Politics
Michelle Obama: A not-so-secret 2012 campaign weapon
Barack Obama’s day job is a lot more demanding now, forcing him to rely more on others to press the case for his re-election. During the debt crisis last summer, the president had to cancel 10 fundraisers around the country. Mrs. Obama’s schedule was unaffected.
The first lady’s popularity has remained high even as the president’s has slipped. Polls show she has broader appeal than her husband with a number of groups that could be troublesome for Obama next year, including senior citizens, whites and people in the West and Midwest. While she is popular with both sexes, women express more deeply favorable views of Mrs. Obama: 47 percent say they have “very favorable” opinions of her, compared to 31 percent of men. A number of her fundraisers have been before largely female audiences.
The first lady can easily travel to smaller cities and out-of-the-way places that are more difficult for Air Force One and a cumbersome presidential entourage to reach. On July 26, she hit a US$1,000-and-up breakfast in Park City, Utah, and a US$1,000-and-up luncheon in Aspen, Colo., where she kicked off her shoes and mingled in a tent on the lawn. On June 30, she fit in two fundraisers in Burlington, Vt., and one in Boston. On Friday, she’ll be in Portland, Maine, and Providence, R.I.
Mrs. Obama is more at ease as a campaign surrogate now, after years in the spotlight. At the start of each appearance she gives a shout-out to prominent locals, singling out “amazing” politicians and “favorite” people. Trying to humanize her husband, she tells audience after audience about the quiet moments, after their daughters are asleep, when Obama hunches over letters from struggling Americans. “I see the sadness and the worry creasing his face,” she tells her listeners.
Campaign manager Jim Messina says Mrs. Obama is a unique ambassador for her husband because of her front-row seat during his first term and her knowledge of his character. “She was an enormous asset to the president traveling the country in 2008, and we expect that she’ll play just as critical a role in 2012,” he said.
Mary Powell, a Vermont utility executive, said her 15-year-old daughter used some of the money she inherited after her grandfather’s recent death to attend the first lady’s luncheon in Burlington last summer, and both mother and daughter came away from the event moved.
“I found myself tearing up a couple of times,” Powell said. “She feels like the real deal.”
Feminist leader Gloria Steinem, who appeared alongside Mrs. Obama at a New York fundraiser last week, describes the scene there as “a room full of New York women who are activists, who care deeply about the issues, many of whom are feeling that the president could have been stronger as a negotiator, that he’s handcuffed by the right wing.”
“You can imagine the feeling in a New York room,” Steinem said. “Well, by the end of her speech, people were standing up cheering and ready to go to work. It was a transformation.”
The first lady is constantly under a microscope. She was criticized earlier this month for wearing diamond bracelets costing tens of thousands of dollars to one of the New York fundraisers. (She had borrowed the jewels from a store for the night.)
In general, though, first ladies are afforded more respect and leeway in campaigning, and they speak in more controlled environments than do the wives of presidential hopefuls, who are thrown into an exhausting, rough-and-tumble political scene and can more easily fall victim to gaffes.
“First ladies can scoop up considerable amounts of cash and considerable amounts of good will,” says GOP strategist Rich Galen. “There’s almost no downside.”
In 2004, Laura Bush raised more than US$15 million for George W. Bush and the GOP and kept a busy separate political schedule.
White House aides say it’s too early to set a goal for Mrs. Obama, but she’ll go wherever the campaign directs.
Copyright 2011 Associated Press.
