Who Is Michelle Obama?

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Keywords: Michelle Obama, campaing, Barack, Election 2008, Presidental election

Princeton undergrad, Harvard Law School alum, corporate vice president and mother of two young girls--Michelle Obama's professional and personal résumé already is impressive. And since she could be the next First Lady, let's take a look at her. To her friends, Michelle Obama seems to manage public and private pressures with effortless poise. She is intimately involved with her husband's work, reading drafts of his major speeches and tweaking his big ideas and little punctuation choices alike, reports Newsweek. She has been his link to African America, its civil-rights movement and its power elite.

Those ties came in handy when her husband, then a state senator, ran for the U.S. Senate in 2004, where he faced a primary dominated by some of the Democratic Party's most powerful political families. Barack Obama won, thanks to the support of influential black business leaders, some of whom had closer ties to his wife than they did to him. An old boss of Michelle Obama's, Valerie Jarrett, chair of the Chicago Stock Exchange, was among the most powerful black women in Chicago and served as finance chair of Barack Obama's campaign, reports Newsweek.

A native of Chicago's predominantly black south side, Michelle Obama always has been a creature of discipline, decorum and determination. Her résumé is as impressive as her husband's. She is a 1985 cum laude graduate of Princeton University, a 1988 graduate of Harvard Law School, a former associate dean at the University of Chicago, and currently a vice president at the University of Chicago Hospitals. Michelle Obama sits on six boards, including the prestigious Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools and Tree House Foods.

"As far back as any of us can remember, she was very bright," her brother, Craig Robinson, who preceded his sister at Princeton to become its fourth-highest-scoring basketball player, told the Chicago Sun Times.

Michelle Obama was raised in a one-bedroom apartment on the top floor of a classic Chicago brick bungalow, now surrounded by a chain-link fence, in South Shore. Her bedroom actually was the apartment's living room, which had been converted with a divider down the middle, allowing her to share it with her brother until an addition was built. Her father died in 1990, but her mother still lives there, behind burglar-proof wrought-iron doors and secured windows, poised above a hedge of clipped yews.

As a young lawyer, she initially brushed off advances from her future husband because they worked at the same firm--he was a young intern, she was a young associate.

A reporter, visiting her Chicago home in 2004, noticed a to-do list for her two daughters, Malia, 8, and Natasha, 5, that included time for "play." She is in bed most nights by 9:30 and rises each morning at 4:30 to run on a treadmill.

Michelle and Barack Obama live today in a $1.65-million Georgian revival Kenwood mansion surrounded by a tall wrought-iron fence. The couple chose to keep their children in Chicago following Barack Obama's election to the U.S. Senate.

"We made a good decision to stay in Chicago, to remain based in Chicago, so that has kept our family stable," Michelle Obama told the Chicago Tribune. "There has been very little transition for me and the girls. Now he's commuting a lot, but he's the grown-up. He's the senator. He can handle it. That's really helped in keeping us grounded."

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