Holding down the Obama family fort

'Grandma' makes the race possible

CHICAGO - She is the linchpin of Barack Obama's presidential campaign, and yet she does not raise money, plot strategy, lead conference calls, or carry a BlackBerry, which, in her day, was an unassuming fruit that grew on bushes.

Marian Robinson does, though, carry an exalted title in this race: mother-in-law. And from that perch, she makes the whole thing run.

A steely 70-year-old matriarch with a raspy voice and seen-it-all laugh, Robinson manages the family while Obama and his wife, Michelle, venture to the far reaches of the campaign trail. Amid the daily chaos of the marathon primary campaign, it often falls to Michelle's mother to keep the Obamas' two daughters - Malia, 9, and Sasha, 6 - grounded, not to mention fed, bathed, and in bed by 8:30 p.m.

"The whole time I'm raising [son] Craig and Michelle, I am telling them that, 'Look, you see, I am raising my kids, so don't you all have any kids that you expect me to help you raise,' " Robinson said with a laugh last week, in her first extended interview of the campaign. "And look at what I'm doing!"

In fact, she cannot imagine anyone else doing it.

"If somebody's going to be with these kids other than their parents," she said, "it better be me."

Every presidential candidate, when deciding whether to run, weighs the promise of the White House against the inevitable strains the grueling campaign will place on a family. The Obamas, young enough to have daughters in elementary school, have not been shy about their struggles to maintain relative normalcy, a challenge that has only grown with the Illinois senator's political success. They have worked hard over the past year not to let politics intrude on their daughters' daily lives.

But it is difficult to imagine that being possible without the support of Robinson, who retired from her part-time bank job last summer, lives off a pension from her late husband's job, and resides in the house on Chicago's South Side where Michelle Obama and her brother grew up, about 4 miles from the Obamas' current home.

"I am standing here breathing in and out with any level of calm because my 70-year-old [mother] is home with my girls," Michelle, 44, told voters in Chillicothe, Ohio, late last month, on one of the dozens of campaign trips she has made in recent months. "There's nothing like grandma."

Indeed, it is hardly clear Barack Obama would be running - or that his wife would let him - were his mother-in-law not in the picture.

"I'm not sure we could do it," he said in an interview. "I'm not sure Michelle would have felt comfortable with it, and I probably would have agreed with her."

The support Robinson provides, he said, has helped the family survive his transition to national politics.

"One of the best decisions we made when I was elected to the Senate was that we wouldn't move from Chicago. A big reason for that was that Marian lived 10 minutes away," he said. "She loved nothing more than to spend time with her grandkids."

It is here in South Shore, a mostly black neighborhood of modest brick bungalows about 10 miles south of downtown Chicago, that Robinson, who is tall and stately like her daughter, runs her little domestic empire.

Depending on Michelle Obama's work and campaign schedule, Robinson stays with Malia and Sasha at the Obamas' six-bedroom home or looks after them at hers. When Michelle Obama is out of town, Robinson's day is full: She sleeps over at the family's house, gets the girls up in the morning, and feeds them breakfast according to the strictures imposed by their mother, who insists on organics and natural foods. Robinson ensures their lunches are packed, combs their hair, and drives them to school.

Most days, Robinson becomes a chauffeur after school, shuttling her granddaughters to piano lessons, gymnastics, dance practice, soccer, and tennis. She prepares dinner (with certain nutritional requirements, of course), supervises their homework, and limits their TV watching to an hour. (Another rule of their mother's.)

"She has them so, I don't know, like little soldiers," Robinson said.

And here, as Robinson begins to discuss the rules she must follow, it becomes clear where Michelle Obama gets her trademark candor.

The 8:30 bedtime? "That's ridiculous!" Robinson said. The TV-for-an-hour rule? "That's just not enough time," she said.

Michelle Obama said she learned these strict routines from her mother. But Robinson, now that she's a grandmother, finds them confining.

"I've heard [Michelle] say, 'Mom, what are you rolling your eyes at? You made us do the same thing,"' Robinson said. "I don't remember being that bad. It seems like she's just going overboard."

It's not just Michelle, though. Barack Obama, when he talks to his daughters from the road, often inquires about the status of things on the homefront: Have they had their baths? "He checks," Robinson said.

The rules about eating healthily she finds especially limiting.

"That's not my thing," Robinson said. "Well, see, I grew up when you had good food, right? I can't change that at this late day and time."

Like fried chicken, for instance. Her secrets: using crumbled Ritz crackers in the batter, bathing the chicken pieces in ice water before frying ("that makes it crispier"), adding salt liberally, and using "lots of oil."

"If you're going to have fried chicken," she said, "have fried chicken."

While Robinson tries to obey regulations when she watches the girls at the Obamas' house, her grandmotherly indulgences know few bounds when they come to her place.

"I have candy, they stay up late - come to my house, they watch TV as long as they want to, we'll play games until the wee hours," Robinson said. "I do everything that grandmothers do that they're not supposed to."

Robinson's deep involvement in her granddaughters' lives gives the Obamas a direct link to a simpler past that the couple hold as something of an ideal. Obama celebrates his peripatetic upbringing in Hawaii and Indonesia, but he has sought a more rooted upbringing for his own children, one more like his wife had.

"He likes the fact that his daughters are growing up in a little bit more ordinary way, if you can say that," said Craig Robinson, Michelle's brother, who is the men's basketball coach at Brown University.

The Robinson family lived in a four-room apartment on the second floor of a brick bungalow. A relative built partitions to divide their 16-by-18 living room three ways, so Craig Robinson and his sister could have bedrooms.

"It was tight, but it was adequate," Craig Robinson said, and paused. "Yeah, that was tight, come to think about it. You know, it's funny, when you're in the situation, it's OK, and then you look back on it and it's like . . . 'How did we do that?' "

Marian Robinson held various secretarial jobs once her daughter was in high school. Michelle Obama's father, Fraser, worked as a "stationary fireman," tending boilers at a city water-filtration plant. A one-time boxer, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at 30. He died in his mid-50s in 1991, the year before Barack and Michelle Obama were married.

Neither of Michelle Obama's parents finished college, a decision Marian Robinson said they regretted and used as a lesson for their children. Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson both attended Princeton.

The Robinsons have been "the rock for their kids," said Verna Williams, a friend of Michelle Obama's from Harvard Law School who teaches law at the University of Cincinnati. Marian Robinson, she said, "definitely holds the family together."

"It's sort of like the whole cycle-of-life thing," Craig Robinson said. "The girls need her, but she needs the girls."

Marian Robinson said she has taken on such an active role with her granddaughters, partly because her daughter did more campaigning than anyone expected.

"She just did what she always does once she goes along with something," Robinson said. "She just jumps in."

Suddenly being part of such a high-profile political family is a strange, and at times unsettling, turn for Marian Robinson, who said her husband, a former precinct captain, was the only one in her family who cared about politics.

Even the prospect of a family move to the White House has forced Marian Robinson, a Chicagoan through and through, to ponder the bittersweet thought of relocating to Washington.

"I will do whatever she needs me to do," she said of her daughter. "I'll be mad, but I'll do it."

Marian Robinson is a rare presence on the trail, though she campaigned with her daughter in New Hampshire last June. But she allows that she has become a political junkie, unable to resist the near-constant news coverage of her loved ones - even when it makes her angry.

"They're some strong people, and doing things I couldn't do," she said. "Which is what you want your kids to do - not have those restrictions that you had."

Scott Helman can be reached at shelman@globe.com.