Michelle Obama's The Natural: Vogue
Saturday, September 1, 2007 at 4:33PM 
Iowa in spring. A full nine months before the primaries, but Michelle Obama is already at work on her husband's behalf. The setting: the Chit-n-Chat coffee shop in Waukee. Population 9,213. Percentage of population that is white: 97.7. The subject: values. Hers and his. "I married my husband," she tells the crowd, composed equally of reporters and supporters, "because we shared the same Midwestern values: Keep your word, work hard, treat others with respect."
As a topic, it's a little disappointing. Who would ever come out in favor of shirking work? I had hoped for a little more of "He's a man, just a man"—the speech in which she ribs her lionized husband for being so inept at the banal details of daily life—but those jokes, she tells me later, have gone a little flat. Once you've done them, you can't keep doing them. That, and Maureen Dowd's having chided her in The New York Times for assuming that the American public does, in fact, see Barack Obama as a god. "No harm, no foul," Michelle Obama says of the criticism. "She obviously didn't get me"—though she admits to subsequently toning down the irony. "If the joke is clouding the point, then let's just get to the point." more
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