Michelle Obama

Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama (born January 17, 1964) is the wife of the forty-fourth President of the United States, Barack Obama, and the first African-American First Lady of the United States.





Michelle Robinson was born and grew up on the South Side of Chicago and graduated from Princeton University and Harvard Law School. After completing her formal education, she returned to Chicago and accepted a position with the law firm Sidley Austin, before meeting her husband Barack Obama. Subsequently, Mrs. Obama has worked as part of the staff of Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley, and for the University of Chicago Medical Center. Throughout 2007 and 2008, she helped campaign for her husband's presidential bid. She also delivered a keynote address at the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado. Mrs. Obama is the mother of two daughters, Sasha and Malia, and is the sister of Craig Robinson, men's basketball coach at Oregon State University. She is the first cousin, once removed, of Rabbi Capers C. Funnye Jr., one of the country’s most prominent black rabbis. Her assigned Secret Service codename is "Renaissance".

Michelle Robinson was born on January 17, 1964, in Chicago, Illinois to Fraser Robinson III, a city water plant employee and Democratic...............

Michelle Robinson was born on January 17, 1964, in Chicago, Illinois to Fraser Robinson III, a city water plant employee and Democratic precinct captain, and Marian Shields Robinson, a secretary at Spiegel's catalog store. Michelle can trace her roots to pre-Civil War African Americans in the American South; her paternal great-great grandfather, Jim Robinson, was an American slave in the state of South Carolina, where some of her family still reside. She grew up on Euclid Avenue in the South Shore community area of Chicago, and was raised in a conventional two-parent home. The family ate meals together and also entertained together as a family by playing games such as Monopoly and by reading. She and her brother, Craig (who is 21 months older), skipped the second grade. By sixth grade, Michelle joined a gifted class at Bryn Mawr Elementary School (later renamed Bouchet Academy). She attended Whitney Young High School, Chicago's first magnet high school, where she was on the honor roll four years, took advanced placement classes, was a member of the National Honor Society and served as student council treasurer. The round trip commute from her South Side home to the Near West Side took three hours out of her day. She was a high school classmate of Santita Jackson, the daughter of Jesse Jackson and sister of Jesse Jackson, Jr. She graduated from high school in 1981 as salutatorian, and went on to major in sociology and minor in African American studies at Princeton University, where she graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in 1985.

At Princeton, she challenged the teaching methodology for French because she felt that it should be more conversational.[17] As part of her requirements for graduation, she wrote a thesis entitled, "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community."[ "I remember being shocked," she says, "by college students who drove BMWs. I didn't even know parents who drove BMWs." She obtained her Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree from Harvard Law School in 1988. While at Harvard, she participated in political demonstrations advocating the hiring of professors who are members of minorities. She is the third First Lady with a postgraduate degree, following Hillary Rodham Clinton and Laura Bush. In July 2008, Obama accepted the invitation to become an honorary member of the 100-year-old black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha, which had no active undergraduate chapter at Princeton when she attended.


Barack and Michelle Obama.She met Barack Obama when they were among very few African Americans at their law firm, Sidley Austin, (she has sometimes said only two, although others have pointed out there were others in different departments) and she was assigned to mentor him while he was a summer associate. Their relationship started with a business lunch and then a community organization meeting where he first impressed her. The couple's first date was to the Spike Lee movie Do the Right Thing. The couple married in October 1992, and they have two daughters, Malia Ann (born 1998) and Natasha (known as Sasha) (born 2001). After his election to the U.S. Senate, the Obama family continued to live on Chicago's South Side, choosing to remain there rather than moving to Washington, D.C. Throughout her husband's 2008 campaign for President of the United States, she made a "commitment to be away overnight only once a week—to campaign only two days a week and be home by the end of the second day" for their two children.

The marital relationship has had its ebbs and flows. The combination of an evolving family life and beginning political career led to many arguments about balancing work and family. Barack wrote in his second book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, that "Tired and stressed, we had little time for conversation, much less romance". However, despite their family obligations and careers, they continue to attempt to schedule date nights.

She once requested that Barack, who was then her fiancé, meet her prospective boss, Valerie Jarrett, when considering her first career move. Now, Jarrett is one of her husband’s closest advisors.

The Obamas' daughters attended the University of Chicago Lab School, a private school, and now attend Sidwell Friends School in Washington after also considering Georgetown Day School. According to an Obama interview on the 2008 season premiere of The Ellen DeGeneres Show, the couple does not intend to have any more children. They have received advice from past first ladies Laura Bush, Rosalyn Carter and Hillary Rodham Clinton about raising children in the White House. Marian Robinson has moved into the White House to assist with child care.

Following law school, she was an associate at the Chicago office of the law firm Sidley Austin, where she first met her husband.

Following law school, she was an associate at the Chicago office of the law firm Sidley Austin, where she first met her husband. At the firm, she worked on marketing and intellectual property. Subsequently, she held public sector positions in the Chicago city government as an Assistant to the Mayor, and as Assistant Commissioner of Planning and Development. In 1993, she became Executive Director for the Chicago office of Public Allies, a non-profit organization encouraging young people to work on social issues in nonprofit groups and government agencies. She worked there nearly four years and set fundraising records for the organization that still stood a dozen years after she left.

In 1996, Obama served as the Associate Dean of Student Services at the University of Chicago, where she developed the University's Community Service Center. In 2002, she began working for the University of Chicago Hospitals, first as executive director for community affairs and, beginning May, 2005, as Vice President for Community and External Affairs.

She continued to hold the University of Chicago Hospitals position during the primary campaign, but cut back to part time in order to spend time with her daughters as well as work for her husband's election; she subsequently took a leave of absence from her job.

She served as a salaried board member of TreeHouse Foods, Inc. (NYSE: THS), a major Wal-Mart supplier with whom she cut ties immediately after her husband made comments critical of Wal-Mart at an AFL-CIO forum in Trenton, New Jersey, on May 14, 2007. She serves on the board of directors of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

According to the couple’s 2006 income tax return, Michelle's salary was $273,618 from the University of Chicago Hospitals, while he had a salary of $157,082 from the United States Senate. The total Obama income, however, was $991,296 including $51,200 she earned as a member of the board of directors of TreeHouse Foods, plus investments and royalties from his books.

Although Michelle Obama has campaigned on her husband's behalf since early in his political career by handshaking and fund-raising, she did not relish

Although Michelle Obama has campaigned on her husband's behalf since early in his political career by handshaking and fund-raising, she did not relish the activity at first. When she campaigned during her husband's 2000 run for U.S. House of Representatives, her boss at the University of Chicago asked if there was any single thing about campaigning that she enjoyed; after some thought, she replied visiting so many living rooms had given her some new decorating ideas.

In May 2007, three months after her husband declared his presidential candidacy, she reduced her professional responsibilities by eighty percent to support his presidential campaign. Early in the campaign, she had limited involvement in which she traveled to political events only two days a week and traveled overnight only if their daughters could come along. In early February 2008, she attended thirty-three events in eight days. She has made at least two campaign appearances with Oprah Winfrey. Obama writes her own speeches and speaks without notes.

In 2007, Michelle gave stump speeches for her husband's presidential campaign at various locations in the United States. Jennifer Hunter of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about one speech of hers in Iowa, "Michelle was a firebrand, expressing a determined passion for her husband's campaign, talking straight from the heart with eloquence and intelligence." She employs an all-female staff of aides for her political rol She says that she negotiated an agreement in which her husband gave up smoking in exchange for her support of his decision to run. About her role in her husband's presidential campaign she has said: "My job is not a senior adviser." During the campaign, she has discussed race and education by using motherhood as a framework.

The presidential campaign was her first exposure to the national political scene and even before the field of Democratic candidates was narrowed to two she was considered the least famous of the candidates' spouses. Early in the campaign, she exhibited her ironic humor and told anecdotes about the Obama family life. However, as the press began to emphasize her sarcasm, which did not translate well in the print media, she toned it down. A New York Times op-ed columnist, Maureen Dowd, wrote:

I wince a bit when Michelle Obama chides her husband as a mere mortal—comic routine that rests on the presumption that we see him as a god ... But it may not be smart politics to mock him in a way that turns him from the glam JFK into the mundane Gerald Ford, toasting his own English muffin. If all Senator Obama is peddling is the Camelot mystique, why debunk this mystique?

Asked in February 2008 whether she could see herself "working to support" Hillary Rodham Clinton if she got the nomination, Michelle Obama said "I'd have to think about that. I'd have to think about policies, her approach, her tone." When questioned about this by the interviewer, however, she stated "You know, everyone in this party is going to work hard for whoever the nominee is."

The Obamas, with Joe and Jill Biden at the August 23, 2008 Vice Presidential announcement in Springfield, Illinois.Despite her criticisms of Clinton during the 2008 campaign, when asked in 2004 which political spouse she admired, Obama cited Hillary Clinton, stating, "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."

On October 6, 2008 Larry King Live Obama was asked if the American electorate is past the Bradley effect. She stated that Barack's achievement of the nomination was a fairly strong indicator that it is.[56] The same night she also was interviewed by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show where she deflected criticism of her husband and his campaign. Her first Daily Show appearance came after her husband had made three such appearances.


The Obamas enjoy a victory fist bump upon his winning the Democratic nomination. (2008-06-03)Obama was involved in two of a trio of references to Barack Obama by Fox News that were controversial. On June 11, 2008 during an interview with conservative columnist Michelle Malkin about whether Michelle Obama had been the target of unfair criticism, the network flashed a chyron that showed the message "Outraged liberals: Stop picking on Obama’s baby mama," which implied that Michelle Obama was not married to the father of her children. Because Barack and Michelle Obama are lawfully married to each other, the network recognized the poor judgment of its own producer in an official statement made to The Politico. Earlier on E. D. Hill's Fox News show America's Pulse, Hill referred to the affectionate fist bump shared by the Obamas on the night that he clinched the Democratic presidential nomination as a "terrorist fist jab." In June 2008, Hill was removed from her duties on the specific show, which was then canceled.

Throughout the campaign, the media often labeled Obama as an "angry black woman,"and some websites attempted to propagate this perception, causing her to respond: "Barack and I have been in the public eye for many years now, and we've developed a thick skin along the way. When you’re out campaigning, there will always be criticism. I just take it in stride, and at the end of the day, I know that it comes with the territory." By the time of the 2008 Democratic National Convention in August, media outlets observed Obama's presence on the campaign trail had grown softer than at the start of the race, focusing on soliciting concerns and empathizing with the audience rather than throwing down challenges to them, and giving interviews to shows like The View and publications like Ladies' Home Journal rather than appearing on news programs. The change was even reflected in her fashion choices, with Obama wearing more and more sundresses in place of her previous designer pieces. The View appearance was partly intended to help soften the perception of her, and it was widely-covered in the press.

She told NEWSWEEK last week

Michelle Obama was never much interested in calling attention to herself. As an undergrad at Princeton in the 1980s, she was interested in social change, but didn't run for student government. Instead, she spent her free time running a literacy program for kids from the local neighborhoods. At Harvard Law, she took part in demonstrations demanding more minority students and professors. Yet unlike another more prominent Harvard Law student who would later take up the cause, she was not one to hold forth with high-flown oratory about the need for diversity. "When [Barack Obama] spoke, people got quiet and listened," recalls Prof. Randall Kennedy. "Michelle had a more modest, quieter, lower profile." Barack won election as president of the Law Review. Michelle put her energy into a less glamorous pursuit: recruiting black undergrads to Harvard Law from other schools. For her, politics wasn't so much about being inspirational as it was being practical—about getting something specific done, says Charles Ogletree, one of her professors. "She was not trying to get ahead."

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