Michelle Obama, Ready for The "Job"

In her Chicago neighborhood, one noticed this: Michelle Obama is not the same. Under normal circumstances, she is “extraordinarily sarcastic,” says Barbara Engel one of her neighbors, before adding “Now, she can no longer be herself.”

In two years of campaigning, Michelle Obama has softened, adapted to the needs of the moment. She was sent to the “safe” places. Rather than talking politics, rather than drawing audiences to “claim their place at the table of democracy”, she referred to the children, told anecdotes, and defused controversy, as in late October, when her husband “bought” himself thirty minutes of advertising on all the channels. Michelle, who was the guest of a humorous televised debate, explained that 10-year-old Malia, the older of their two daughters, was, like most Americans, very concerned for her favorite show…

Harvard graduate, like her husband, Michelle Obama, 44, quickly understood that her mission during the campaign wasn’t to show the advancement of women, but to reassure the voters and to ensure that they are “comfortable with the idea of a black first lady,” as her advisers told the New York Times. At the end of the line, she only campaigned a third of the time. This was a discretion offset by multiple interviews with family magazines, intended to show that Michelle has a priority: the children. “People are not used to highly educated black women. It unsettles them. African American women are still seen as helping those who work in assistant professions,” commented Professor Mark Sawyer, director of Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Politics, at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), before adding: “Even Oprah Winfrey [television host]. Her show, in fact, is for assisting women in their daily lives. As soon as she leaves her role, she is criticized.” Michelle Obama has faced the same obstacle. As soon as she presented herself as herself, she worried. “There is still a lack of sympathy towards her. If she is serious, she is portrayed as ‘angry.’ As a person who does not stay in her place,” said Mark Sawyer.

Like Hillary Clinton in 1992, her ambition is perceived as a fault. Although it is not involved in the strategy, but the tune of “wanting the White House as much as her husband,” wrote the weekly magazine Newsweek after the Democratic primary.

Michelle Obama grew up in a [united] home on the South Side of Chicago, in a black neighborhood south of the city. Two parents and two children lived in a one-bedroom apartment. Her father, Frazer Robinson, has worked all his life as a city hall employee, despite having multiple sclerosis. Marian, her mother, worked as a secretary and raised the children. Michelle was not the first in her class. But she managed to be admitted to Princeton in 1981. She thinks this was less by way of “affirmative action,” than because her brother Craig, who was awarded a scholarship, became the star of the basketball team.

Michelle is 6 feet tall. She did not want to play sports, precisely because she is “tall, black and athletic,” as one of her former teachers said to the New Yorker. And no team sports, because she gets sick if she does not win. At Princeton, her brother Craig who is now a basketball coach, said she put her French teachers in their place. They did not assign enough conversational practice. “Just pretend you don’t know her,” their mother advised him.

The campus was still very homogeneous. She felt “like a visitor.” Her sociology thesis focused on racial division: how black students seem to immerse themselves in the “white social and cultural structure” over their years of study and identify less and less with their original communities.

The Obamas had initially asked to keep the Princeton thesis sealed until after the presidential election. But at the insistence of the press, Michelle had to publish the text. In it you sense skepticism, almost bitterness, in contrast to the Barack Obama experience.

Her conclusion is that her degree from Princeton would at most move her to the “periphery of society,” never to “become a full participant.”

After Princeton, Michelle studied at Harvard Law School. From there she followed the path of the “white” elite and became a lawyer at a business firm in Chicago. She was responsible for intellectual property cases. Nothing very exciting, until one day in 1989 when the management gave her the responsibility of dealing with a summer intern from Harvard, a certain Barack Obama. The couple described the meeting in detail. She initially resisted. One evening he took her to the movies to see a Spike Lee film. They embraced at Baskin-Robbins on 53rd Street (now replaced by a photocopy shop).

Barack Obama was unattached. His references were the distant horizons of Hawaii and Indonesia. He had not known the generation that fought against segregation. Michelle has brought solid roots on the South Side. “Since Oscar the Priest, there is no better springboard for a political career that,” says historian Edward Frantz, referring to the first African-American from a Northern State to be elected to Congress in 1928. Michelle gave him a family and also a clan.

After meeting Barack, she left the private sector to enter Chicago city hall, where Valerie Jarrett, director of the mayor’s office who became the couple’s confidante and is now a spokesman for Barack Obama, recruited her. Then she joined a university hospital, where she was, until the election campaign, vice-president of external relations.

Michelle Obama had to get used to the critics’ watch. The Chicago newspapers noted that her salary had increased over the course of her husband’s political ascent and was increased from 121,000 dollars in 2004 to 317,000 in 2005, after the Senate election.

They wondered why two Harvard-educated lawyers had not seen the potential conflict of interest in buying land adjacent to a lot that Tony Rezko, a campaign contributor, bought the same day – to resell them later.

When Michelle opened up about student loans that the couple had just repaid, critics point out that Obama has been living for the past three years in a house worth 1.65 million dollars (which they could afford thanks to the candidate’s two books that became best-sellers).

Michelle Obama is now entrusted with a historic role in American society. “For once we have a perspective from inside an African-American family that goes against stereotypes: a very disciplined family, where children have priority, where we take education seriously,” says the professor from Los Angeles. “She plays the game but it is not clear if, deep down, she even believes in it. She came on the podium after a speech and bolted joyfully to Barack, giving him a small fist pound as if it weren’t just the two of them on stage. That also is an image different from the clichés,” says Mark Sawyer. “Hollywood rarely depicts African-American couples in love.” She still sees herself as the little South Side girl who woke up at 5am to do homework (today she happens to get up at 4:30am for her workout at the gym).

Like her husband, she “sells” his unlikely story. “I am a statistical anomaly. A black girl, raised on the South Side of Chicago … I am not supposed to be here,” she says. She will become the youngest First Lady since Jackie Kennedy. She is already thinking about it.

If Malia and Sasha adapt well to Washington and give her the time, Michelle plans to do “tons of things.” Bringing children “from all backgrounds” to the White House, for example. The danger, according to someone who knows her, is her passion: “She is the rock of Barack. But will she keep his feet on the ground?”

When asked by The New York Times, Barack Obama’s advisers gave her a wiser mission: address the problems of women and military families facing economic crisis. She has no office in the “West Wing, the wing reserved for the president. But as she explained on television, the couple – both lawyers! – have a habit of arguing.”

“You want to know how Barack prepares for a debate?” she said one day. “He just spends some time with me, and he’s ready.”