Michelle: The Bar We Always Set for Ourselves Was Doing ‘Everything Perfectly’

RUSH EXCERPT:

OBAMA: "Well, being the first of any— you know, when you’re the first of anything, the bar feels you feel like you have— you don’t have room to make mistakes. One of the things I don’t talk about in the book but I talk about on the road is that I do remember that at the end of— that last flight that we took out when I was leaving from the Capitol, and we waved. We got on air force one the last time. I forgot about this, because I didn’t put it in the book. But a friend of mine reminded me they cried for about 30 minutes. And it was just the release of eight years of feeling like we had to do everything perfectly, that there wasn’t a margin of error, that we couldn’t make mistakes, that we couldn’t— that we couldn’t slip, that our tone had to be perfect. Because that was— that was the bar that was set for us. But it was also the bar that we always set for ourselves. Thinking that as the first, people will measure everyone of our race, of our gender by what we do. And there is pressure there that comes with that. So that’s how we carried ourselves. And that had to trickle down to all of our staff. So the pressure was on everyone. We couldn’t afford to make a mistake. We couldn’t afford to look cavalier. We had to watch our language. And we also knew that everything we said, we thought about how it would be viewed by children, not just our children, but all of our children. We— we knew that we— we were the moral compass, so we had to speak carefully and clearly and intelligently, and we couldn’t just say things off the cuff. Now —"