Barack’s Rock

Though she has no official policy role in the campaign, she has been deployed to speak directly to the fears of black audiences in a way that Barack often does not. Earlier this year, Obama staffers worried that some African-American voters might still be reluctant to believe that a black man could really be elected president. Michelle went down to South Carolina to try to put them at ease. As she reviewed her speech on the plane ride to one event, a story came to mind. She thought of African-Americans she had known who had saved for new furniture, only to wrap it in plastic to protect it. But in the end, doing so was self-defeating. "That plastic gets yellow and scratches up your leg," she told the audience. "I think folks just want to protect us from the possibility of being let down … by the world as it is. A world, they fear, is not ready for a decent man like Barack. Sometimes it seems better not to try at all than to try and fail." She urged them to take the risk.

At least once, Michelle did voice her displeasure to the campaign staff. After one of the debates, Obama's team met to discuss strategy. Michelle dialed in and spoke over the phone. She did not say much, but she made it clear that she was not happy. She thought that Hillary Clinton had packed the crowd with supporters, and that Obama had been booed whenever he criticized Hillary. She told the strategists that she didn't want that to happen again. "It was more than a strategist talking about what the best tactic would be," says a senior Obama aide who attended the meeting and spoke candidly on condition of anonymity. "It was a spouse saying, 'Do not do this to my husband again'."

As the campaign wears on and the scrutiny of her every utterance increases, she is reluctantly learning to not always say what comes to mind, especially within earshot of reporters. She took flak for voicing ambivalence about Hillary Clinton in a recent ABC News interview, when she said she would need to "think about" supporting her if she won the nomination. (Now she says that interview was edited to cut out her positive comments about Clinton.) Michelle had in fact spoken positively about Clinton in the past, saying she admired her accomplishments as First Lady. "This is what I haven't learned how to do," she says. "It's like I can't think out loud. I can't sort of meander through because then somebody takes a clip of the first part" and twists it.

Like any savvy politician, she'd rather take her story to the voters without the filter of the press. In her stump speech, she uses her own life as a rebuke to those who have said that she and her husband aren't ready for the White House. She tells the story of a 10-year-old girl she met in a beauty parlor in South Carolina who told her that if Barack wins the White House, "it means I can imagine anything for myself."

That story, Michelle says, was just like her own: "She could have been me. Because the truth is, I'm not supposed to be here, standing here. I'm a statistical oddity. Black girl, brought up on the South Side of Chicago. Was I supposed to go to Princeton? No … They said maybe Harvard Law was too much for me to reach for. But I went, I did fine. And I'm certainly not supposed to be standing here." Whatever lingering doubts Michelle Obama may still have, moving into the White House would go a long way toward putting them to rest.

With Sarah Kliff, Karen Springen and Roxana Popescu

© 2008