A Woman Who Didn't Like Politics

"She's a hugger," Michelle Obama's press secretary warned me. So when I find myself enfolded by a pair of long, well-toned arms, I'm not as astonished as I might have been. It is early June, and Obama has just arrived in Montana for the last day of campaigning in the long Democratic primary season. I've been hovering on a rope line, eavesdropping on her conversations. She has bestowed hugs on a few supporters, but with a press ID pinned to my lapel, I wasn't expecting one. (Reporters rarely score hugs from anyone but their own family.) When I identify myself, she disentangles without recoil or embarrassment and says she is looking forward to our interview: "It's great you came out here to see what I do."

Then she moves on, a Secret Service agent at each elbow, to greet a toddler being held aloft by his mother. "Hi! So glad I got to meet you before your nap!"

For a woman who didn't like politics and didn't want her husband to run for president, Obama has become a polished campaigner. I first met her the summer before, when Barack's candidacy seemed destined to be flattened by the Clinton juggernaut. The event was an evening fund-raiser (disclosure: I was there as a campaign donor) on Martha's Vineyard, and Michelle had been pleasant but detached as she worked the room. I got the impression she would much rather have been at the beach with her daughters.

The Montana Michelle is entirely different. Casually elegant in a silver-gray sweater over linen pants, she moves through the crowd as if she is genuinely enjoying each encounter. Warm, focused, she switches easily from light banter with those who just want to shake her hand to grave attentiveness with those who buttonhole her about policy. Beside me in the crowd, a campaign volunteer named Loretta Howard recalls how a young woman at another rally had asked Barack if he'd consider an Obama-Obama ticket. "He said that if he did, Michelle would have to be the one on top." The women standing nearby smile. They like this, the slightly henpecked pose the candidate occasionally affects, even if Washington insiders like Maureen Dowd sniff that it is emasculating. These women -- ranchers, some of them, with capable hands, who left battered pickups in the parking lot -- understand what it means when a man calls you his rock.

Earlier, when Michelle addressed the crowd, she spoke without notes about the lessons of the 16-month primary season. "I don't care where I've been, I don't care what state or community, I don't even care if Barack got crushed in that state. People have been decent, they've been open, they've listened, they've been kind...That's the America that I've come to know."

MORE articles in this Topic