The Obama Rules

By Holly Peterson

As a subscriber to Women's Health Magazine, I always am looking for different stories to share with you. Being that Obama is now our new President, I thought this was both fitting and very insightful...
BARACK OBAMA
The Obama Rules
Make these seven lessons from the president-elect part of your life story, too.
Written By: Peter Moore

Barack Obama is about to be tested as never before. But things haven't exactly been easy for him up to now. If George W. Bush was born on third base, Obama was a charter member of the knothole gang: on the outside looking in. His father abandoned the family when Barack was 2, and he and his mother left for Indonesia four years later. At age 10, he moved to Hawaii to live with his grandparents, who sometimes relied on food stamps. And yet that bumpy road delivered him to the presidency of the Harvard Law Review, to the side of a first-lady-in-waiting who is already being compared to Jackie Kennedy, and into a family portrait that includes two of the brightest-eyed little girls ever to cross the public stage. Oh yeah, and it allowed a guy with the middle name Hussein to take over for a president who was obsessed with ridding the earth of Saddam. What does Barack Obama know that the rest of us don't? WH contributing editor Peter Moore met with him last August on his campaign plane to find out. Read on for Obama's flight plan.

Lesson 1: Be there for your family, even if you're not around.
I joined the campaign on August 4, which also happened to be Obama's birthday. But Michelle and their daughters, Malia and Sasha, were nowhere to be seen."The birthday celebration was yesterday," he said. "We get everything in, just not always on schedule. I sat on a lounge chair in a friend's backyard, watching my girls and Michelle dance. It was as nice a moment as I've had in a long time. I don't miss the important things. I haven't missed a dance recital. I haven't missed a parent-teacher conference. But there are some things I do miss. Those are trade-offs you make."I'd like to say that quality time replaces quantity, but sometimes it doesn't. A lot of the best moments of family life happen spontaneously. If you have less time to devote to them, there are fewer of those. What I've been able to do is create a zone of normalcy for my kids. Michelle's been wonderful about that. I have been able to transmit to them my absolute interest in them and my absolute love for them."

Lesson 2: Make the future your focus
An unavoidable sacrifice: the way a child's life changes under the glare of campaign lights. Obama noted that his daughters were young--5 and 8--when he had to explain the upheaval that was about to shake their family. The girls' first order of business: their now-famous request for a First Dog. "They did also ask about what they called 'secret people,' which were the Secret Service folks: 'Are we going to have to have those people with sunglasses and earpieces following us around all the time?' And I told them, well, not right away. They've adjusted wonderfully."

Lesson 3: Learn from your father, even if he wasn't a good one.
Citing the complex relationship between Bush I and Bush II, I asked the then-senator if his absent father would have an impact on an Obama presidency. "I would like to think that most of the issues related to my father have been resolved," he replied. "That's part of what writing Dreams from My Father was about: understanding him, his own personal tragedy. He wasn't a presence in my life; he was an idea that I had to wrestle with for a long time."Somebody once said that every man is either trying to live up to his dad's expectations or make up for his dad's mistakes. And I'm sure I was doing a little bit of both. But somewhere in my late twenties or early thirties, I sort of figured out what his absence had meant. It's part of what I think has made me a pretty good dad. There's no doubt that it has contributed to my drive. I might not be here had it not been for that absent father prodding me early in life."

Lesson 4: Organize distractions right out of your life.
Clearly, Obama knows how to manage groups. By the time your outfit has its own plane, it had better have a solid pilot."I'm part of an organization," he said, speaking of his campaign team, "and one of the things I really try to push is to make sure that everybody is focused on the two or three things that are really going to make a difference. I ask them to design my schedule in a way that focuses on being active instead of reactive. "The most difficult thing is to carve out time to think, which is probably the most important time for somebody who's trying to shift an organization, or in this case, the country, as opposed to doing the same things that have been done before. And I find that that time slips away." His solution: delegate. "I don't spend a lot of time returning calls or e-mails. If somebody needs something, usually somebody else can handle it. Eliminating TV has been helpful." But, he confesses, "I'm still a sucker for SportsCenter."

Lesson 5: Use workout time to focus your mind.
In the epilogue to The Audacity of Hope, Obama recounts how, after a long day in the Senate, he would jog to the Lincoln Memorial, where he'd pull a patriotic Rocky on the steps. Now those head-clearing runs are over: "One of the things about this job is the loss of anonymity. I can't run outside anymore. Looks like I've got to find other ways to exercise."Along with impromptu hoops games, Obama follows a six-day workout schedule that alternates cardio and weight training. But fitness is just the side benefit: "My blood pressure is pretty low, and I tend to be a healthy eater. So I probably could get away with cutting back a little bit. The main reason I work out is just to clear my head and relieve stress. It's a great way to stay focused."

Lesson 6: Quit smoking (as often as you need to).
For all of Obama's fitness, he's carried around the ultimate health taboo--smoking--for most of his adult life. And he inhaled, alright. Then came word that he'd quit smoking."There wasn't some dramatic moment," he said. "Michelle had been putting pressure on me for a while. I was never really a heavy smoker--probably at my peak I was smoking seven or eight a day. More typical was three. So it wasn't a huge challenge. There have been a couple of times during the campaign when I fell off the wagon and bummed one, and I had to kick it again."He does have advice for people wrestling with the dependency. "Eliminate certain key connections--that first cigarette in the morning, or after a meal, or with a drink. Eliminating those triggers should help."

Lesson 7: If you want to avoid disappointing others, don't disappoint yourself.
No surprise here. It's something Obama has thought about a lot: "I always try to make sure that my expectations are higher than those of the people around me," he says. "The American people are having a tough time. And I never want people to feel as if I've overpromised to them. I try to explain in a real, honest way how difficult some of the changes will be. But I never want the effect to be that I'm not working as hard as I can on their behalf, that I'm not continually trying to improve. I'm actually glad for the high expectations. One of the interesting things about a campaign is that it really does push you to the limit and then some. And it turns out that you have more in your reservoir than you expected."