Photo courtesy of Carolyn Kaster/AP
Serena Hotel
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
July 2, 2013
9:56 A.M. SAT
Transcript
MS. ROBERTS: What a great occasion, and what a tremendous honor for
me to be here. Thank you so very, very much for inviting me to come to
Tanzania. And thank you, Mrs. Kikwete, for hosting this. This is very —
it’s important to do.
President Obama said in South Africa on Sunday, quoting the best
possible source — his mother — (laughter) — he said that you can measure
how well a country does by how it treats its women. And, of course,
President Obama’s mother said that long before we had the data — and we
now have tons and tons of data to show that the single two biggest
factors in development are the education of girls and the economic
empowerment of women.
And for all the reasons that you’ve just delineated, Mrs. Bush — the
importance of the education of girls and the empowerment of women. So
my hat’s off to all of you, and especially the first ladies of Africa —
who are wearing wonderful hats, by the way — because you work on these
issues every day in your countries, pushing and prodding the powers that
be — and yes, your husbands — to do the right things; to help your
countries by helping the women and girls in your countries. So
congratulations to you.
And this is a session where we are going to have some congratulations
and also some learning. And in that spirit, I was going to start by
saying, why can’t the guys get together like this, but now they are
getting together. (Laughter.) They’re getting together this morning; I
think they’ve probably taken their example from you.
MRS. OBAMA: They’re learning from us as women. (Laughter.)
MS. ROBERTS: Exactly. But you know, this question of “First Lady”
has always been somewhat fraught. You quoted Mrs. Johnson, Mrs. Bush,
but it really — particularly, I know in the United States, Americans
have always been a little bit wary about first ladies — they’re not
elected, and they can’t be fired — (laughter) — and they have a whole
lot of power. But it can also be a little confining, I think is a fair
way to put it.
Martha Washington, our first First Lady, wrote in the first year that
she was First Lady, she wrote to her niece that she felt like a “Chief
State Prisoner.” (Laughter.) But she was able to do good — she lobbied
for all of those veterans that she had been to camp with through the
Revolutionary War. And people don’t realize that first ladies have been
doing that kind of thing from Martha Washington –
MRS. OBAMA: Absolutely.
MS. ROBERTS: And, Mrs. Obama, you talked about — you’ve talked
about, wherever you go, there’s a light that shines, and that you’re
able to shine that light on something that needs attention that wouldn’t
otherwise get it. Talk about that a little bit.
MRS. OBAMA: That’s absolutely true. I always joke that we have
probably the best jobs in the world because, unlike our husbands who
have to react and respond to crisis on a minute-by-minute basis — they
come into office with a wonderful, profound agenda, and then they’re
faced with the reality. (Laughter.)
On the other hand, we get to work on what we’re passionate about.
And I think that that’s something that I would encourage all first
ladies to never lose sight of. You have an opportunity to speak to your
passions and to really design and be very strategic about the issues
you care most about. And I just found it just a very freeing and
liberating opportunity.
MS. ROBERTS: No state prisoner? (Laughter.)
MRS. OBAMA: No, there are prison elements to it. (Laughter.) But it’s a really nice prison, so –
MRS. BUSH: But with a chef. (Laughter.)
MRS. OBAMA: You can’t complain. But there is definitely elements that are confining.
MS. ROBERTS: And she said that before tweeting and cell phones.
MRS. OBAMA: That’s right, 24-hour media.
MS. ROBERTS: And she could cover her hair with that cap. (Laughter.)
MRS. OBAMA: Right. But being able to pursue our passions and do
things that not only help our country and connect us with the rest of
the world, it’s a great privilege. So while people are sort of sorting
through our shoes and our hair — (laughter) — whether we cut it or not –
MRS. BUSH: Whether we have bangs.
MRS. OBAMA: Whether we have bangs. (Laughter.) Who would have thought? I didn’t call that one. (Laughter.)
MRS. BUSH: I said that just because our daughter, Barbara, cut bangs at the same time Michelle did. They commiserated –
MRS. OBAMA: I was doing what Barbara was doing. (Laughter.) I was
just following her lead. But we take our bangs and we stand in front of
important things that the world needs to see. And eventually, people
stop looking at the bangs and they start looking at what we’re standing
in front of.
MRS. BUSH: We hope.
MRS. OBAMA: They do, and that’s the power of our roles.
MS. ROBERTS: Mrs. Bush, you quoted, again, Lady Bird Johnson,
talking about, I have a podium and I’m going to use it. But it’s a
unique role, and there must be a learning curve. And I remember as you
were leaving the White House, you said that at first you were “dense” —
(laughter) — about how hard it was; how the role is really not something
that you understood the power of.
MRS. BUSH: Well, and I should have understood it, because I had a
mother-in-law who was a First Lady. I had watched her, of course, the
whole time she served in public office with her husband, my
father-in-law, President Bush. And so, I really had an advantage that —
the only other First Lady that’s had this advantage was Louisa Adams,
whose mother-in-law had been first lady as well.
So I really did come to the White House knowing a lot about the White
House and knowing where things were, and we even knew the staff — the
butlers and the ushers — because we had stayed there so often with
President Bush and Barbara. But what I didn’t really understand was how
people would listen to the First Lady.
And right after attacks of September 11th when — I gave the
presidential radio address to talk about women in Afghanistan. And
right after that, I was in a department store with my daughter, Jenna —
she was a freshman in college and I was in Austin seeing her — and we
want to a department store. And the women who sold cosmetics at the
department store said, thank you so much, Ms. Bush, thank you for
speaking for the women in Afghanistan. And that was the first time it
really occurred to me that people really did hear me, and that I really
did have that podium that Lady Bird Johnson knew about and had told us
about.
And so, I want to encourage every first lady to speak out and speak
up and let people know, because people are watching and they are
listening. And you can be so constructive for your country if you speak
up about issues that you think are important.
MS. ROBERTS: Did you have an experience like that?
MRS. OBAMA: Absolutely, but I just want to take a moment to commend
Mrs. Bush, because she and her staff helped my team with that
transition. And that’s a powerful lesson for other leaders, is that
there’s a lot of give and take when you’re campaigning, but when the
dust settles, we are all in this together. And Laura has been just so
helpful. Her Chief of Staff, Anita McBride, and many of the team
members left notes for my staff. My chief of staff calls Anita on a
regular basis — (laughter) — I think it’s daily or weekly or something
like that.
But having your predecessors be people who are willing to extend
themselves on behalf of the country, to help with that transition makes
the world of difference. But nothing prepares you. (Laughter.)
Nothing prepares you for this role. I mean, it is so startling that the
transition of power in the United States happens so quickly that you
don’t have access to the house until the President takes the oath of
office.
So, literally –
MRS. BUSH: During the inaugural parade — one family moves out and the next family moves in. (Laughter.)
MRS. OBAMA: Literally. And I remember walking into that house and I
didn’t even know where the bathrooms were. (Laughter.) But I had to
get ready for a ball. (Laughter.) It was like, and I’ve got to look
nice? It’s like, what door is this, and you’re opening up all these
doors, and you can’t find your toothpaste, you don’t know where your
kids are. (Laughter.) So that’s day one.
MRS. BUSH: Exactly.
MS. ROBERTS: That’s a daunting experience. One of the things — we
did ask the first ladies of Africa if they wanted to submit some
questions, and one of the things that was true throughout the questions
was the sense of continuity; that — was there a way to keep your efforts
going after the spotlight does go away. Now, Mrs. Bush, is this one of
your ways of doing that?
MRS. BUSH: Yes, this is. But for George and me, through the Bush
Institute, we’re able to focus on four areas that were so important to
us when George was President.
When you are President, every issue comes to the desk of the
President of the United States. First ladies have it a little bit
easier because we can choose specific issues to focus on, but now that
we’re home, through the Bush Institute — the policy institute that’s
part of our Bush Presidential Center at SMU — we are able to continue to
work on issues that were important to us.
MS. ROBERTS: And you said, Mrs. Obama, that you want your issues to have a lasting effect, so how do you do that?
MRS. OBAMA: Four to eight years is really a blink of an eye. And
you often find that you’re just starting to get your teeth into your
issues, and then it’s time to go. But none of the issues –
MS. ROBERTS: — your children.
MRS. OBAMA: That’s true, that’s true. (Laughter.) That’s
absolutely true. But none of the work that we do and any of us does
will be concluded at the end of a term. I tell the young people that I
work with around health, the military families that I support, that for
me, these issues are — I say a forever proposition.
This isn’t work that I’m just doing
(Audio drops out.)
MRS. OBAMA: — that I find in this position that there are girls
around the world who are looking to us and how we behave and how we
carry on our issues. And they’re going to be watching us for decades to
come.
MS. ROBERTS: There’s that prisoner thing again.
MRS. OBAMA: There it is. (Laughter.) Keeps coming –
MRS. BUSH: But there are things that you could establish, like the
National Book Festival that I started. I’m the librarian, and so it was
a very obvious sort of thing for me to start. I started a Texas book
festival in Dallas — I mean, in Austin, when George was governor, and
then started one that the Library of Congress now runs. And so it
continues to go on.
But Michelle’s right — we’ll never finish with education. We’ll
never get to rub our hands together and say, oh, we took care of that.
There will be another little class of kindergartners. And it’s
something we’ll always work on.
MS. ROBERTS: Well, again, it’s like child-raising. Yes, it’s like child-raising.
MRS. BUSH: Exactly — it’s never over.
MS. ROBERTS: But, Mrs. Bush, you all talked about the — agenda and
it gets disrupted, but your agenda got disrupted too. And you were on
Capitol Hill about to testify before Ted Kennedy’s committee about
education when September 11th –
MRS. BUSH: That’s right. I mean, of course, things happen that you
don’t expect, like what happened to us in the United States on September
11th. And the National Book Festival that I founded, it — just then
the weekend before — the Saturday before that, September 8th. And then I
was scheduled — in fact, I went onto Capitol Hill on the morning of
September 11th because I was going to brief the Senate Education
Committee on a summit that I had hosted that summer on early childhood
education, and got to the Capitol and joined Senator Kennedy in his
office then as we watched on television and started to see the towers
fall. And we knew — he knew and I knew — that everything had changed
for us and for our country, really.
And that’s what happens to presidents also; those kinds of issues
come up that you don’t expect, and it changes your whole focus. In
fact, in our new presidential museum, the very first part of it is
everything that we thought we would be working on — tax cuts, the book
festival, the faith-based and community service projects, tee ball on
the South Lawn of the White House — (laughter) — our first state dinner,
which was with Mexico — which is where we really expected to spend a
lot of our time in the Americas because we were from a border state —
and then September 11th –
MS. ROBERTS: And that’s how you got involved with the women of Afghanistan.
MRS. BUSH: That’s right.
MS. ROBERTS: One of the questions that has come in from the South
African — or from the African first ladies refers to both of you as the
mothers of girls — and you are now the grandmother of a girl.
MRS. BUSH: That’s right, the grandmother of another girl — baby Margaret Laura. (Applause.)
MS. ROBERTS: And the question of the education of girls — and you,
of course, know how important it is in your own lives, but as I alluded
to earlier, one of the things we now have just so much data on is that
if you educate a girl, you can save a country. And the first ladies
here are saying, what can you do to work with them globally for the
education of girls?
MRS. BUSH: Well, we both obviously spend a lot of time on education,
especially the education of girls. But the fact is, in the United
States, now more girls are graduating from high school than boys. And
more girls are in college and more girls are in masters programs — women
are — than boys. And that –
(Audio interruption.)
MRS. OBAMA: — Mandela’s most important quote of the millions of
things he has said is that education is probably the most powerful
weapon for change. But a lot of our kids don’t understand that. In the
United States, many of them take it for granted. Many of them have a
mindset that they can’t do it because they’ve been grown up to be taught
that they can’t.
So there’s a large part of my initiative that’s really trying to get
into the heads of these young people and use my story as an example of
what — the power of education. And I tell kids all across the country, I
want them to look at me not as the First Lady, but as one of them.
I was a girl who grew up on the South Side of Chicago, my parents
didn’t have much money, but they invested in my education. And they
invested in my education as equally as they did my brother; there was no
different bar. And as a result of that training and preparation, I
have had opportunities and I am sitting here now as First Lady of the
United States of America because of education. (Applause.)
MS. ROBERTS: It was — one of the things that the PEPFAR program is
doing is not just reaching — not just treating people — which is, of
course, wonderful — but getting to the orphans and vulnerable children.
I was in — Ethiopia with Save The Children where this 13-year-old girl
that had been through our program stood up and started talking about
what was needed in the community, and then the local minister from that
region told her she was crazy and she just stood right back up and just
went — and I — you go, girl. And that really does make a difference in
the future.
MRS. BUSH: Well, it is important to reach parents as well. So the
parents know that they need to make sure their children are educated —
in whatever way they can.
We know from research that mothers who can bring in a little bit of
money, they’re more likely to spend their money on their fees for their
children’s education and on their uniforms and others things they need
to go to school. So all of it really works together — the economic
empowerment as well as just the understanding of how important education
is.
MRS. OBAMA: And I just want to take a moment to recognize Mama
Kikwete’s work educating female orphans here, the school she has
started. (Applause.) I got an opportunity to sit with some of the
children and watch a cultural program. But there are so many young
girls that don’t have families, they don’t have role models. And as
Mama Kikwete understands, they need a safe place to land, a place where
they can get food and shelter and love and direction.
So I applaud Mama Kikwete and all the first ladies who are providing
that kind of safe harbor for our young girls. So, congratulations.
(Applause.)
MS. ROBERTS: Well, you talk about the role models, and you talked
about yourselves as role models, but, Mrs. Bush, you said at one point, I
think that our first ladies are a lot more complicated than they get
treated in the media. I suspect every first lady here would agree with
that. Why do you think that is? Why do you think that it’s always
those sort of –
MRS. BUSH: Well, I think — in the United States, it has a lot to do
with the way you look. That’s a lot of the discussion about women.
That’s a problem everywhere in the United States — for girls as well.
The way you look — girls worry about all sorts of problems that they
shouldn’t have to worry about. They should be worried about what
they’re doing and how they’re being educated instead of whether they
look pretty or they look sexy. (Applause.)
But that’s the way we treat women, sadly. And it’s obviously when
you read in the press — I mean, it’s like talking about the bangs, or
somebody writing about them, really — worse — the press writing about
them.
MS. ROBERTS: Do you think you get put in a box?
MRS. BUSH: Yes, a little bit.
MRS. OBAMA: Absolutely. I constantly get asked, especially in the
first term, are you more like Laura Bush, or are you more like Hillary
Clinton? And I’m like, is that it? That’s all I — (laughter) –
MRS. BUSH: Exactly the problem — everyone said — reporters — are you
Hillary Clinton or Barbara Bush? And I always just said, well, I think
I’ll be Laura Bush; I do Laura Bush pretty well, having grown up as
her. (Laughter.)
MRS. OBAMA: But this is also why it’s important for us to make sure
that more women use their voices and their power. Because we know, as
women, that we’re not that complicated, but we are complex. We are
deep, diverse, enlightened people in the universe. And the world will
be better off when our voices are at the table.
We just bring a different perspective. We are mothers. We are
nurturers. We have to juggle a lot. I love my husband, but sometimes
when he has, like, five things to do at one time, it’s funny to watch
it. (Laughter.) You don’t know where you jacket is right now —
(laughter) — can’t find that shoe, Mr. President. (Laughter.) It’s a
little –
MRS. BUSH: I always think — but they’re good at focus.
MRS. OBAMA: Very focused. Focus. (Laughter.) But I think that
that’s the — and we as women cannot underestimate the value of what we
bring, and I think that’s what young girls are taught — that their
voices aren’t important; be small, be quiet.
MRS. BUSH: The way we look is more important –
MRS. OBAMA: The way they look is more important –
MRS. BUSH: — than what they learn and say.
MRS. OBAMA: And we are missing 50 percent of the intellect that
could go — and needs to go to — that’s true. But I want to keep it
fair. I don’t want the men to feel too –
MS. ROBERTS: Left out.
MRS. OBAMA: — lesser.
MS. ROBERTS: You know, you talked — just briefly mentioned the
campaign trail. And of course, both of you spent a great deal of time
on the campaign trail, and wives — and it has been wives so far — are
sort of in the role of validators, character witnesses for their
husbands on the trail. But then you get to the White House and you have
another role, which seemed to me to be incredibly difficult, which is
that sometimes you have to be the only truth teller.
Now, this is true of all spouses to some degree, but when I have to
tell my husband the truth, there’s not his political future or the peace
of the world riding on it.
MRS. OBAMA: It’s just “that tie looks bad.” (Laughter.)
MS. ROBERTS: So how do you deal with sometimes being the only person who can tell your husband the truth?
MRS. BUSH: Well, I have that famous story — I think I told it to the
first ladies last year in New York — about how Barbara Bush, my
mother-in-law, said, don’t criticize George’s speeches — (laughter) —
because she criticized her George’s speech and he came home for weeks
afterwards with letters saying it was the best speech he’d ever given.
(Laughter.)
So I took her advice — this was years ago when George was running for
Congress — and we were driving into our driveway after a campaign event
in another town. We were just driving up, and he said, how was my
speech? And I said, well, it wasn’t really very good, and he drove into
the garage wall. (Laughter and applause.)
But I think you have to be really careful, actually — (laughter) — with — tells him the truth. Actually, the President –
(Audio interruption.)
END 10:24 A.M. SAT
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