Obama's anchor
s his career soars toward a presidential bid, wife Michelle keeps his feet on the ground
His stomach was a bit queasy.
Michelle responded by hugging her husband tightly and looking him straight in the eye, Obama recalls in his book, The Audacity of Hope.
"Just don't screw it up, buddy!" Michelle said, transforming the tense moment into one of shared laughter.
The remark is classic Michelle Obama -- a woman who faces reality head-on with candor, humor and tenacity, who keeps her husband grounded, who keeps him real.
"He is the senator. His profile is soaring," said consultant and friend Avis LaVelle, national press secretary to Bill Clinton during his successful 1992 presidential campaign.
"But every high-flying kite needs somebody with their feet on the ground. And that's Michelle."
In the nearly 2 1/2 years since Obama's rousing address, the junior Democratic U.S. senator from Illinois has become a familiar figure on Sunday talk shows, the cover of Time and Newsweek, and the front pages of newspapers nationwide.
Meanwhile, the woman who never really wanted a political life has stayed mostly behind the scenes.
But Obama's announcement last week that he is exploring a 2008 presidential bid inches Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama ever closer to the floodlights, to the strange blend of curiosity and scrutiny that awaits the wives of presidential candidates.
Obama, 45, would never make a run for president without his 43-year-old wife's approval and careful counsel, those close to her say. Rest assured, Michelle, a devoted mother, has weighed the impact on daughters Malia, 8, and Natasha, 5.
"There are arguments to be made that maybe a presidential bid is better when they are younger," said Verna Williams, a University of Cincinnati law professor and one of Michelle's closest friends at Harvard Law School.
"If anything, you can count on Michelle to have thought through whether it's better to do it now, as opposed to four years from now, as opposed to eight years from now."
Barack Obama's credentials have become familiar: first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review; University of Chicago law professor; two-term Illinois state senator; third African-American U.S. senator since Reconstruction.
Michelle's resume may be less well-known, but it is impressive.
She is a 1985 cum laude graduate of Princeton University, a 1988 graduate of Harvard Law, a former associate dean at the University of Chicago and currently vice president at University of Chicago Hospitals.
Michelle, who declined an interview request, sits on six boards, including the prestigious Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools.
"She's smart, she's successful, and she's well-liked and popular," said LaVelle, Mayor Daley's former press secretary.
"Long before there was a Barack Obama, there was a Michelle Robinson who was a star in her own right."
And although Obama is an adopted Chicagoan -- born in Hawaii to a Kenyan economist father and a Kansas-bred cultural anthropologist mother -- his wife is pure Chicago.
Michelle's late father, Frasier Robinson, was a city pump operator and a Democratic precinct captain. Her mother, Marian, is a former Spiegel's secretary.
Michelle was raised in a one-bedroom flat on the top floor of a classic Chicago brick bungalow in South Shore. Her mother still lives there.
From that outpost, early on, there were signs Michelle was a standout.
"As far back as any of us can remember, she was very bright," said her brother Craig Robinson, who preceded his sister at Princeton.
Both Michelle and Craig, now head basketball coach at Brown University, learned to read by age 4.
Both skipped second grade. By sixth grade, Michelle joined a gifted class at what is now Bouchet Elementary, at 73rd and Jeffery.
The gifted program exposed Michelle to three years of French before she graduated, as class salutatorian, and, for two years, to biology classes at Kennedy King College.
There, the gifted class studied photosynthesis, worked in a lab and identified the muscles of dissected rat specimens, recalled childhood friend Chiaka Davis Patterson.
"This is not what normal seventh-graders were getting," Patterson said.
In other ways, Michelle was a typical youngster.
When Craig Robinson battled Michelle, 16 months his junior, in Monopoly, he had to "let her win enough that she wouldn't quit."
"My sister is a poor sport. She didn't like to lose," Robinson said.
Michelle also was athletic, playing baseball, football and basketball with her brother, father and mother.
She has since grown into a 5-foot-11, sleek and striking woman who enjoys a good 4:30 a.m. workout.
When she was little, Michelle also loved "girl" stuff.
She set up an Easy Bake Oven in her bedroom. She sprawled across the carpet with the African-American version of Barbie, her mate, their toy house and car.
Later, as a young adult, children were "all she wanted," said close friend and consultant Yvonne Davila of D&T Communications. Now that she has them, she is an "amazing mom," Davila said.
"She's a family person first," Davila said. With kids, "she gives lots of love but at same time, there's no nonsense."
Michelle coordinates play dates, ballet, gymnastics, tennis and piano lessons with what Obama calls "a general's efficiency."
She pitches in at school potlucks -- she tries to claim the dessert so she can pick up a pie at the store -- and makes time to sit in a folding chair, water bottle in hand, to watch her girls in their soccer league.
Michelle may live today in a $1.65 million Georgian revival Kenwood mansion, but Patterson remembers playing Barbie with her in "the smallest room I had ever seen. It was like a closet."
Her bedroom was the apartment's living room, which had been converted with a divider down the middle, allowing her to share it with her brother until an addition was built.
In the Robinson household, both children had chores.
Every Saturday, Michelle had to clean the bathroom. She scrubbed the sink, mopped the floor and cleaned the toilet.
"We alternated washing dishes," Craig Robinson said.
Today, in the Obama household, even Sen. Obama has to pitch in.
"Michelle keeps him very grounded. She makes him throw out the trash," Davila said. "He makes the bed when he's in town. . . . When he's home, he has to do things the way other people do them."
Three years after the city's first magnet high school opened, Michelle was among the handpicked freshmen at state-of-the-art Whitney Young.
"That was the school to go to," Patterson said.
Striving for excellence was always the goal in the Robinson household.
"We were always encouraged to do the best you can do, not just what's necessary," Craig Robinson said. "We all wanted to go to the best schools we could."
At Young, Michelle made the honor roll four years running, took advanced placement classes, was in the National Honor Society. She was student council treasurer and on the fund-raising publicity committee.
She seemed to conquer it all "effortlessly," classmate Norm Collins said.
But behind the scenes, "She's worked for everything she's gotten," her brother said.
Later, at Princeton, Michelle was one of four roommates, all on financial aid, who shared a sparsely decorated common room and had to walk down three floors to the bathroom, said roommate Angela Acree.
"We were not rich," Acree said. "A lot of kids had TVs and sofas and furniture. We didn't."
For her work-study assignment, Michelle coordinated an after school program, caring for children of Princeton's lunchroom and maintenance people.
In their common room, to unwind, Michelle and her roommates played Stevie Wonder records, swapped stories and "giggled and laughed hysterically," Acree recalls.
But Michelle's senior thesis reveals the sociology major was acutely aware of being among the few blacks then at Princeton.
"My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'Blackness' than ever before," she wrote in a 1985 thesis, "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community."
"I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my White professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus, as if I really don't belong.
"Regardless of the circumstances under which I interact with Whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be Black first and a student second."
Early on at Princeton, Michelle wrote, she was determined to "utilize all of my present and future resources to benefit the black community first and foremost." Yet she now realized attending a launching pad like Princeton would "likely lead to my further integration and/or assimilation into a White cultural and social structure. . . .
"As I enter my final year at Princeton, I find myself striving for many of the same goals as my White classmates -- acceptance to a prestigious graduate or professional school or a high-paying position in a successful corporation. Thus, my goals are not as clear as before."
"She has incredible presence," Williams said. "She could very easily be the Sen. Obama that people are talking about."
At Harvard, Michelle mixed with rich and poor, working with Legal Aid clients and recruiting African-American Harvard Law School alums to serve on Black Law Student Association panels.
Today, as vice president of external and community relations at the University of Chicago Hospitals, Michelle deals with the full economic spectrum -- "from presidents of hospitals to community leaders to people who are poor . . . and she just has a way about her, a real kindness," said current boss Susan Sher, hospital general counsel.
After Michelle's law school graduation, she joined the kind of "successful corporation" -- Chicago's Sidley & Austin -- she wrote about at Princeton. Her specialty: marketing and intellectual property.
If she had stayed, "she would have been a superstar," said Sidley senior counsel Newton Minow.
Her first year, in walked Obama. Michelle was tapped as the young summer associate's adviser.
"I remember that she was tall -- almost my height in heels -- and lovely, with a friendly, professional manner," Obama recalls in The Audacity of Hope.
Michelle tried to set Obama up with friends, but he wanted to take her out. Finally, she relented, and by the time Michelle called Williams to say she was dating someone new, Williams could tell this was something different, something special.
"She said, 'Guess what? I've got this great guy in my life. His name is Barack,' " Williams said. "It was clear she was pretty crazy about him."
Four years later, in 1992, when the couple walked down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ. Michelle's childhood friend Santita Jackson, daughter of the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., sang at the wedding.
"It's clear they were in love and each other's best friends," said Valerie Jarrett, CEO of Habitat Co. but at the time Michelle's boss.
By then, Michelle had grown restless with corporate law. In 1991, before her marriage, she had joined the crew of energetic young people surrounding Daley in his early years in office. Jarrett, then deputy chief of staff, remembers interviewing Michelle for an assistant's job.
"I was instantly impressed. I think I offered her a job at the end of the first meeting," Jarrett said.
Before she signed up, Michelle told Jarrett her fiance wanted to meet her "so he could figure out if he was comfortable with her going to work for Mayor Daley."
Obama had "some trepidation" about Michelle working in politics, Jarrett said.
At City Hall, she confronted issues head-on. "I've been in so many settings or meetings with Michelle where people are talking all around an issue, and she has a way of succinctly getting to the issue and putting it on the table," Jarrett said.
In 1993, Michelle grabbed an offer to be the founding executive director of the Chicago office of Public Allies, part of President Clinton's AmeriCorps effort.
She helped promising young people enter public service. Public Allies found them, trained them and matched them up with internships.
Michelle put together a board of people who could help Public Allies raise money and "left it with about a one-year reserve, which none of our sites since have had," said Paul Schmitz, national Public Allies CEO. "She built it to last."
By 1996, the University of Chicago offered a job as associate dean of students. Part of her job was to organize the volunteer work of students.
Hearing of her work, then U. of C. Hospitals President Michael Riordan offered Michelle a job in 2002 as executive director of community affairs -- liaison between the institution and its community.
Two months after Obama's January 2005 swearing-in as U.S. senator, Michelle was promoted to vice president of external affairs and community relations. Tax returns show her compensation that year went from $122,000 to $317,000, though hospital officials say some of the latter figure includes a one-time pension payout and a bonus.
By then, among other things, Michelle had expanded a two-person part-time office to a staff of 17, grown the number of volunteers coming into the hospital from 200 to nearly 1,000, and quadrupled the number of employees volunteering outside the hospital to 800, officials said.
Even so, some have questioned if Obama's new status triggered Michelle's promotion. Riordan insists the job had been discussed well before Obama became U.S. senator.
"Michelle is the real deal and . . . really earned every bit of her promotion on her own," he said.
Web sites and Crain's Chicago Business have noted Michelle's June 2005 election to the board of directors of TreeHouse Foods -- a post that earned her $45,000 in 2005 and stock options that by the end of 2006, if claimed, would have reaped her $60,000.
"She got on the corporate board of someplace where she could make money, and make money quickly," said political consultant Joe Novak.
"She's cashing in because of her husband."
Michelle was on the TreeHouse board in November 2005 when one of its divisions announced plans to close a pickle plant in La Junta, Colo., displacing 150 "mainly Hispanic" workers, Novak said.
A year later, her husband criticized Wal-Mart's treatment of its workers.
"How can she defend TreeHouse while her husband is attacking Wal-Mart?" Novak said.
Obama spokesman Julian Green said Michelle applied for the TreeHouse job after a family friend who consults for companies seeking to increase minorities on their boards alerted her to the opening.
"Michelle has performed her duties diligently, and her compensation is commensurate with the company's other board members," Green said.
Some people sweat under the floodlights, but Michelle's background as a lawyer, community liaison, fund-raiser and strategist could come in handy if her husband runs for president.
The toughest part may be juggling the demands of a campaign with work, marriage and motherhood -- something Michelle has been able to do so far, in part due to baby-sitting and other help from her mother and close female friends.
Whatever happens, Michelle will find a way to make it all work, said Craig Robinson.
"There's nothing too hard for her to do," he said.
rrossi@suntimes.com