She seems so easy going but this article really makes her seem like the woman from Devil Wears Prada.
For one thing, the imperative to guarantee results could be paralyzing.
“That was the pressure on us,” one ex-aide told me. “‘Don’t do it if
it’s not going to be perfect.’” Staff knew that every event should
produce positive coverage, and that all the angles had to be
exhaustively researched and gamed out (not easy with a team of less than
30). But it was never completely clear what the standard of perfection
should be. “There’s no barometer: The first lady having the wrong pencil
skirt on Monday is just as big of a fuck-up as someone speaking on the
record when they didn’t mean to or a policy initiative that completely
failed,” says another former aide. “It just made you super anxious.”
Another past employee described a common feeling of “how can we be the
caliber that we’re expected to be with no attention and no resources and
being an afterthought? And all that can make for sparks. Friction.”
This passage sounds like it was lifted from the Court of the Sun King Louis XIV:
All of this led to a culture of harsh internal judgment. Invitations to
meetings with the first lady, in her office above the Jackie Kennedy
Garden, became a vital status symbol, a way for staffers to measure
their worth. “Every meeting was like an identity crisis, whether you got
invited or not,” one former East Winger told me. Casual face-time with
Mrs. Obama was coveted as a badge of insiderdom. “Everyone sort of
stands at attention in a different way, or they try to make the joke, or
they try to be the one noticed, or they try to get the smile,” says a
former employee. “And that’s in part a yearning for acknowledgment that
you’re part of this, something bigger, and that she knows who you are.”
Another former employee put it more bluntly: “They don’t want to work
for her; they want to be friends with her.”
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