Michelle Obama

First Lady of the United States (since January 2009)

Why She Matters

From her policy positions to her fashion choices, Michelle Obama has pushed the boundaries of what it means to be a 21st-century first lady.

Obama's personal narrative made her a unique entry in the succession of women to occupy the East Wing. She is a descendant of slaves (and slave owners) from a working class family on the South side of Chicago who is also an Ivy-League educated lawyer, a working mother of two young daughters and a down-to-earth fashion icon.

Read more

Corrections?

Background

At a Glance

Career History: Vice president for community and external affairs, University of Chicago Hospitals (2005 to 2008); Executive director for community affairs, University of Chicago Hospitals, (2002 to 2005); Associate dean of Student Services, University of Chicago, (... to 2002)
Birthday: January 17,1964
Hometown: Chicago, Ill.
Alma Mater: Princeton University, B.A., 1985; Harvard Law School, J.D., 1988
Spouse: Barack Obama

Religion: Christian
Office: Office of the First Lady, The White House1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Email
Web site

Path to Power

In the Obama family narrative, it is Michelle's life that is often held up as the truly American success story. It was a path that took her from her working-class roots to an Ivy League education to the White House. She is only the third first lady to hold a graduate degree (Laura Bush and Hillary Rodham Clinton preceded her).

Born Michelle LaVaughn Robinson on the South Side of Chicago to working-class parents - her father, Fraser Robinson worked for the city's water treatment centers and her mother, Marion, stayed home with Michelle and her brother Craig - the future first lady grew up in modest circumstances.

Read more

Unlike her husband - whose Kenyan father and white Kansan mother track his family trajectory away from more typical life stories of African-Americans - the Robinson family moved northward to Illinois as part of the Great Migration, a path African-American families took in the decades after the Civil War and the early part of the 20th century.

Princeton Years

Robinson followed her older brother to Princeton University in the early 1980s. But as one of few black students, life was lonely. She wrote her 1985 senior thesis on the alienation she felt. "My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'Blackness' than ever before," explained Michelle in her thesis entitled "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community." "I have found that at Princeton no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my White professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong."

Excerpted in various publications during the 2008 presidential campaign, the thesis was used by right-wing pundits as a means of proving Michelle Obama's black radicalism, though most independent observers called the thesis "dense" at best, and hardly radical.

After Princeton, Obama attended Harvard Law School. Though she spent the bulk of her time at Harvard working for the Legal Aid Society, upon graduation in 1988, Obama joined the Chicago law firm Sidley Austin LLP where she was eventually assigned to mentor a summer associate: another Harvard law student named Barack Obama. The couple married in 1992; controversial pastor Jeremiah Wright conducted the ceremony.

In 1991, Michelle joined city government - working for Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley (D) - and stayed in the public sector as her husband began a political career.

In 1998, she gave birth to her first child, Malia. Her second daughter, Natasha, nicknamed Sasha, was born in 2001.

By 2007, she was collecting around $300,000 a year as the vice president for the University of Chicago Hospitals, where she led community outreach. That year, she took a leave of absence to help her husband, then a senator, campaign for the presidency.

2008 Campaign Controversy

Obama professes to have been uncertain about her husband's path to the White House - indeed, into politics at all. But her pride in her husband's quest for residency at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue got her in trouble during the primary season.

At a February 2008 rally in Milwaukee, Wis., Obama came to the podium and said, "For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country. And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. And I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction."

Labeled unpatriotic, the "proud" gaffe cost the future first lady considerable public sympathy at the time, especially from Republicans and right-wing pundits.

Throughout the rest of the campaign, she worked hard to reclaim public support via appearances on female-oriented television programs like daytime's "The View" and in her speech to the Democratic National Convention in Denver where she emphasized the normalcy of her family.

The future first lady, very consciously, did not evoke the historic, or racial, nature of the race to the White House again during the 2008 campaign.

The White House

In November 2008, Barack Obama won the presidency, and the Obamas became the first African-American family to live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Obama was swept immediately into a post-feminist debate when she officially left her high-powered job and declared her first priority in the White House would be as "mom in chief" to daughters Malia and Sasha. Feminist commentators wrote that Obama's choice not to continue working was a defeat for working women everywhere.

The Issues

Obama is the first presidential wife who is African-American, the third with a graduate degree and the first to have a child born in the 21st century. As she assumed her new role, she was deluged with expectations. Many White House-watchers hoped she would revolutionize what it meant to be a first lady in one way or another.

Obama entered the policy realm with enthusiasm, but kept to the areas traditionally associated with presidential wives, specifically children and families. Though disappointing to some, Obama gained swaths of fans. Her approval ratings hit a high of 72 percent in March 2009, and remained quite a bit higher than her husband's.

Read more

Healthy Eating and Health-Care Reform

Obama took the groundbreaking nature of her role as first lady literally in March 2009 when she invited local schoolchildren to help her plant a vegetable garden on the White House lawn.

The event was meant to draw attention to the importance of healthy eating at a time when Obama's husband was pushing a massive overhaul of the American health system. Many of Barack's reforms focused on cutting the skyrocketing medical costs caused by lifestyle diseases such as diabetes and heart disease. Doctors believe those chronic, expensive conditions can be prevented by eating a healthier diet.

It wasn't long before the firt lady entered the policy realm. In 2009 she became one of the administration's most public personalities advocating health reform.

In February 2010, Obama took the ideas behind her garden a step further, announcing a campaign to end the epidemic of childhood obesity, which she called "Let's Move!"

"It's an ambitious goal, but we don't have time to wait," Obama told USA TODAY. "We've got to stop citing statistics and wringing our hands and feeling guilty, and get going on this issue."

In it's first year, the Let's Move Campaign brokered a deal with megachain Walmart to sell healthier food, enlisted the help of the NFL to encourage kids to earn the Presidential Active Lifestyle Award, and helped pass the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which required healthier food in public school lunches.

Military Families

Obama has made championing the needs of military families one of her top priorities.

During the 2008 campaign, the Chicago Tribune wrote that Barack Obama had "deployed his wife on a mission to win over military families, many of them traditional Republicans." It was a bold move in a campaign against former Navy pilot Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) who spent five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, and allowed the Obama campaign to target voters in traditionally red states like North Carolina, which has eight active military bases. It worked; Obama won the state in the general election, the first Democrat to do so in 32 years.

Michelle Obama focused on one group with whom she felt she could make a real connection: military wives, especially those whose husbands were deployed overseas, leaving them to run households and raise children alone often while holding down full-time jobs.

Once she became first lady, Obama continued to visit military bases to meet with families.

At the Joint Armed Forces Officers Wives Club in January 2010, she announced that her husband's 2011 budget included $8.8 billion for military family support programs.

Community Service

Obama and her husband have both been strong advocates of national and community service, especially in the wake of the 2008-2009 financial crisis.

In June 2009, she helped kick off United We Serve, a summer program aimed at stimulating the economy through volunteer work.

Fashion Icon

During the 2008 campaign, Obama was gradually able to win over the majority of Americans, not only with her family-first statements but also with her fashion choices. Unlike other first ladies, she prominently wore affordable labels like J. Crew juxtaposed with designer outfits, to such effect that she was named to the best dressed lists of Vanity Fair and People magazines.

"I feel like [this] is the first time in a really long time that the First Lady looks like she lives the same life as the rest of us, as opposed to being very much separate from us," said Robin Givhan, fashion editor for The Washington Post. "Her clothes look like clothes that you live in, as opposed to stand around and pose for official photographs in."

The Network

A native Chicagoan, Obama introduced her husband to many of the Chicago political insiders who formed a tight-knit group around the couple and fueled Barack's rise in Illinois politics.

Nearly two decades ago, Obama first encountered now-senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett when Jarrett hired her to work in Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley's (D) office after Michelle's stint in corporate law. Jarrett soon became a close friend and mentor to both Obamas. It was working for Daley that Michelle met her current chief of staff, Susan Sher.