Vanity Fair: Michelle Obama, First Lady in Waiting

[DeepModem Mom]

Change Agent
First Lady in Waiting
Who needs a warm-up campaign? Having scaled down her career to support her husband’s political goals, Michelle Obama says “it’s now or never” for the couple to take the White House. As Barack gathers momentum, Michelle speaks candidly about America’s need for change, and a different kind of political marriage.
by Leslie Bennetts WEB EXCLUSIVE December 27, 2007


Michelle Obama at a rally for Barack Obama in Londonderry, New Hampshire, October 2007. (Brigitte Lacombe)

As Michelle Obama strolls around Mack’s Apples Pick-Your-Own orchard greeting people at the Londonderry children’s fair, she seems relaxed and friendly, her casual manner belying the pressing schedule that just whisked her from Chicago to New Hampshire and will soon rush her off to an afternoon packed with other events.

But when she addresses the crowd, there is no mistaking her sense of urgency as she makes an impassioned case for her husband’s presidential candidacy. “I am desperate for change—now,” she says, “not in 8 years or 12 years, but right now. We don’t have time to wait. We need big change—not just the shifting of power among insiders. We need to change the game, because the game is broken. When I think about the country I want to give my children, it’s not the world we have now. All I have to do is look into the faces of my children, and I realize how much work we need to do.”

Right now the Obamas’ daughters, six-year-old Sasha and nine-year-old Malia, are bouncing on the inflated castle at the fair, oblivious to the country’s problems. But for some of the assembled voters, their father’s youth is also an issue. Even his admirers acknowledge that, at 46, Barack Obama—a first-term senator and the youngest presidential contender in either party—has great potential but is relatively green. Most of his rivals are over 60, and many analysts have viewed the 2008 campaign as an exploratory run that could set the groundwork for a future race when Obama is more seasoned and the electorate has adjusted to the idea of America’s first black president.

Michelle Obama, who turns 44 in mid-January, is also young, by First Lady standards. Regally tall, stunning, and city-chic in a triple strand of pearls atop her country-casual pants-and-sweater outfit, she manages to look as down to earth as any other soccer mom and as glamorous as a model while instantly commanding respect, even before she starts to speak.

But Mrs. Obama has no interest in an ongoing quest for the White House. “To me, it’s now or never,” she tells me a few days later, in Chicago, where we’ve met up again at the campaign’s Michigan Avenue headquarters. “We’re not going to keep running and running and running, because at some point you do get the life beaten out of you. It hasn’t been beaten out of us yet. We need to be in there now, while we’re still fresh and open and fearless and bold. You lose some of that over time. Barack is not cautious yet; he’s ready to change the world, and we need that. So if we’re going to be cautious, I’d rather let somebody else do it, because that’s a big investment of time, just to do it the same way. There’s an inconvenience factor there, and if we’re going to uproot our lives, then let’s hopefully make a real big dent in what it means to be president of the United States.”...

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/12/michelle_obama200712?printable=true¤tPage=all

[peoli]

1. Sweet!

[College Liberal]

2. Thanks

It was a really good read. I am reread the GQ article on Edwards....

[killbotfactory]

3. I hope everyone has already seen her speech about fear

http://youtube.com/?v=qB0nlymrkLY

She is an impressive woman.