Barack’s Rock

She was smitten. "I was, like, 'This guy is different'," she says. " 'He is really different, in addition to being nice and funny and cute and all that. He's got a seriousness and a commitment that you don't see every day'." She recalls thinking, " 'Well, you know, I'd like to be married to somebody who felt that deeply about things'." At this, she paused for a second. "Maybe I didn't say 'marry.' Scratch that part. It took him a little while." Each of them offered the other something they had lacked growing up—for her, a free-thinking outlook, for him, a sense of stability.

Michelle introduced him to her family. They liked him, but didn't expect him to last long. Michelle was a demanding girlfriend, always breaking up with one suitor or another, and it was something of a family joke that sooner or later she would toss him overboard, too. "The first thing I was worried about was, is this poor guy going to make the cut?" says her brother, Craig. "How long is it going to be until he gets fired?" Her mother remembers Obama as quiet and respectful. "He didn't talk about himself," she says. "He didn't tell us that he was running for president of the Harvard Law Review. We never realized that he was as bright as he is."

Soon after meeting Barack, Michelle suffered a personal crisis that made her rethink what she wanted to do with her life. Her father passed away in 1991 of complications from MS. Around the same time, her dear college friend, Suzanne Alele, died of lymphoma. She had admired Alele's free spirit. Unlike dutiful Michelle, her friend tried not to take life too seriously and she traveled widely. After Alele's funeral, Michelle thought, "If I died in four months, is this how I would have wanted to spend this time?"

Looking back, she says she realized she had unthinkingly climbed onto an "automatic path" of a corporate career. "I started thinking about the fact that I went to some of the best schools in the country and I have no idea what I want to do," she says. "That kind of stuff got me worked up because I thought, 'This isn't education. You can make money and have a nice degree. But what are you learning about giving back to the world, and finding your passion and letting that guide you, as opposed to the school you got into'?" She resolved to leave the law firm and mentor young people from the neighborhood she grew up in. But she was daunted by how little money she would make, and feared she would not be able to pay back her sizable student loans. Obama convinced her that if they married and combined their incomes, they could afford a more frugal life.

Michelle began writing job letters to various charities and city agencies. One landed on the desk of Valerie Jarrett, deputy chief of staff to Chicago Mayor Richard Daley. "I interviewed Michelle, and an introductory session turned into an hour and a half," Jarrett tells NEWSWEEK. "I offered her a job at the end of the interview—which was totally inappropriate since it was the mayor's decision. She was so confident and committed and extremely open." Michelle was flattered by the quick offer. But though she came across as supremely confident to Jarrett, she had doubts about whether it was the right decision. She asked Barack to meet with Jarrett to discuss the job before she accepted.

Jarrett, who is now a senior adviser to the Obama campaign, became Michelle's mentor. She set Michelle to work with businesses caught in red tape between city departments. It wasn't exciting work, and it paid far less than her law-firm salary, but Michelle saw it as a first step in her new career in public service.

After she worked for the city for a couple of years, Barack led Michelle closer to community activism. He was on the board of a start-up group called Public Allies, a nonprofit that encouraged young people to go into public service—just the kind of encouragement she felt she had never gotten. The organization needed a Chicago director. The job paid even less than her city post. "It sounded risky and just out there," she says. "But for some reason it just spoke to me. This was the first time I said, 'This is what I say I care about. Right here. And I will have to run it'." (Michelle jokes that she took a pay cut with every new job. The couple finally got out of debt when Barack's book, "The Audacity of Hope," became a best seller.) More recently, she inspired a program to send doctors from the prestigious University of Chicago Medical Center into community hospitals and clinics in poor surrounding neighborhoods. (At nearly $275,000 a year, her work at the University of Chicago paid much better than her earlier public-service jobs.) Last fall, Michelle took a leave of absence from her job to participate in the campaign full time.

What would she do as First Lady? It's a question she gets all the time now. Yet it's not one she ventures to answer in any detail. She is interested in issues women face balancing work and home, and in lowering barriers that keep poor students from college. "There are a ton of things. It's endless what you can do in the White House," she says. "But until I get there and know what kind of resources I'll have and how much time and what's the agenda of the country, I think, truthfully, I don't know which of these many things I can focus on."

If they win, Michelle says, there won't be any to-do list for the East Wing until she gets her daughters settled in Washington. (She never moved to the capital when Obama became a senator.) "What will the girls need?" she asks. "Are they going to transition easily to the White House and this public life and a new school and a new city? If they're losing their minds, that's one project off Mommy's table, because I'm going to be making sure that they have their feet on the ground."