Photo: Scott Kowalchyk/CBS
Michelle Obamacontinues to reflect on her time in the White House as well as the changes she has witnessed sinceDonald Trumpbecame her husbandBarack Obama‘s successor.
The former first lady discussed the importance of moral leadership in a presidential administration during her appearance onThe Late Show with Stephen ColbertFriday during which she promoted her best-selling memoir,Becoming.
“When you’re the first of anything the bar feels higher. You don’t have room to make mistakes,” she said. “One of the things I don’t talk about in the new book, but I talk about on the road is that I do remember at the end of that last flight that we took out when I was leaving from the Capitol, we waved and got on Air Force One for the last time … I cried for about 30 minutes.”
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“It was just the release of eight years of feeling like we had to do everything perfectly. That there wasn’t a margin for error. We couldn’t make mistakes. We couldn’t slip, our tone had to be perfect. That was the bar that was set for us,” she told host Stephen Colbert.
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“I have been very clear about how I felt about that. I gave a speech about it at the 2016 convention,” Obama remarked, referencing her famous “when they go low, we go high” quote.
“The question we have to ask ourselves is, how does the country feel about it? I don’t think it matters how I feel about it. I felt torn about it since the day I watched it happen,” she shared. “The country has to ask itself, what do we want, what is the bar we are setting for ourselves? … What kind of moral leadership do we demand in the White House? Regardless of race, regardless of party, regardless of gender, regardless of where you are: what do we want our president to look like? How do you want him to act. If we vote for one set of behavior, then that’s obviously what we want, until we vote differently.”
At Thursday night’s Philadelphia stop on herBecomingstadium tour, Obama sounded a similarly sharp and somewhat bitter note as she discussed the pressures she and her husband felt—as the nation’s first black president and first lady—to be “perfect.”
“The margin of error was small, and we felt that. Barack couldn’t golf. You know, we could just start there. There’s so much that would have been an outrage for us and we knew it. There was any room for anybody in our administration to be indicted. … We had to be highly ethical. We showed our taxes, we divested our money. This isn’t shade. This is just the sort of stuff we had to think about doing. This isn’t shade, it’s truth!”
The Late Show With Stephen Colbertairs weeknights (11:35 p.m. ET) on CBS.
source: people.com
