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Barack: I was doing the checkbook, the house and car repairs, the grocery shopping.
Michelle: That was a long time ago.
Barack: I would sometimes do the laundry – although not fold, I have to confess.
Michelle: Which is really pretty useless.
Barack: But clean clothes, that's something. ... I mean, look, I gotta be honest. For the last 17 months I've been on the road 98 percent of the time.
Michelle: His job is to be there when requested. Right now, it's important for him to be at parent-teacher conferences, piano recitals, things that are important to the girls. It's less the household stuff because the household works; it's more being there for them, which he has done an outstanding job at. There are few things that he's missed that were important to them.
Last year, when we first met, Malia said that she sometimes wished maybe you wouldn't win. Do you think they still have those mixed feelings?
Barack: I am absolutely certain because we've talked about it – that they are not looking forward to moving. They have a wonderful life in Chicago, they have lifelong friends in Chicago and the prospects of having to make new friends, that's never something that kids are looking forward to. So I'm sure that there's a part of them that says we won't be heartbroken if things don't work out.
And if they said tomorrow, "I don't want you to be President, I want you to be Daddy"?
Barack: Well, so far those issues haven't been mutually exclusive. We talked about this before we started and Michelle and I monitor their attitudes pretty closely.
Michelle: They've been stable. Their lives just haven't changed that much.
Barack: And our job, more than anything, is to make sure that in addition to monitoring whether or not they're feeling sad or neglected at all, that they're also not feeling special because their dad is running for President.
Michelle: That's right.
Barack: One of the things I've been really happy about is how nonplussed they've been by the whole thing. They don't bring it up, they don't talk to their friends about it. If anything, they're actually more courteous and more careful with other people now than they were before I ran.
