Michelle Obama: She's the closer for her husband

CHICAGO

There is no confusing Michelle Obama for her husband on the campaign trail. ¶ Asked at the Democratic debate in Los Angeles whether he would pick Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton as a vice presidential running mate, Sen. Barack Obama said she "would be on anybody's short list." ¶ But when a television interviewer recently asked Michelle Obama whether she would support Clinton, if she won the nomination, she was far less generous.

"I'd have to think about that," Michelle Obama said on "Good Morning America" on ABC. "I'd have to think about -- policies, her approach, her tone."

Outspoken, strong-willed, funny, gutsy and sometimes sarcastic, Obama is playing a pivotal role in her husband's campaign.

Her personal style -- forthright, comfortable in the trenches and often more blunt than Barack -- plays well with many voters and has given the campaign a steelier edge while allowing the candidate to stay largely above it all.

"I am trying to be as authentically me as I can be," Michelle Obama said in an interview. "My statements are coming from my experiences and my observations and my frustrations."

Obama says she dislikes politics -- she insists there will be no second run for the presidency if her husband falls short this time -- but relishes a good fight, the competition of it all.

In the beginning, she had significant questions about an Barack Obama candidacy and didn't give her blessing until there was a firm blueprint of how the campaign would raise money and compete with Clinton and other candidates.

Now she is involved in most major facets of campaign strategy, always a fierce protector of her husband's image. While the Obamas seldom travel together, Michelle Obama's message is shaped by the same strategists who advise her husband.

Growing up in Chicago, her brother, Craig Robinson, recalls, Michelle did not like watching close basketball games, but would always watch blowouts to the end.

"She didn't like the stress of watching," said Robinson, the men's basketball coach at Brown University.

At almost 6 feet tall in heels, Michelle Obama, 44, cuts an athletic and authoritative figure in her tailored pantsuits and skirts. A Harvard-educated lawyer who had been earning $212,000 a year as a hospital executive before she took leave on Jan. 1, she delivers rousing 40-minute speeches -- surveying topics as far-ranging as the specific failings of the federal No Child Left Behind education act and problems with the military strategy in Iraq -- without the aid of even a note card.

A doting mother of two, Obama has kept crowds waiting with phone calls to daughters Sasha, 6, and Malia, 9.

But Obama's confident, commanding presence has its drawbacks. At an address last month for a black awards gala in Atlanta, some were left feeling that she had been condescending, preaching to a group of achievers about the need to achieve.

"Her speech was very long and inappropriate for that occasion," said Vivian Creighton Bishop, a public official in Columbus, Ga., who supports Clinton.

Michelle Obama has also had to learn to tamp down her sometimes biting humor because it too often leaves her husband as the punch line.

"What I've learned is that my humor doesn't translate to print all the time," she said in the interview.

But her audiences do laugh. Talking about how long it took them to pay off their student loans (they did so only in the past couple of years), she told a church audience in Cheraw, S.C., "I'm still waiting for Barack's trust fund." They cackled. She continued: "Then I heard Dick Cheney was supposed to be a relative! Thought we might be in for something here."

On some occasions, her straight talk has also made it necessary for the campaign to explain her remarks. In the case of "Good Morning America," campaign officials pointed out that in an unbroadcast portion of the interview, she later acknowledged that as a good Democrat, she would need to support Clinton if she were the nominee.

Her nickname inside the campaign is "the closer" because she is skilled at persuading undecided voters to sign pledge cards. But as a smooth orator, she is also known as a connector, volunteering her own life lessons from working-class roots.

She has been transparent about more mundane things, too, like leaning on her mother for child care while she is on the road. "Thank God for Grandma!" she says more than once on the campaign trail, adding that she "couldn't breathe" if she thought her girls, who attend private school in Chicago, were being neglected.

"I spend more time worrying about how do I keep their lives on track in the midst of this?" she said in the interview. "Barack and I both do. ... Those are the day-to-day concerns."

Interviews with people who know Michelle Obama say she chose, even as a young adult, to strive for the opportunities that were closed to previous generations.

"My parents told us time and time again, 'Don't tell us what you can't do,'" she said. "'And don't worry about what can go wrong.'"

She talks on the campaign trail about high school advisers who tried to dissuade her from applying to Princeton because they thought her scores were not good enough. (She graduated with honors in sociology in 1985.)

She talks about college counselors who said similar things about her desire to go to Harvard Law, from which she graduated and went on to one of the top corporate firms in Chicago.

Her father, Fraser Robinson, provided for the family of four on a city worker's salary. Her mother, Marian Robinson, now 70, stayed home and allowed their two children only one hour of television a night. She and her brother were expected to fill their time with books, chess, sports -- and, critically important they both said, dinnertime conversations with their parents.

The defending of ideas, the back-and-forth, the debates, they were an early in-home version of what Michelle Obama has come to do, almost full-time now, for her husband.

At Harvard Law School, one professor recalled that Obama was not one to mince words.

"Michelle was a student in my legal profession class in which I ask students how they would react to difficult ethical and professional challenges," said Prof. David Wilkins. "Not surprisingly, many students shy away from putting themselves on the line in this way, preferring to hedge their bets or deploy technical arguments that seem to absolve them from the responsibilities of decisionmaking. Michelle had no need for such fig leaves. She always stated her position clearly and decisively."