The Accompanists

Bill Clinton and Michelle Obama Warm Up to Their Parts in Orchestrating Victory

Both are confident and funny, opinionated and very smart. Both are Ivy League lawyers with working-class roots. Both have formidable identities independent of their formidable partners. Both are history-making spouses of history-making presidential candidates.

It is fascinating enough that Bill Clinton and Michelle Obama are playing on the same field as their partners duel for the Democratic nomination. More intriguing still is her effectiveness, hardly a given for a recent campaign recruit matched against a two-term president.

Clinton, 61, earned his reputation as one of the most gifted national politicians in modern times while Obama was still a young lawyer trying to find herself. Obama, 44, kept her political forays to a minimum while building a career on community outreach in Chicago, yet more than a few enchanted voters have said after watching her that she should be the one in public office.

They share an ability to please a crowd, although in styles as different as a piano and a saxophone. Her riffs are typically smooth and tart, usually understated, always controlled; his are showy and wide-ranging, often roaming exuberantly through complex material.

On the campaign trail, as one staff member put it, Bill Clinton is Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's chief validator. He zips around the country -- this week in states from Illinois to Georgia to Missouri to Colorado -- reassuring Democrats, above all, that she is ready but he has her back. Michelle Obama's role is more of a portraitist. She jetted to both coasts this week to deepen the picture of the self-described skinny black guy with a funny name, and to argue that a divided nation needs him now.

The Clintons and the Obamas are crossing rhetorical paths more frequently these days.

Leading up to the South Carolina primary, the voluble former president assumed the role of antagonist in chief. He called Barack Obama's assertion of consistent opposition to the Iraq war a "fairy tale" and suggested that Obama was way too admiring of Ronald Reagan. He told one audience that "people tell me that Hillary doesn't have a chance to win here" because the state's voters care so deeply about race and gender.

Michelle Obama, who rarely talks explicitly about her husband's Democratic opponents, had something to say about all of that.

"Another candidate's spouse has been getting an awful lot of attention," understandably, she wrote in a fundraising e-mail last week. "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."

The day before the primary, she and Bill Clinton campaigned within an hour's drive of each other.

"My fear," Obama told a rapt mid-morning audience at Central Oak Grove Missionary Baptist Church in Hilton Head, "is that we don't know what truth looks like anymore.

"I desperately want change, personally," Obama said. "A change in tone, a change in the tone that creates division and separates us, that makes us live in isolation from one another. Sometimes our politics uses that division as a tool and a crutch. We think we can mend it all up after all the dirt has been thrown, but we can't."