Obama’s wife ‘commands a room,’ seen as an asset in ‘08

There seems to be an instant connection people make with the wife of Sen. Barack Obama from the first words she speaks.

“She commands a room,” said New Hampshire-based political talk-show host Arnie Arnesen, who was on hand to listen to Michelle Obama at the opening of the Obama campaign’s Granite State headquarters.

Although not easily impressed with politicians and their wives having, as she says, “been around the block too many times,” Mrs. Arnesen was extremely taken with Mrs. Obama.

“She is a tall statuesque woman; I would say a handsome woman; she’s not drop-dead gorgeous so as to alienate you but beautiful in her presence,” she said. “She is not a frivolous woman but a woman of substance. She has an image, and she actually lives up to the image she projects when she speaks … in a way that is not scripted and not uncomfortable.”

That’s a lot of accolades from a first impression, and Mrs. Arnesen was prepared to offer more. But Mrs. Obama, 43, a lawyer and vice president for community and external affairs for the University of Chicago Hospitals has earned them. In addition to her professional titles she is also a successful wife and mother of two young daughters, Malia and Sasha.

“Although she is a professional and well-accomplished, she seems to be more interested in being a mom,” said Barbara Gould, an Obama fundraiser who has observed the candidate’s wife on the campaign trail.

Mrs. Gould, 67, has been fundraising for candidates in her native Ohio for more than a decade and did the same for Sen. John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign.

Mrs. Obama “is the future,” she said. “She is the real embodiment of the true measure of what women’s lib was really about. It was about being a person, being equal, someone who does her thing and lets someone else do their thing.”

Mrs. Obama was unavailable for an interview, according to officials from both the Obama campaign and the University of Chicago Hospitals, and has no formal role on her husband’s campaign team. But like most candidate spouses has made numerous stops on the campaign trail, both with her husband and by herself.

She has been criticized for being a little too honest about her husband and their home life, but long-time friends say “that’s Michelle,” painting a picture as honest and as real as what people see every morning.

“I think she’s almost exactly the same person now as she was in college — a brilliant, casual fun-loving person,” said Kenneth M. Bruce, 45, a classmate at Princeton.

For decades, candidates seeking the presidency would rarely make prominent mention of a spouse.

But the 2008 presidential race will see large roles for at least two other Democratic contenders. Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards’s wife Elizabeth came to the forefront with her valiant struggle against cancer. And New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has the most-famous spouse of all — former President Bill Clinton, who her campaign says will help govern the nation if the former first lady wins the White House.

Michelle Robinson was born in Chicago’s South Shore in 1964 — too late to remember much about Martin Luther King’s 1968 marches against poverty and segregation in Chicago but just in time to take advantage of the opportunities that the civil rights movement made available to her and other blacks.

Her father, the late Frasier Robinson, was a city pump operator and a politically active Democratic precinct captain. Her mother, Marian Robinson, a housewife, would go to work and be a secretary at Spiegel’s catalog store to help pay for her children’s Ivy League education.

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