United States: Obama’s Greatest Asset is Michelle

“It’s the economy, stupid!” The joke that served as Bill Clinton’s campaign slogan in 1993 to prevent George Bush Sr. from having a second term might well jinx this other president, Barack Obama, from pursuing reelection. All recent elections, in fact, have shown without exception that the economic crisis was fatal to all incumbents, whether on the right or left. Certainly, the situation in the United States is better than the famous one in Greece, of course, or even Italy, Spain or France. But the American revival is timid. The growth index was down in April after several months of improvement, and consumers, like investors, are waiting for a little more solid progress to reassure themselves.

American culture has its own special component which upsets opinion: The United States is less and less the leader country, a symbol of the prosperity, power and success that have been the pride of its citizens for a century. This downgrading has done more harm than the arrival of Barack Obama in the White House, with all the change that represented, could counteract by allowing Americans to hope for a new departure. It hasn’t been won yet.

Solid and Discreet

Certainly, the adversary whom the Republican party ended up with after endless primaries – Mitt Romney – is far from having Obama’s influence and popularity. But it’s now that the real campaign begins, and the Republican challenger will be able to devote all his time – and especially his money – on attacking the president and weakening his image. In one of its editorials, the Times remarked this week that from Mario Monti to Mariano Rajoy via Francois Hollande, in a crisis, voters do not necessarily chose charismatic personalities to take away their difficulties. A leaning towards “normal” presidents, as they say now in France, could benefit Mitt Romney.

Luckily for him, Obama has an argument of weight and charm, his wife Michelle. Whatever judgments a French person might make on her clothes, she is a favorite with Americans. Her popularity even easily exceeds that of her husband. Since the last Gallup poll this week, she was approved of by 66 percent of Americans against 52 percent for the President. Newspapers regularly boast about this 48-year-old lawyer’s personality; her presence, at once solid and discreet around the President; the way she raises her daughters; and the campaign for her fellow countrymen and women to have a healthier diet.

If the French, according to Valerie Trierweiler at least, are not comfortable with the status of a “first lady,” Michelle Obama, who we will often see at the President’s side during the upcoming five months of campaigns, is not in this predicament. And she’s even less reluctant to fill this role that she has ever been since they met at the Sidley Austin law firm in Chicago. In 1991, she was asked to welcome and accompany a summer intern named Barack Obama. She has not stopped since.