Don't worry this isn't another 'I love Obama' post (even though....Obama08! Obama 08!), this is about Michelle Obama who has become a fashion standout in the months she has been on the campaign trail. I've been watching her for some time now, an I must say, I like her style. Many have said she is bringing fashion back to the white house, where it has been absent since the days of Jackie O. Loving called "Miche" by her family, they wondered if their strong headed girl would find a husband tough enough to hold his own. Then Barack came around.
Both had graduated from Ivy League colleges (Michelle from Princeton and Barack from Columbia) and then from Harvard Law (Michelle in 1988 and Barack in 1991, though he is three years older than she). Both are tall (Michelle is 5 feet 11 and Barack is six feet two). And the couple had met through another serendipitous coincidence: In 1988, when Michelle was a first-year associate at the Chicago law firm Sidley & Austin (now Sidley Austin Brown & Wood), Barack arrived as a summer associate, an internship between his first and second years of law school. Michelle was assigned to be Barack's mentor and a month later he asked her out.
"Barack is very straightforward! He said, ‘I think we ought to go on a date.
After putting it off for a while because she worried that it would be inappropriate, the two spent a day touring the Art Institute, lunching at the museum's outdoor café, and then walking along Michigan Avenue before taking in a movie, Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing. Three years later, they married.
Michelle Obama, 40, grew up on Chicago's South Side. Michelle showed her aptitude early. She skipped second grade, graduating second in her class at Bryn Mawr Elementary, and, according to her mother, Marian, "she would practice the piano for so long you'd have to tell her to stop." Michelle later attended Whitney Young High School; her friends there included Rev. Jesse Jackson's daughter Santita, now godmother to the Obamas' older daughter. During her junior year in high school, Michelle visited Craig at Princeton University, which had recruited him to play basketball (at 6 feet 7, he became the school's fourth-leading scorer in its history). She set her sights on following Craig, also an excellent student, and remembers thinking, perhaps only half jokingly, "I'm smarter than he is!"
After Princeton, she went to Harvard Law, then took the job at Sidley, back in Chicago. Three years into her career as a corporate attorney, Michelle was devastated when her father died from MS complications.
"That's when I started analyzing my life, sitting in a firm."
She left the firm to work for the city. She is now the executive director of community affairs for University of Chicago Hospitals.
Today, as a windstorm of anticipation gathers around them, Michelle is Barack's confidante. "She's gorgeous. She's strong and smart and grounded," he says. "[And] she's brutally honest, which is good for keeping my head on straight." When not making the occasional campaign appearance, she maintains a normal routine: rising at 4:30 a.m.; exercising with a personal trainer; working full-time; caring for their two young daughters (Malia, six, and Natasha, three), who attend the university's Lab School; and staying close to home, the bottom floor of a Hyde Park brownstone where the Obamas have lived for more than a decade.
She also manages to carve out time for friends and family, often visiting her mother, who lives nearby, and making dates with brother Craig and his two kids.
Asked what political wife she admires, she cites Hillary Rodham Clinton. "She is smart and gracious and everything she appears to be in public-someone who's managed to raise what appears to be a solid, grounded child." Would she ever consider running for political office herself? "No," she says, firmly, not pausing a beat. "Absolutely not."
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