On the stage the night he conceded the New Hampshire primary, Barack Obama looked exhausted. Closing his eyes for a moment, he leaned back on his wife, Michelle, who encircled his waist with one arm, giving him a squeeze, while pumping her other fist in the air, as if in victory. If anything, Michelle looked, in the words of her husband's campaign slogan, "fired up" and "ready to go".
Obama leans on his wife in many ways — for support, for advice, for grounding and increasingly for her fighting words. In an increasingly nasty race that seems to pit the Illinois Senator against not just a former First Lady but her ex-President husband as well, Obama needs Michelle more than ever. This week, for the first time since Barack Obama launched his campaign 11 months ago, Michelle Obama has left the couple's two young girls at home with her mother and hit the campaign trail full-time. While she's no Bill Clinton, Obama does have sharp elbows. One of her more pointed remarks is about how "things have gotten continually worse over my lifetime," implying the Clinton era did little to help "regular folks" like her and her family. And in a forcefully worded fund-raising letter sent out Thursday, she says, "What we didn't expect, at least not from our fellow Democrats, are the win-at-all-costs tactics we've seen recently. We didn't expect misleading accusations that willfully distort Barack's record... We've seen disingenuous attacks and smear tactics turn people off from the political process for too long, and enough is enough."
But more importantly, as she tours South Carolina, speaking on behalf of her husband, she has become the real-life example of Obama's soaring rhetoric. "I was raised in a working class family on the South Side of Chicago, that's how I identify myself, a working class girl," Michelle told a group of students at the University of South Carolina Wednesday. "My mother came home and took care of us through high school, my father was a city shift worker who took care of us all his life. The only amazing thing about my life is that a man like my father could raise a family of four on a single city worker's salary."
Obama's conventional background contrasts with her husband's childhood, growing up between Hawaii and Indonesia, to which few of his supporters can relate. Where Barack Obama's speeches are all about soaring rhetoric, with very few mentions of his personal upbringing, his wife focuses on her childhood, telling her story from the ground up. "You think of my parents who didn't go to college, who sent not one but two of us to Princeton, my brother and I," she told the 200 or so students that came to hear her speak. "And the one thing that is clear to me as I've traveled the country is the story of my father is the story of America, I don't care what color what folks are, I don't care if they grew up on a farm or in the inner city."
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