People are often surprised by Michelle Obama's skill as a public speaker. But by the time she began campaigning for her husband's presidential bid nearly two years ago, she was already a veteran of his political campaigns.
"I think to the extent that people think that I'm good, it's from the fact that I really do try to speak from my heart," she said earlier this year on her campaign bus in South Carolina. "I know that sounds corny. When I talk, I am really trying to speak from experience, the things I know."
This is what has endeared her to her husband's supporters. And it is also what has occasionally gotten her into trouble.
She "goes out there, speaks her mind, jokes," Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod told the New Yorker in March. "She doesn't parse her words or select them with an antenna for political correctness."
"Occasionally, it gives campaign people heartburn," he said.
Unlike Cindy McCain, who usually stood silently at her husband's side, Michelle Obama, 44, campaigned separately all over the country, enchanting supportive crowds with her down-to-earth attitude and her visceral understanding that people's lives were in an uncertain period of upheaval and challenge.
"We have become a nation of struggling folks, just barely making it every day," she told a crowded church in Cheraw, S.C., days before her husband triumphed in that state's primary last January. "Folks are just jammed up, and it's gotten worse over my lifetime. And doggone it, I'm young!"
Until she was burned by reaction to some poorly chosen campaign hyperbole ("For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country."), which led her to make her speeches a little blander, she would speak at length, often without notes, and in transcendent terms about her husband's ability to effect change.
Sometimes, her rhetoric could seem a little over-the-top.
"In my opinion," she would say, "the only rational decision is Barack. Nothing else makes sense."
Or: "It is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us to be graced with a man like Barack. The question is, are you ready for him?"
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A long journey
On Jan. 21, the Obamas will wake up in the White House, and the country will wake up to a new first lady who appears as if she would like to model herself on the uncontroversial domesticity of Laura Bush, even though her own Ivy League resume and work history resemble more closely those of another first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
