Michelle Obama revels in family role
MANCHESTER, N.H. - Forty minutes late, weary from another early-morning flight, and eager to win over undecided voters, Michelle Obama came to a small cafe here on a recent Friday and commiserated with women about juggling work and family.
"You're very delicious," she told a baby girl at the table, then launched into a frank, detailed recitation of her own routine - up before dawn, she fixes her two daughters breakfast, does their hair, worries how they will get to sports practices, and wonders how she will make parent-teacher conferences.
"I know everyone is very busy," Obama told the women, "because I know what life is like."
The twin gestures - acknowledging the baby, then a mother's juggling act - illustrate the humanizing role Obama is trying to fill in the presidential campaign of her husband, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois. Michelle Obama's stock-in-trade is talking openly about her family - how the Obamas, despite the unique challenges of running for president, are just like everyone else.
"I still go to Target," she said to knowing nods in Manchester. "I do my own shopping. I'm on the soccer field. I am, you know, struggling with work and a career."
In a Democratic race featuring two celebrity spouses in Bill Clinton and Elizabeth Edwards, Michelle Obama, 43, is trying to be the anticelebrity: the familiar working mother from next door willing to admit that being first lady was never on her to-do list. While it is clear Michelle Obama wants to see her husband in the White House, it is also clear her life does not depend on it - she could do without the attention, the glamour, and certainly the press.
"When people ask sort of these crazy questions about the campaign, I'm like, 'I've got kids,' " she told a gathering in Nashua earlier this month. "You know what I'm thinking about!"
With Barack Obama looking for ways to peel voters away from rival Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama is playing an active and visible role in her husband's campaign. Two weeks ago, she headlined a fund-raiser for him in London. Last week she participated in a women's conference hosted by Maria Shriver, the wife of the governor of California. And she is a frequent presence on the trail, both with and without her husband.
Last weekend, she and their daughters - Malia, 9, and Sasha, 6 - carved pumpkins and drank cider with other families at an apple orchard in Londonderry, N.H.
As she sees it, Michelle Obama's job as a surrogate is to show voters a side of her husband that not everyone sees.
"Who is Barack Obama the man, the father?" she said in Nashua. "What is his character? What are his values?"
Answering those questions, she hopes, will combat impressions obstructing his candidacy: that he lacks experience. That the change he represents is too dramatic. That he's not "black enough" for some African-American voters.
Michelle Obama's additional challenge, like Elizabeth Edwards's, is that having Clinton in the race complicates the outreach to women that political spouses traditionally engage in.
"It puts the woman in the position of trying to argue . . . that her husband is better for women than a woman is for women," said Susan Carroll, senior scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. "That's a very difficult argument to try to make, particularly if you've got a woman like Hillary Clinton who certainly doesn't shy away from feminism and hasn't shied away from the causes of women, children, and families."
Michelle Obama's message might be family-centered, but it has its barbs.
In Nashua, she expressed incredulity that Clinton and her supporters were painting Obama as inexperienced, when it was Clinton who voted to authorize the Iraq war. She said: "The question you have to ask yourself is, which experience got it right? It's right there!"
And in a recent interview with the London Sunday Times, she said Clinton was a polarizing figure and questioned the so-called inevitability of her nomination. "Sometimes we wear the same suit even if it's got holes in it," she said. "We need a new suit, not just a new tie or new pants."
Michelle Obama's trademark candor cuts both ways. Supporters believe it underscores the authenticity of Barack Obama's message. And yet her words have at times created wrinkles for the campaign.
In Iowa recently, she suggested that her husband had to win the state to capture the nomination, saying, "If Barack doesn't win Iowa, it is just a dream." The campaign had to clarify her remarks, saying she was only motivating supporters and not casting Iowa as do-or-die.
Those who know the Obamas say they are each other's chief counselor.
"What you see when you know them both is how they push each other," said Valerie Jarrett, a close friend of the couple in Chicago, calling it "part of the magic of their relationship."
During the campaign, Michelle Obama is working a reduced schedule at the University of Chicago Medical Center, where she has been an executive since 2002. She carries two BlackBerries, one for work and one for the campaign. She has made good use of
But she makes a point of fitting her campaigning into daytrips, so she can be home to put their daughters to bed. (During the day, Michelle Obama's mother, Marian Robinson, who lives nearby, is the glue that holds the family together.)
The Obamas often talk at campaign stops about how they have tried to keep Malia and Sasha grounded amid the craziness of the campaign. They host family-themed events at campaign headquarters in downtown Chicago, at which everyone brings their children. There is talk of doing another one near Halloween.
Michelle Obama acknowledges that her education - she holds degrees from Princeton and Harvard Law School - gives her opportunities and leverage in the workplace many Americans do not have. But despite that and the peculiarities of the campaign, she contends that she is little different from many working mothers.
"The only difference between me and every other woman that I know is that my challenges are publicized, and I'm doing this juggling in front of cameras," she said in Manchester.
Her down-to-earth approach has helped bridge a racial and cultural divide between her - she hails from a middle-class black family on Chicago's South Side - and white voters from rural communities in Iowa and New Hampshire.
On the Fourth of July, the Obamas made a morning campaign stop at the Smokey Row coffee house in Oskaloosa, Iowa, a small town in the southern part of the state. Michelle Obama took the microphone first and scored big points with the few hundred voters there by saying, in essence, that her daughters were more important than voters were. She explained that she had refused the campaign's request to arrive in Iowa a day earlier, because Sasha and Malia had a "haunted trails" event at summer camp that they did want to miss.
"Family is first for us and it will always be that way," she said.
A few years ago, even getting Michelle Obama to an event like that would have been a major feat. She had long been ambivalent about her husband's growing political ambitions, fearful of the burden on their family and skeptical of politics.
During Obama's failed congressional bid in 2000, she once refused to stand in at a fund-raiser for her husband, who was stuck in the Illinois Senate, said Dan Shomon, who managed Obama's campaign.
Today, she talks about how "we're running" for president. Barack Obama turned to Shomon at a campaign event in Chicago earlier this year and said, "Isn't it amazing to see how into it she is?"
"The same reason I've gone along with almost every political decision that he's made [is] because I think in the back of my mind, I do believe in him," Michelle Obama said in a recent interview.
Last Monday, Barack Obama called in to the Rev. Al Sharpton's radio program to talk about voting rights. But Sharpton first wanted the senator to know, good-naturedly, that he had been in Chicago - Obama's hometown - recently, and had dropped Michelle's name. Not his name, her name.
Obama laughed, and then showed deference to his wife.
"That's the password, there," he said. "If you know Michelle Obama, you're straight."
Scott Helman can be reached at shelman@globe.com. 