Barack Obama is celebrating the birthday of his “love, partner, and best friend,” Michelle Obama, with a photo of the two taken on a balcony in what appears to be one of their favorite vacation spots: Hawaii.
“Happy birthday, Michelle,” the former president, 60, wrote in a tweet Monday, along with a photo of the two in Hawaii earlier this month. “My love, my partner, my best friend…”
The former first lady turned 58 on Monday, and a host of big names spoke up in honor of her big day.
Current First Lady Dr. Jill Biden — a pal and collaborator since their time in the White House together — sent well wishes along with a throwback photo of the pair.
Mrs. Obama, meanwhile, used social media to urge her followers to celebrate something else: the legacy of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by calling elected officials and urging them to pass the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act, a major reform bill backed by Democrats.
Michelle Obama has been a vocal proponent of voting rights bills in recent months, recently writing an open letter about the need to protect the right to vote.
“From Georgia and Florida to Iowa and Texas, states passed laws designed to make it harder for Americans to vote. And in other state legislatures across the nation, lawmakers have attempted to do the same,” she wrote in the letter, which was published earlier this month as an ad in The New York Times.
She continued: “This type of voter suppression is not new. Generations of Americans have persevered through poll taxes, literacy tests, and laws designed to strip away their power — and they’ve done it by organizing, by protesting, and most importantly, by overcoming the barriers in front of them in order to vote. And now, we’ve got to do the same. We’ve got to vote like the future of our democracy depends on it.”
Mrs. Obama also recently issued a call to action through her organization When We All Vote to protect voting rights and also set an ambitious goal: to register a million new voters across the country, ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.