democrats in the midterm elections in 1998, visiting about twenty states, while Michelle Obama visited only a handful in 2014.
    Getting the first lady on the campaign trail to support her husband and other important elected officials from his party haslong been par for the course. Though Hillary was more willing to campaign for fellow Democrats, she had a similarly strained relationship with Emanuel. When he was working for her husband as a senior adviser she was furious when Emanuel booked her to appear at a last-minute dinner with members of Congress without consulting with her office first. She had plans for that evening and simply refused to go. She called Emanuel to make her displeasure known, and when he promised her that it would not happen again, and added that she was needed just this once, she relented. (Hillary came to dislike Emanuel’s abrasive style so much that she tried to have him fired from her husband’s administration.)
    Barbara Bush was so popular that in 1992 she was sent to New Hampshire to file the papers for her husband’s second candidacy, and she spent more time campaigning in the state than her husband did. Her loyalty to her husband had always been reciprocated: when George H. W. Bush first ran for president in 1980 a group of supporters strongly suggested that Barbara start dyeing her hair. Her hair had started turning white when she was twenty-eight years old and their toddler daughter, Robin, was diagnosed with leukemia. The stress of staying by Robin’s hospital bedside and watching their three-year-old daughter endure