In 2009 Jodi Kantor, a reporter for the New York Times, spent 40 minutes in the Oval Office with Barack and Michelle Obama. The topic was their marriage. It was bound to be awkward. At one point she asked how it is possible to have an equal marriage when one partner is the president. Their answer, she would later write, suggested some "subtle tension". After that article was published, Ms Kantor mulled. She had been trying to understand how Mr Obama's presidency had affected their relationship. But that, she realised, was only part of the story. "The more difficult question was the reverse one," Ms Kantor writes now. Even if it is not an equal marriage, it is a marriage of equals. Certainly their union has informed his presidency.
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