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New to campaigning, but no longer a novice
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 AP World reacts to Obama’s victory From the U.S. president-elect’s ancestral homes in Kenya and Ireland to his namesake town in Japan, election fever grips the globe. |
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She usually holds rallies (her biggest was with 11,000 people in Gainesville, Fla., last week) or small round tables on the needs of working women and military families, the two groups she speaks about the most. On Saturday, she delivered the Democratic Party ’s weekly radio address, urging her husband’s supporters to turn out on Election Day.
As first lady, Obama advisers say, Mrs. Obama would focus first on her family and then on the issues facing women and military spouses as those groups deal with the economic crisis and the return of troops from Iraq. She also plans to take up national service as an issue, aides say. She will not have a major policy role, they say, and does not plan to have an office in the West Wing.
Advisers to the spouses of past Democratic nominees — Teresa Heinz Kerry in 2004, Tipper Gore in 2000, Hillary Rodham Clinton in 1992 — say they spent more time campaigning in the fall than has Mrs. Obama. All their children were older, however, and Mrs. Kerry and Mrs. Clinton were often sent to secondary media markets, because they were unpopular with some undecided voters and independents.
Chris Lehane, an adviser and spokesman for the Gore campaign, said Mrs. Gore traveled constantly in the fall of 2000, and he described a somewhat larger traveling retinue than Mrs. Obama has. (She is accompanied by a handful of aides and a Secret Service contingent, but there is no press corps on her plane.)
Echoing private comments of some Obama advisers, Mr. Lehane said he believed that the Obama campaign had been unsure at first about Mrs. Obama’s potential appeal, in part because of some early missteps and in part because of the novelty of a black woman’s auditioning for the role of first lady.
“My sense,” Mr. Lehane said, “is that the campaign was initially apprehensive, because they recognized that she was going to be treated unfairly and held to a hard-to-meet standard.”
Indeed, for months Mrs. Obama was a political target. A Fox News anchor referred to an affectionate fist bump between the Obamas as a “terrorist fist jab.” Republicans, including Cindy McCain , criticized her for saying in February that “for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country.” (They omitted the words that followed: “And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change.”) A blogger supporting Senator Clinton spread an unfounded rumor that Mrs. Obama had once used the word “whitey.”
The Obamas’ need to deal with race as a factor in the campaign came to the fore this spring as Mr. Obama confronted incendiary remarks by his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. , who had married the couple and baptized their children. As the son of a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya, Mr. Obama has often drawn on his biracial experience to help bridge racial divides. Mrs. Obama does not have that background to draw on, making her political challenge that much more complex.
David Axelrod , Mr. Obama’s chief strategist, said in an interview that Mrs. Obama, not being a politician, had gone through a period of “getting comfortable” with campaigning. She learned a great deal on her own, Mr. Axelrod said, noting that aides had not had to tell her to avoid fist bumps or remarks like “proud of my country” in the future.
Still, the Obama campaign has limited interviews that would entail tough questions from national newspapers and cable news programs. “There is not one vote she will get from doing Wolf Blitzer,” an aide said.
Instead, she has appeared several times on the morning network programs and on entertainment shows like “The View,” “Ellen,” “The Daily Show,” “Rachael Ray” and, twice each, “Access Hollywood” and “Entertainment Tonight.”
If Mrs. Obama is not as blunt as she once was (in describing some of her husband’s habits, for instance), she is by no means hiding her personality, either. On “The Tonight Show,” she noted that she and her husband still sparred privately like the lawyers they are, and added: “You want to know how Barack prepares for a debate? He hangs out with me, and he’s ready.”
At the Akron rally, she drew appreciative laughter from many in the audience when, her voice at once growing hushed and yet rising in pitch, she referred to her husband as “baby” while sharing an anecdote.
“My assumption,” she said, “is that Barack Obama is going to be the underdog until he is sitting in the Oval Office. At the start of this, I said to him, ‘Look, baby, you can do a lot of things.’ He believes he can do a whole lot. If he works hard, he can change the world.”
But, she added, if he is to win, he needs for his supporters to be sure to vote. The audience erupted in applause.
This report, "New to campaigning, but no longer a novice," originally appeared in the New York Times.
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