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Former first lady Michelle Obama is continuing her worldwide tour promoting her new book Becoming and she admitted what so many people felt in 2008: that the country was not ready for her husband, Barack Obama, to be President of the United States.
“I didn’t believe America was ready for a black president,” Obama told a sold-out crowd at the London Royal Festival Hall. “Let alone a black president named Barack Hussein Obama.”
The interview was done Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. This is far from the first time she has brought up this point. She admits in the book that she only went along with Barack’s campaign because she figured that he had no chance to actually win.
—Possible 2020 candidate Joe Biden believes ‘he’s the most qualified person to be president’—
“Deep down, I was like: ‘There’s no way he’s going to win,’” she said. “And we can just sort of get this out of the way and I can be that supportive wife going, ‘Aw honey, you tried.’ OK, now let’s go back to our lives as usual. That was my whole plan.”
When Michelle was asked about what she felt about the idea that Donald Trump’s presidency is seen as a direct response to her husband’s, she said it was “ridiculous” to think that Barack’s presidency “was going to erase hundreds of years of history in eight years.”
“We are putting down markers, we make progress and going backward doesn’t mean the progress wasn’t real,” she says of her husband’s influence. “It just means that it’s hard, what we are trying to do is shift culture.”
—Black Philadelphia man files the lawsuit after ICE tried to deport him to Jamaica—
In less than six weeks, “Becoming” is the best-selling hardcover book of 2018. The memoir sold more than 2 million copies in all formats in the United States and Canada in its first 15 days, according to a statement by Penguin Random House.
Now in its sixth printing, the book has 3.4 million copies in print in the U.S. and Canada.