Former WH Aide Spills the Beans on What It’s Like to Work for Michelle Obama

Working in first lady Michelle Obama’s office turned into a “confining, frustrating, even miserable place to work,” a former White House aide claims in a New Republic article.

Credit: AP

Reid Cherlin, former White House assistant press secretary, is calling the first lady’s East Wing the “worst wing” and describing Michelle Obama as demanding and hard to please.

“Perhaps no first lady in recent memory has entered the stately recesses of the East Wing under a higher burden of expectation than Michelle Obama,” Cherlin writes.

Another former aide discussed with Cherlin the demanding nature of working under the first lady.

“That was the pressure on us,” the unnamed aide said. “Don’t do it if it’s not going to be perfect.”

Cherlin quotes another former aide as saying: “There’s no barometer: The first lady having the wrong pencil skirt on Monday is just as big of a f***-up as someone speaking on the record when they didn’t mean to or a policy initiative that completely failed.”

He also revealed how most of Michelle Obama’s staff doesn’t really want to work for her, they want to be friends with her. Many times, the staffers would “measure their worth” based on how much access they were granted to the first lady, he claims.

“Every meeting was like an identity crisis, whether you got invited or not,” another former East Wing staffer reportedly said.

There’s much more in Cherlin's New Republic piece. You can read it here.