For anti-obesity push, Michelle Obama woos business, puts her popularity to work

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Mrs. Obama traces her passion for health and fitness to her own childhood, growing up in a family with limited means.

“My brother and I, we didn’t grow up in a wealthy community,” she said during her Let’s Move tour. “Our parents didn’t have resources to put us in a lot of expensive programs and things like that.  But we had the Park District Day Camp every summer.  And we took the bus to Rainbow Beach and wore our little camp shirts.  And almost every kid that couldn’t afford to go to a paid, structured summer program was in day camp.  And that’s where I learned to play softball.  And I ran track.  And at the end of every year, we did a camp-wide Olympics.  And then each team had a softball team, and you’d play a citywide league.  And you learn to throw a ball and to catch a ball, and we swam in the lake, and we did that for a good part of the summer.  And that kept us out of trouble and it showed us other aspects to our personalities and skill sets.  You could be best camper.  I still remember the year I wasn’t best camper.”

She has assembled a small, youthful team to put her passion to work, including fellow Chicago native Sam Kass, a former White House assistant chef and recently-named Executive Director of Let’s Move, and Julie Moreno, a senior White House adviser on urban affairs who provides policy support for the initiative. The team has not been shy about pursuing corporate partners, or touting companies’ participation, as the first lady did in an op-ed this month for the Wall Street Journal.

“Let’s Move is unique in that it’s a new way of looking at public-private partnerships,” Moreno said. “And it’s aggressively research focused, savvy about cultural relevance, and unconcerned about barriers” like Wal-Mart’s image.

It’s a far cry from the “anti-business” brush her husband’s administration has sometimes been painted with in the past, particularly by President Obama’s opponents on the right. Administration members dispute the accuracy of that characterization, with Kass calling partnerships with business the “heart and soul” of Let’s Move, and Jarrett chalking the meme up to the hard choices the administration needed to make in its first years due to the financial crisis. And she notes the administration’s alliances with business leaders on issues like the fiscal cliff.

“The president’s team is managing business relationships through the lenses of regulation, taxation and the state of the national economy,” Ealons said. “For Valerie Jarrett, Gene Sperling and others managing those relationships for the president, that has been a much tougher lift.”

For the First Lady and her team, the “lift” has increasingly been about visibility, both in media, and with political and industry leaders.

“Her office has been incredibly proactive,” Kat Cole, president of Cinnabon, said of Mrs. Obama. “[They have] reached out not only to private enterprise, but industry organizations that represent multiple private enterprise organizations, and asked them to be a part of the conversation; to have a seat at the table. And that’s been missing from past administrations.”

“Her focus is clear,” Cole said. “She certainly doesn’t waver in what she wants to see out of corporate America, but she and her group are open to the feedback of private enterprise, and how we can work together to create meaningful change, especially in the case of healthy living.”

Jarrett said the East and West wings work seamlessly on initiatives like Let’s Move, and that Mrs. Obama’s chief of staff even attends the president’s chief of staff’s daily meetings. But it’s clear that the health and fitness push, along with her and Dr. Jill Biden, the wife of the vice president’s, outreach to military families, are very personal to Mrs. Obama.

“I think because the first lady was very selective about the initiatives that she chose,” Jarrett said, adding that Mrs. Obama chose Let’s Move, the Joining Forces military family initiative and a mentoring program, “because she cared deeply about them, and she thought she could make a difference.”

“And she was very conscious of not spreading herself too thin because really her first priority which continues to this day of course is her daughters,” Jarrett said.

Jarrett added that the first lady recognized “that it isn’t enough for her just to talk about Let’s Move, from the White House; she has to engage a range of stakeholders, and she’s been aggressive about reaching out to the business community, she’s also done the same with our nation’s governors,” and with mayors and other stakeholders, the more of whom Jarrett says get involved “the more likely we are to be successful.”

As for Mrs. Obama herself, she said her and the president’s approach to the issues they care about have been grounded in pragmatism.

“One of the things I am just naturally is a strategic thinker,” she said. “Even when we embarked on the issues of military families and childhood obesity, we spent a lot of time really thinking about where can I uniquely have an impact. So it wasn’t just, what’s the hot issue. A lot of it was what I cared about and could speak passionately about and authentically about. But it was like, what’s linking up with what the president is going to be trying to do over the next four years; where is the country on the issue; are there gaps somewhere where my voice will add value so that we’re not being redundant.”

“In the end, after four years, after eight years, both Barack and I want to have done something. So … it takes a little bit of time and conversation sitting down the departments and agencies,” she said. “We also never come into an issue acting like we know everything already. So we spent a lot of time with experts and people who have been doing this, and non-profits.”