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Barack Obama And Family Graces The Cover Of People Magazine

July 23rd, 2008 · 3 Comments

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Barack and Michelle Obama sits down with People Magazine’s writer Sandra Sobieraj Westfall for a personal interview on their lives in the public. Catch a excerpt from the interview and more pics of the Obama family after the jump.

Do you give your girls an allowance?
Michelle:
Sorta, kinda. [Laughs]
Barack: I’m out of town all the time, so Malia will say, “Hey, you owe me 10 weeks!” … Originally, we were giving her a dollar a week as long as she did all her chores. It turns out that she’s been doing her chores even without prompting from the allowance, which makes me feel guilty that she’s been carrying on her end of the bargain and I haven’t been as consistent.
What types of chores?
Barack: Setting the table, rinsing the dishes.
Michelle: They have to clean up their half of the third floor where they play. They have a closet of toys they have to clean up. They have to practice their piano every day.
What does discipline look like in your house?
Barack: Mommy raising her voice.
Michelle: It’s usually a lecture. It’s a lot of conversation. Or it’s separating them. Or it’s saying if you guys can’t decide nicely what program to watch, then you don’t get to watch anything. It’s sort of pulling away a privilege. But in all honesty, we don’t have to discipline –
Barack: If you ask them to do something, they’re like any other kid …
Michelle: They’ll whine a little bit.
Barack: They’ll test boundaries. But if you say, “Guys, this is what we need to do …”
Michelle: An example of this is one night I was going out, I had to do a fund-raiser, and I told Malia, “You guys really need to have an early bedtime because you’ve got to get up tomorrow and have a busy day.” So my mom was there, and my mom doesn’t adhere to bedtime. She’s kinda, “Well, maybe you wanna start taking your bath…” But that night, she said she sat down to watch TV with them and they both got up, turned off the TV and left. And my mom was like, “Where are you going?” And they said, “We have got to go to bed early today, Grandma.” And they went downstairs, took their baths and went to bed, and my mom was just stunned.

In normal times, what’s the division of labor at home between the two of you?
Barack:
I was doing the checkbook, the house and car repairs, the grocery shopping.
Michelle: That was a long time ago.
Barack: I would sometimes do the laundry – although not fold, I have to confess.
Michelle: Which is really pretty useless.
Barack: But clean clothes, that’s something. … I mean, look, I gotta be honest. For the last 17 months I’ve been on the road 98 percent of the time.
Michelle: His job is to be there when requested. Right now, it’s important for him to be at parent-teacher conferences, piano recitals, things that are important to the girls. It’s less the household stuff because the household works; it’s more being there for them, which he has done an outstanding job at. There are few things that he’s missed that were important to them.

Last year, when we first met, Malia said that she sometimes wished maybe you wouldn’t win. Do you think they still have those mixed feelings?
Barack:
I am absolutely certain because we’ve talked about it – that they are not looking forward to moving. They have a wonderful life in Chicago, they have lifelong friends in Chicago and the prospects of having to make new friends, that’s never something that kids are looking forward to. So I’m sure that there’s a part of them that says we won’t be heartbroken if things don’t work out.
And if they said tomorrow, “I don’t want you to be President, I want you to be Daddy”?
Barack: Well, so far those issues haven’t been mutually exclusive. We talked about this before we started and Michelle and I monitor their attitudes pretty closely.
Michelle: They’ve been stable. Their lives just haven’t changed that much.
Barack: And our job, more than anything, is to make sure that in addition to monitoring whether or not they’re feeling sad or neglected at all, that they’re also not feeling special because their dad is running for President.
Michelle: That’s right.
Barack: One of the things I’ve been really happy about is how nonplussed they’ve been by the whole thing. They don’t bring it up, they don’t talk to their friends about it. If anything, they’re actually more courteous and more careful with other people now than they were before I ran.

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