Michelle Obama: First Lady in the making

BACKSTAGE, behind the floodlights, moments before he gave the 2004 Democratic convention keynote address that would launch his career into the national stratosphere, Barack Obama made a confession to his wife, Michelle.

His stomach was a bit queasy.

Michelle responded by hugging her husband tight and looking him straight in the eye, Obama recalls in his book, The Audacity of Hope.

“Just don’t screw it up, Buddy!” Michelle said, transforming the tense moment into one of shared laughter.

The remark is classic Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama — a woman who faces reality head-on with candour, humour and tenacity, who keeps her husband grounded, who keeps him real.

The Princeton and Harvard Law grad is direct and sometimes takes up subjects Obama avoids, especially issues of race.

Obama rarely narrowcasts to black audiences, leaving it to her to address concerns among African-Americans. In a November speech before an audience at historically black South Carolina State University, Michelle spoke movingly about doubts that a black man could ever be elected president. She said she understood “that veil of impossibility that keeps us down and keeps our children down — keeps us waiting and hoping for a turn that may never come. It’s the bitter legacy of racism and discrimination and oppression in this country. A legacy that hurts”.

In private, she uses gentle (and sometimes not so gentle) put-downs to keep Obama, who can tend toward the grandiose, from getting too full of himself.

“I’m often reminded by events, if not by my wife, that I’m not a perfect man,” he says.

Where Obama emphasises hope and self-belief in his speeches, Michelle Obama throws down a challenge to voters to step up.

While Obama rarely references his own racial identity or his personal struggles, Michelle draws a direct link between his experience in overcoming prejudice to his readiness for power. “On the day that he’s inaugurated, [he] is going to send a different message to thousands of kids like me who were told, ‘No, no, wait. You’re not ready, you’re not good enough’,” she told one crowd in Waterloo, Iowa, last week. “See, I’m not supposed to be here. As a black girl from the southside of Chicago, I wasn’t supposed to go to Princeton because they said my test scores were too low. They said maybe I couldn’t handle Harvard because I wasn’t ready. I don’t even know why. But see, every time I pushed past other people’s doubts and limitations, [when] Barack and I... earned the seat at the table that other people felt entitled to, the only thing we realised was that we were always more ready, more prepared than we ever imagined.”

Obama received Secret Service protection early in the campaign after unspecified threats. It is not a subject his wife likes to talk about. “She doesn’t allow herself to go there,” says Valerie Jarrett, Michelle Obama’s close friend, who says Michelle has not raised the subject with her. “It would paralyse her to think like that.”

Michelle explained her desire to shake up American politics. “We complain that politicians are mean and cynical and angry, but we’ve been doing the same thing over and over again,” she said. “We have been making the same irrational decisions. When faced with the most rational choice, we hesitate — and... we have to break out of this.”