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Who Is Michelle Obama?
By Yoji Cole
January 25, 2007
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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Readers' Comments
Posted: Monday, Jul 21, 2008
Who Is Michelle Obama?
i think that this article was very much on point, there were a lot of things that i didn't know about michelle, that has truly inspired me to get up a go back to college and make something out of my life and stop depending on others.
Carol Sharkey
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