CHARLOTTE, N.C. - On Friday, Malia Obama will be at her desk at Sidwell Friends School for the fourth day of high school -- hours after waving onstage at the Democratic National Convention with her sister, Sasha.
Their appearance will be a rare one: Unlike in earlier political races, they have barely been on the campaign trail this time. They have spent this summer swimming, playing sports and attending camp in New Hampshire. They are no longer the small children who toted little pink bags with Uno cards. Malia, now 14 and nearly as tall as her parents, is a varsity tennis player with a cellphone. Sasha, 11, can chat in Mandarin.
And yet if the Obama girls are bit players in the presidential race, they are also important ones -- not as campaigners but as characters, highlighting traits important to their father's re-election hopes: his likability and his family-man image. Voters know about Malia and Sasha while barely hearing them speak, encountering them in Obama advertisements, photographs and campaign videos and in the nonstop stories told by their parents.
"We're going to be experiencing the first stages of empty nest syndrome," President Obama told CBS' Charlie Rose this summer, before his daughters left for camp. "I get a little depressed."
On Tuesday night, they were in Charlotte without being there. One of the most memorable images invoked in Michelle Obama's convention speech was that of her husband sitting with their girls at the end of the day, "strategizing about middle school friendships." As she spoke, the White House posted on Twitter a photo of the president and his daughters curled up on a sofa, watching Michelle Obama on television.
'So utterly normal'
The first couple clearly choose the stories they tell about their daughters carefully. The anecdotes are rarely about the celebrities the girls meet or their trips on Air Force One. If Malia and Sasha have felt anxiety or distress about the scrutiny and security they live with, the Obamas do not say so. Instead, the president and the first lady share upbeat anecdotes that reflect the rhythms of an ordinary American family: the end-of-season basketball tournament that Sasha's team won, her discovery that she liked tomatoes, the girls' enthusiasm for the television show "Modern Family."
The stories are an implicit counter to right-wing charges that Obama is a threatening figure, a socialist or somehow un-American. "The family seems so utterly normal, the type of people who could be at the soccer game or basketball game," said Steve Schmidt, who managed Sen. John McCain's 2008 bid for president.
