online link to lengthy Obama article in December Elle Magazine...

[carpe diem]

It's Obama's wife, Michelle, who gets me pondering more deeply my own—and other Americans'—high expectations of her husband. Michelle is only a few inches shorter than Barack's 6'2" and attractive without seeming to have to work at it; a vice president for community affairs at the University of Chicago Hospitals, she has become almost a caricature in the media—the ballbusting wife who keeps her husband's ego in check, the working mom who demands that her man share the care of their two young daughters (the three days a week that he's in Chicago, that is, where Michelle and the girls live). The caricature isn't exactly wrong ("I'm not one of those wives who just says, 'Do what you need to do,'" she tells me. "I'm like, 'You've got to be present in our children's and family's lives'"), it just misses her sophistication, warmth, and palpable respect for her husband.

Michelle says she's "suspicious" of the adoration Barack receives, which has gone so far that one political consultant labeled him the Democrats' "black Jesus." "I would just caution people to believe in Barack Obama not because it makes them feel good," she says, sitting in an open-air restaurant at the ecotourism lodge where we're staying, "but because he's someone who's worth believing in, which means you have to believe in him when he makes mistakes, or when he falls."
____

Part and parcel to the "feel-good" effect is that people of all colors and creeds find themselves strongly identifying with Obama—a phenomenon he's well aware of. "I do have a lot of different pieces, different people and cultures in me," he says. "My mother told me toward the end of her life, 'I didn't leave you a lot of wealth, and I didn't leave you a fancy title, but I left you a really interesting life,' and she's right."

That rapport is obviously a huge advantage for a presidential candidate, but his wife isn't the first one to hint at the possible danger of the promiscuous identification Obama engenders. As the former treasurer of his political action committee, Valerie Jarrett, told The American Prospect, "Because he can click with so many different kinds of people, the expectation is that because I clicked with him, he's going to agree with me."
____

http://www.elle.com/featurefullstory/9959/barack-obama.html

[applegrove]

1. Very informative. Thanks for the post.