Wholesome, intimate and suspiciously vague: The Michelle Obama Podcast reviewed

Back in March, I made a long-odds bet that Michelle Obama would be the Democratic party’s vice-presidential nominee. I knew that in her memoir, Becoming, she had said that she wasn’t interested in high office. But political candidates always claim they aren’t running — until suddenly they are.

Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, had already said he’d take Michelle as his VP ‘in a heartbeat’, which struck me as funny since, if Biden’s heart stopped beating, his VP would become commander-in-chief. Since Biden had been Michelle husband’s running mate, the idea of a 2020 Biden-Obama ticket had a fairytale symmetry that would thrill the public. Strategists crunched the numbers and found that, with an Obama on the ticket, Biden could cruise to victory in November.

Yet that was all wrong. Biden went for Kamala Harris, who is a West Coast version of Barack with more balls. It turns out Michelle really didn’t want to return to the political front line. She was too busy becoming — to use her favourite word — a podcast host like everyone else. Podcasting is now one of the easiest ways for people with huge public profiles to get even richer. It’s also a lot simpler than, say, trying to fix American healthcare.

Michelle and Barack’s warmth and admiration for each other feels real and clear, or at least brilliantly faked

The Michelle Obama Podcast is exclusive to Spotify — the tech company that rips off struggling musicians in order to reward established megastars with insanely large sums of money. Spotify has just signed Joe Rogan, the king of ‘bro’ podcasts, for some $100 million. Presumably they hope that Michelle, one of the most popular women on the planet, can establish a similar-sized audience among the more mature global sisterhood — the kind of women who keep a copy of Becoming on their shelves, next to White Fragility and a scented candle.