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See a slideshow of Michelle Obama and her family
Before I met Michelle Obama, her brother, Craig Robinson, told me that to really understand her, I'd have to know a little bit about their father. Fraser Robinson worked swing shifts for the city of Chicago, tending the boilers at a water-filtration plant. "My father was not college-educated,'' said Craig, head basketball coach for Oregon State University, but was "full of integrity,'' the "gold standard'' of husbands, and "a hardworking man who raised two kids when he had multiple sclerosis.''
When I sit down with the potential first lady at her husband's Chicago campaign headquarters, I see what her brother was getting at. In nearly an hour with Michelle and her 70-year-old mother, Marian Robinson, nothing comes across more clearly than the extent to which 44-year-old Michelle was molded by the years she spent watching her father, whose determination defined strength for Michelle. She came to see complaining as a moral failing and a show of self-indulgence.
"Seeing a parent with a disability moving through the world and living life as if that disability didn't matter," Michelle says, "always made us think, What do we have to complain about? We wake up, we bound out of bed, we are healthy, we're happy, and our father is struggling to get out of bed. But he never missed a day of work, never talked about being sick. So it made it hard to wake up and say, 'I don't want to go to school.'"
Michelle is candid, yes, sometimes to her detriment, and can come across as overconfident in a way a man similarly lacking in self-doubt might not. But victimhood is not her style. On the contrary, she's disinclined to take political jabs personally and so disinterested in dissecting or answering them that when I invite her to take umbrage, she practically yawns. She's a big girl, she says, and sees that those attacks are not about her, not at all.
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