The other Obama

In Barack Obama's bid for the Democratic nomination, wife Michelle is fondly referred to as 'The Closer.'

He is, by both nature and image-maker design, the John Boy of presidential aspirants.Harvard grad, successful lawyer, devoted mother . . . and every morning she gets to wake up next to him.

COLUMBIA, S.C.–She's the other "supportive spouse" on the campaign trail, but she doesn't lecture the media or launch political assaults.

Michelle Obama has no legacy to protect, can't wax nostalgic about her eight years in the White House, doesn't appear to be seeking office herself.

She has her own story to tell.

On a recent day, when Bill Clinton was talking about political "hit jobs," she was reading The Big Hungry Bear to preschoolers, trading hugs with 5-year-olds, then talking at a round table about breastfeeding and her daughters' soccer games.

But make no mistake – 44-year-old Michelle Obama is a savvy, if reluctant, political campaigner, a woman whose elegant air cushions some blunt views, a woman who can switch from doting mother to dynamic speaker at a podium in a blink.

She is an unquestioned asset to her husband, Barack Obama, as he heads into today's South Carolina showdown with Hillary Clinton in their battle for the Democratic presidential nomination, working more subtly and quietly than Clinton's spouse, who likes to bloody a few noses and make a lot of noise along the trail.

The Obama campaign fondly calls her "The Closer," the one who seals the deal, the embodiment of her husband's brassy campaign theme by Stevie Wonder, "Signed, Sealed Delivered."

She, more than her husband, can speak about a typical African American upbringing in this country.

She talks to women, a demographic her husband must win back, and about the gap in opportunities for young black girls, and she has spoken openly about fears for her family's safety.

"Ain't no black people in Iowa," she said famously, touting her husband's ability to cut across racial lines for support.

"Something big, something new is happening."

Michelle Obama can point to her childhood in a one-bedroom apartment on the south side of Chicago, her rise through Princeton and Harvard, a successful law practice, and her positions on corporate boards and the University of Chicago, posts that allowed her to earn double her husband's salary, more than $300,000 according to published reports, when she gave it up to help her spouse of 15 years become president.

"My mother came home and took care of us through high school, my father was a city shift worker who took care of us all his life," she told a university crowd here this week.

"The only amazing thing about my life is that a man like my father could raise a family of four on a single city worker's salary."

She initially had qualms about her husband's presidential run and spent months under the radar, staying back in Chicago with the couple's daughters, 6-year-old Sasha and 9-year-old Malia.

But then, she told Vanity Fair in an interview, she realized this bid was not about her husband, but her entire family.

"We're running for president of the United States," she said.

Now, one of the Obama campaign's buttons features the family of four as "America's First Family."

The former Michelle Robinson first met Barack Obama, a law student three years her senior, when she was assigned to mentor him at the Chicago law firm of Sidley Austin.

She took it upon herself to try to fix him up with eligible women his age, but Obama finally asked her out.

On their first date, she told the Chicago Sun-Times, they went to the Art Institute, strolled the city's famous Michigan Ave. and caught a movie, Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing.

She had a more traditional view of commitment in a relationship; he was unconvinced of the strength of marriage as an institution.

On the couple's 15th wedding anniversary last October, she told the newspaper of the night he proposed, an evening that began with her telling him she was losing patience with his ambivalence when it came to marriage.

Then dessert arrived, a box on a plate. An engagement ring was inside.

"He said, `That kind of shuts you up, doesn't it?'" she recounted to the newspaper.

She is perhaps an even more commanding presence in a room than her husband, a statuesque woman, this day wearing a grey sweater and pinstriped suit, who demands attention and whose every movement is followed by every eye in the room.

On this day, she reads for a gaggle of 17 preschoolers, and she immediately charms, drawing each and every child into the exercise.

She hams it up with a giant university mascot and even shares a conspiratorial whisper with a tiny member of her group who tells her his parents really like her husband.

"Good," she whispers back, breaking into a large grin.

Then she moves upstairs to another room at this building on the University of South Carolina campus and talks about the challenges facing working women and young children in the United States and the need to elect someone who has "leadership, vision and character ... someone close enough to the ground to understand this."

She tells them she shops at Target, she stands in the morning chill on the soccer fields watching her daughters and agrees with another woman about inadequate maternity leave, saying that everyone pressures women to breast-feed, "but by the time you figure it out, you're back at work."

She tells them she would have no problem staying at home with her children, but that is not an option available to her or anyone in the room.

"During this entire process, I am constantly checking on my kids – `You okay?' `How you feelin'?'

"My disappointment as a woman, as a professional, is that my predecessors have been very good at playing the game, but the game itself is broken," she says. "Being a good mother should not be a barrier to being a good employee."

But she declines an invitation from the Star to discuss the other spouse, with whom Hillary Clinton famously equated her at a debate this week.

"Oh no, definitely not," she says.

But she had no qualms about doing it in a fundraising email.

"We knew getting into this race that Barack would be competing with Senator Clinton and president Clinton at the same time," she says in the appeal.

"We expected that Bill Clinton would tout his record from the '90s and talk about Hillary's role in his past success. That's a fair approach and a challenge we are prepared to face.

"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 wilfully distort Barack's record."

Their "smear tactics" turn people off government, she said.

She has had to learn that her words will always be magnified on the campaign trail. And she has had to check herself in dealing with reporters because her natural penchant is to lapse into sarcastic humour, a dangerous gambit in such a high-stakes race.

Earlier in the race, she made headlines with a comment that appeared to be an attack on the Clintons.

"Our view is if you can't run your own house, you certainly can't run the White House," she said in August. The campaign later said she was referring only to her home situation.

And when her would-be president comes home?

He does the laundry, makes the bed, takes out the garbage, she says.

"The girls need to see him doing that, and he knows I need him to do that," she says.

"That was a meeting of the minds that we had to reach.

"I wasn't content with saying, `You're doing important things in the world, so go off and be important and I'll handle everything else here.'

"The truth is, if I did that, I'd probably still be angry."

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