Michelle Obama Interview: Her Father's Daughter (page 2 of 4)

Here in the Midwest, the highest compliment that can be paid someone who has done well in life is that he or she is "still so normal.'' Michelle Obama easily qualifies for the participant ribbon in that event, turning up at Obama headquarters on time to the minute, in a simple black-and-white cotton skirt and sleeveless blouse, with one arm around her mom. (Marian, who is on her way to pick up her grandkids at camp and agreed to come only because her daughter promised her that she wouldn't have to have her picture taken, has never given an interview with her daughter before.) Because campaign spouses tend to keep a wary eye on the political mercenaries who run these operations, it's a bit startling that even the volunteers call her Michelle and shout a casual greeting as she arrives. I don't know that I've ever seen a presidential candidate's wife inspire less fear in the troops.

Politics wasn't discussed much in their home when Michelle was growing up. "I didn't like to talk about politics'' until fairly recently, Michelle says. For one thing, there seemed to be so many other ways to make a contribution. For a while, she'd hoped to become a pediatrician. "I like kids, and I thought being a doctor was a noble profession.'' But? "Then I got to high school and started taking science. And math.''

Today she works in a medical center, but as an administrator for the University of Chicago Hospitals. She's on leave now but has quadrupled the number of volunteers who come in to lend a hand and rejuvenated a volunteer program to get a similar number of hospital employees to give time to the community-Michelle's old neighborhood-in their off-hours. She's also led a push to get patients who use the ER for routine care connected to neighborhood clinics instead, both to cut costs and to improve preventive care for low-income families.

She's not a big fan of the political process, even now, "because it seems like a dirty business, and Barack is such a nice guy," she says. "I thought, Eventually he'll come to his senses.'' Instead it's she who has come to hers, although a lack of good sense was never an issue for a woman whom friends uniformly describe as the mom most likely to set immovable boundaries for her children. (You don't like what's for lunch? Guess you'll be extra hungry for dinner!) In his first book, Dreams from My Father, her husband wrote of Michelle that "in her eminent practicality and Midwestern attitudes, she reminds me not a little of Toot,'' his maternal grandmother, the no-nonsense Kansan who raised him-and who, after meeting Michelle for the first time, pronounced her "a very sensible girl.''

To hear Marian tell it, her daughter was born that way, maybe too much so. As a mom, "Michelle is way stricter, she has way too many rules," says Marian. "I don't think I was that bad. I let them look at TV.'' But then, by Marian's account, Michelle practically raised herself: "I really just think I left her alone,'' she says with a laugh. Both of her kids, she says, "were way smarter than I was, from the very beginning!"

Says Michelle, whose own girls, Sasha and Malia, are seven and ten, "Mama always understates her role.''

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