Planting a garden at the White House was my response to this problem, and
I hoped it would signal the start of something bigger. Barack’s administration was
focused on improving access to affordable health care, and for me the garden was
a way to offer a parallel message about healthy living. I saw it as an early test, a
trial run that could help me determine what I might be able to accomplish as First
Lady, a literal way to root myself in this new job. I conceived of it as a kind of
outdoor classroom, a place kids could visit to learn about growing food. On the
surface, a garden felt elemental and apolitical, a harmless and innocent
undertaking by a lady with a spade—pleasing to Barack’s West Wing advisers
who were constantly concerned about “optics,” worrying about how everything
appeared to the public.
But there was more to it than that. I planned to use the work we did in the
garden to spark a public conversation about nutrition, especially at schools and
among parents, which ideally would lead to discussions about how food was
produced, labeled, and marketed and the ways that was affecting public health.
And in speaking on these topics from the White House, I’d be offering an
implicit challenge to the behemoth corporations in the food and beverage
industry and the way they’d been doing business for decades.
The truth was, I really didn’t know how any of it would go over. But as I
directed Sam, who’d joined the White House staff, to begin taking steps to create
the garden, I knew I was ready to find out.
My optimism in those first months was primarily tempered by one thing,
and that was politics. We lived in Washington now, right up close to the ugly
red-versus-blue dynamic I’d tried for years to avoid, even as Barack had chosen to
work inside it. Now that he was president, these forces all but ruled his every day.
Weeks earlier, before the inauguration, the conservative radio host Rush
Limbaugh baldly announced, “I hope Obama fails.” I’d watched with dismay as
Republicans in Congress followed suit, fighting Barack’s every effort to stanch
the economic crisis, refusing to support measures that would cut taxes and save or
create millions of jobs. On the day he took office, according to some indicators,
the American economy was collapsing as fast as or faster than it had at the onset
of the Great Depression. Nearly 750,000 jobs had been lost that January alone.
And while Barack had campaigned on the idea that it was possible to build
consensus between parties, that Americans were at heart more united than
divided, the Republican Party was making a deliberate effort, in a time of dire
national emergency no less, to prove him wrong.