He Breaks for Band Recitals

By Sheryl Gay Stolberg, The New York Times
February 12, 2010

IT is no secret that President Obama desperately wants Congress to pass legislation to overhaul health care. But last month, when Mr. Obama convened Congressional Democratic leaders at the White House for a marathon negotiating session, another priority intervened.

His 11-year-old daughter, Malia, had a band recital.

Thus did the president of the United States ditch his own health care talks — temporarily, at least — to slip off to Sidwell Friends School for a few hours to listen to Malia play the flute. When the recital was over, he returned to the White House, and everybody went back to work. The talks wrapped up at 1:30 a.m., and if the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi; the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid; or anybody else had anything to say about the delay, they held their tongues.

“There are certain things that are sacrosanct on his schedule — kids’ recitals, soccer games, basketball games, school meetings,” David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, said in an interview the day after the session. “These are circled in red on his calendar, and regardless of what’s going on he’s going to make those. I think that’s part of how he sustains himself through all this.”

When Mr. Obama and his wife, Michelle, arrived in Washington little more than a year ago, Mrs. Obama promptly declared herself the mom in chief, and mothers across the nation watched as she juggled her duties as first lady with her responsibilities as a mother. But her husband, the president, conducts an unabashed juggling act of his own.

He knocks off work at 6 p.m. each evening to have dinner with his family, and has given his schedulers strict instructions that, if he must have night-time activities, they are to take place after 8 p.m. That includes matters of war; in November, as the commander in chief wrestled with sending more troops to Afghanistan, he called an 8 p.m. meeting of his national security team, in deference to his role as father in chief.

He squeezes in parent-teacher conferences, soccer and basketball games, and broke away from an economics briefing to call his younger daughte

r, Sasha, on her eighth birthday. (She was in London with her mother.) And when the White House announced that Mr. Obama would be traveling next month to Indonesia and Australia, the president’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, was not shy about confirming that the trip was timed to coincide with the girls’ spring break.

“We spend a lot of time coordinating the girls’ holidays and vacation time,” said Valerie Jarrett, another senior adviser. “It doesn’t just drive Michelle’s schedule, but it drives the president’s as well.”

So far at least, Washington does not seem to have raised any eyebrows. When Mr. Obama told lawmakers why he was leaving the health talks, “We all said, ‘Absolutely, get out of here, go,’ ” said Senator Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat, who was there.

Yet even in today’s father-friendly world, Mr. Obama’s balancing act is not risk-free — especially in an economy where so many ordinary Americans are struggling. Critics could accuse him of slacking off when the country is in need. And this city is filled with politicians who have sacrificed their families for their jobs, so Mr. Obama must be careful not to generate resentment among those whose schedules must swing around his own.

“People elect you not to be a good family man, they elect you to fix their problems, and that’s the cold-hearted reality of it,” said John Feehery, a Republican political strategist. “And all those folks on the Hill, they’ve left all their families at home; they don’t have the luxury of skipping back home in the middle of the meeting to catch their daughter’s recital.”

In a sense, the 48-year-old president is reflecting attitudinal changes about fatherhood that are typical of men in his generation, said Ellen Galinsky, the president of the Families and Work Institute, a nonprofit research organization. Ms. Galinsky says men, now more than women, feel caught between work and parenthood; her surveys show that 59 percent of men report experiencing some or a lot of work/life conflict, up from 35 percent in 1977.

Yet while Mr. Obama’s advisers like to think he is setting an example for fathers everywhere, he does, in fact, have more flexibility than most — he is, after all, the boss. Because he gets to “live over the store,” as he often says, he doesn’t have the stress of making that mad dash for the subway to get home in time to relieve the baby sitter. At home, he never has to fix the leaky faucet or take out the trash. And if he needs to go back to the office to finish up work late at night, all he has to do is walk downstairs.

As Ms. Jarrett said, “He doesn’t have to rush here, because everything is the way he likes it to be.”

Still, Ms. Galinsky argues, that does not diminish the significance of the president’s choices. “You could argue on one hand that he has a lot more autonomy than most men, and that is absolutely 100 percent true,” she said. “But on the other hand, he’s got a lot more responsibility on his shoulders than most men.”

And Mr. Obama has had to give up a few things as well. When he lived in Chicago, he enjoyed driving Malia and Sasha to school; his huge entourage now makes that impractical. “Quite frankly, they don’t want him to,” Michelle Obama said of the girls in an interview last week with Larry King on CNN. “They think his motorcade is a complete embarrassment.”

After two years of being away from his daughters on the campaign trail, Mr. Obama made clear from the start that he intended to make up for lost time. Barely a week into his presidency, he set his first bill signing for 11 a.m. so he could attend a morning presentation at Sasha’s school. And in case there were doubts that the dinner hour was sacrosanct, Mr. Obama put an end to them last spring, as his economics team was in the thick of a heated debate over how to bail out faltering auto makers.

“It was getting close to 6, and they were not coming to some sort of resolution,” said one senior official, speaking anonymously to discuss the president’s private conversations. “The president said, ‘Look, I’m going to have dinner with my family, why don’t you guys spend a couple of hours thinking about this, and after they go to bed, I’ll come back and see if we can hash this out.’ ”

Mr. Obama is hardly the first president to feel the tug of fatherhood, but he does seem to be the first to so openly acknowledge working his schedule around his family. In the recent book “The Clinton Tapes,” the historian Taylor Branch reveals how President Clinton quietly put off an important trip to Japan in early 1996 so that he could stay home to help his daughter, Chelsea, then a high school junior, study for her mid-term exams. The decision infuriated former Vice President Al Gore, who viewed the trip as critical to smoothing tensions with Japan. Mr. Clinton ultimately went — three months after Mr. Gore thought he should have gone.

“Gore couldn’t believe that Clinton was baby-sitting, in his view,” Mr. Branch said in an interview. “What Clinton was saying was, ‘It’s junior year mid-terms, those are the last grades that go on your college applications.’ Whether he was a devoted father or an inattentive president — that’s the debate. But he didn’t express any misgivings about it.”

Nobody seems to be accusing Mr. Obama of being an inattentive president, though he did irk one powerful constituency — the Washington media elite — when the White House announced he would not be attending last year’s Gridiron Dinner, the annual white-tie affair in which the city’s high-society journalists poke fun at politicians in song and skits.

The decision earned Mr. Obama the distinction of becoming the first president since Grover Cleveland to miss the first Gridiron of his presidency, and the capital’s media mavens were especially bent out of shape when they discovered that spring break was taking place not in Chicago, as the White House had originally said, but rather at Camp David, the presidential retreat, a short 20-minute helicopter ride away.

When he first took office, Mr. Obama said he intended to run a family-friendly White House — provoking a now-infamous retort from his sharp-tongued chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who bluntly told the president, “family-friendly to your family.” Mr. Emanuel’s prediction has proved pretty much correct; most senior advisers to Mr. Obama see their own children far less than he sees his.

Even so, Anita Dunn, the former Obama communications director, says that by being so open about his own family obligations, Mr. Obama has given his advisers — both men and women — the license to be open about theirs.

“Many of us who have children of our own love this piece of him,” said Ms. Dunn, who has a teenage son. “Not only does he have no problem saying, ‘I have to do this, this is my priority,’ but it gives people who work for him the space to say, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t be at that meeting, because my child has an honor roll assembly.’”