From page 2 of the Times article:
After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1988, Mrs. Obama took a job at what is now Sidley Austin, a corporate law firm. She had a handsome salary and the prospect of better to come. Then a close friend from college died. So did her father, who had long suffered from multiple sclerosis; Michelle so adored him that she would curl up in his lap even as an adult.
“I looked out at my neighborhood and sort of had an epiphany that I had to bring my skills to bear in the place that made me,” she says in the interview. “I wanted to have a career motivated by passion and not just money.”
Eventually, she started the Chicago chapter of a training program called Public Allies. One day, looking for young leaders, she might knock on doors at Cabrini-Green, a public housing project so violent and neglected it would later be mostly demolished. Another day, she discovered Jose A. Rico, a young Mexican so alienated that he insisted on remaining an illegal immigrant rather than pursue citizenship. What is your goal? he recalled her asking. To open a high school for Latinos, he replied. Mrs. Obama nodded: Good, tell me exactly how you would do it.
“Michelle was tough, man; she let nothing slide,” said Mr. Rico, now principal of Multicultural Arts High School in Chicago, which he helped start.
She preached the gospel of the second and third chance, insisting that the white youth from Swarthmore work alongside the former gang member.
On race relations:
Blacks accused whites of being clueless. Whites said blacks masked insecurity with anger. Mrs. Obama probed carefully, sometimes dialing up the heat before turning it down.
“I hate diversity workshops,” she says. “Real change comes from having enough comfort to be really honest and say something very uncomfortable.”
On her ability to bring people together and soothe tensions:
By 2001, Mrs. Obama, married for nine years and the mother of two daughters, had taken a job as vice president of community affairs at the University of Chicago Medical Center. She soon discovered just how acrimonious those affairs were.
Hospital brass had gathered to break ground for a children’s wing when African-American protesters broke in with bullhorns, drowning out the proceedings with demands that the hospital award more contracts to minority firms.
The executives froze. Mrs. Obama strolled over and offered to meet later, if only the protestors would pipe down. She revised the contracting system, sending so much business to firms owned by women and other minorities that the hospital won awards.
On her community deeds:
In the mostly black neighborhoods around the hospital, Mrs. Obama became the voice of a historically white institution. Behind closed doors, she tried to assuage their frustrations about a place that could seem forbidding.
Like many urban hospitals, the medical center’s emergency room becomes clogged with people who need primary care. So Mrs. Obama trained counselors, mostly local blacks, to hand out referrals to health clinics lest black patients felt they were being shooed away.
On taking a stand against injustice:
She also altered the hospital’s research agenda. When the human papillomavirus vaccine, which can prevent cervical cancer, became available, researchers proposed approaching local school principals about enlisting black teenage girls as research subjects.
Mrs. Obama stopped that. The prospect of white doctors performing a trial with black teenage girls summoned the specter of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment of the mid-20th century, when white doctors let hundreds of black men go untreated to study the disease.
“She’ll talk about the elephant in the room,” said Susan Sher, her boss at the hospital, where Mrs. Obama is on leave from her more-than-$300,000-a-year job.
On what's next:
In coming weeks, Mrs. Obama will visit the spouses of military personnel and talk of the patriotic duty to provide these families with care and services. And the campaign has hired Stephanie Cutter, a veteran strategist, as her chief of staff, who will seek to deflect attacks.
I think with good strategists, this could sell. The Times says she will take on a more prominent and visible role in her husband's campaign. Most people have not heard Michelle Obama first-hand. Aside from a few poorly phrased comments overplayed to death by the media, this will be their first chance to form their own impression of her.
If she sounds natural, and I think she will -- they've been working on the makeover for a while and she's a smart woman -- the new Michelle will be the only Michelle in a very short time.
I think voters will want to get to know her. After all, she may be our next First Lady. She isn't re-inventing herself so much as changing her tone and highlighting alternate facets of her life.
She probably won't be as spontaneous. I do hope she stops trying to convince voters she and her husband are ordinary folks just like them. They haven't been for some time. Rather than that approach, I'd like to see her listen to what others have to say about their problems -- like health care, paying off debts, child care and the like -- and then simply respond with what her husband's Administration will do to improve their lives.
It's when she ventures into the "I feel your pain, Barack and I were in the same boat until just a few years ago" that she loses me. Regular folks don't go to Princeton and Harvard and end up with $300k year jobs and million dollar book royalties.
If she can just listen and respond in a way that leaves voters with the feeling that she genuinely cares about their problems and will work hard towards finding solutions, I think she will become both accepted and admired.
