She's a loved - and loathed - lawyer married to a political charmer: Is Michelle Obama the U.S. Cherie Blair?

They have become almost as big a story as the candidates themselves -the First Wives-in-Waiting - but what do we really know about Michelle Obama and Cindy McCain? Femail spent weeks in the U.S. talking to their families, old school friends and current colleagues. Here we present the first in a two part series on the women whose influence will be felt by us all . . .



Formidable: Michelle Obama has a highly competitive streak

Who knows what Michelle Robinson expected as she waited for her new roommate within the Ivy League walls of Princeton University in the autumn of 1981.



As a young black girl from the wrong side of the tracks in Chicago she certainly knew she had done well to get here, one of just 94 black freshers in a class of more than 1,100.



Even she, though, might not have anticipated her skin colour would cause such a furore.



While her roommate Catherine Donnelly appeared unfazed on walking in to greet her, Catherine's mother Alice Brown felt differently, and, on learning the race of her daughter's fellow student, immediately called the university's student housing office.

'I said I needed to get my daughter's room changed right away,' Alice Thomas, a 71-year-old retired schoolteacher recalls today.



'I called my own mother, and she said: "Take Catherine out of school immediately. Bring her home." I was very upset about the whole thing.'

In the end, the room wasn't changed, and today Alice bitterly regrets her bigotry, although, of course, attitudes to race were very different a quarter of a century ago.



And at least she consoles herself with the knowledge that 17-year-old Michelle did not know, although she later confessed to wondering why she and Catherine did not become better friends.



Michelle's years at Princeton, a time when students were not officially but often socially segregated, were to prove formative for the woman who would go on to marry the man now tipped to become America's first black president.



What Michelle Obama did not envisage back then, however, was how she would prove to be a lightning rod for America's views on race in 2008.

Certainly, in a presidential campaign that has bubbled with controversy over race and gender, Mrs Obama has a singular vantage point - a black woman who has traversed vast landscapes of colour and class in her 44 years.

In a campaign where the wives have been set in as direct an opposition as their husbands, the 'Michelle Factor', as it has been dubbed, is playing a crucial part in the Obama team strategy - for better and for worse.



A statuesque and vivid figure - she stands six feet tall in her heels - many have warmed to her direct, straightforward manner and apparent 'relatability' (she often talks of the difficulties faced by working mothers, and has complained her husband doesn't take out the 'trash' often enough).

Others (and they have included on occasion members of Obama's campaign team) have winced at what they privately call her 'lack of filter' and the corresponding headaches this can cause.

One of those apparently more unfiltered moments, has indeed, continued to cause problems for Team Obama.



Earlier this year, Michelle announced, in relation to her husband's political success, that she was proud of America 'for the first time'.



Speaking at a Wisconsin rally in February, she said: 'For the first time in my lifetime I am really proud of my country and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change.'



The quote was replayed on TV news channels in an endless loop of outrage, and eagerly seized upon by the McCain camp, who suggested it showed a lack of patriotism: within hours, the rival First Lady-in-Waiting, Cindy McCain was emphasising that she had 'always' been proud of her country.



Three months on, the issue was raised again, when Cindy referred to it once more during an appearance on the breakfast TV show Good Morning America. 'I don't know why she said what she said. All I know is that I have always been proud of my country,' she said.



Michelle, in turn, felt compelled to issue a renewed statement of pride during a TV appearance of her own this week in which she co-hosted a network chat show.



'Of course I'm proud of my country,' she avowed. 'In nowhere but America would my story be possible.'



She may be right - but there have been times when one could understand why Michelle might not have felt so proud of her country.



Only 20 blocks separate the £900,000 three-storey red-brick home, complete with thousand-bottle wine cellar, where the Obamas now live in the affluent Chicago suburb of Hyde Park from the South Shore district where Michelle Robinson grew up.



But socially, culturally and economically it is a different country. Today the area has improved, but the buildings speak of neglect, and listless groups of black children still kick around on street corners.



Family values: Michelle with Barack and their two children, Malia and Sacha

Michelle, known as 'Miche', and her elder brother, Craig, grew up in a one-bedroom top-floor flat.



Space was tight -Michelle's bedroom was in the apartment's sitting room - and money was tight too: Michelle's father, Fraser provided for the family of four on a manual labourer's salary, all the while battling multiple sclerosis.



Her mother, Marian, stayed home and proved a fond, but disciplinarian parent, allowing her children only one hour of TV a night.



Instead, Michelle and her brother filled their time with books, chess, sports and dinnertime conversations with their parents.



Michelle's parents and sibling recall the young girl as a determined, competitive soul. Craig, now head basketball coach at Brown University, even recalls having to let his sister win at Monopoly because she 'didn't like to lose'.



'She was a poor sport,' he says today.



'Miche' was also athletic, playing football baseball and basketball, honing athletic instincts that have stayed with her today - friends say she still works out 'like a gladiator', often rising at 4.30am for a session on the treadmill.



She was also girlie too, her mother recalls, an 'easy-bake' children's oven, and an Afro-Caribbean version of Barbie among her favourite toys.



Intelligent and inquisitive, the young Michelle was an obvious candidate for one of the city's 'magnet' schools, a state school offering more specialised courses for brighter students.



It was, however, several miles from her home and every day she'd have to make an hour long journey to attend classes. But Michelle wanted to do it.



'The first full graduating class was in 1978, so it was pretty experimental to come here,' one former teacher, Bernadette McHale-Rogers, says.



'She made a decision to choose an integrated environment that had more diversity in both curriculum and population. She was a good student, a class officer in her senior years and a good participant in class. She physically looks very much the same as she did in High School and she still is an articulate speaker.'



Yearbook pictures show a serious looking girl in a yellow shirt who does, indeed, look much the same as she does today, albeit a little less polished back then.



An ambitious student, Michelle made it clear she wanted to follow her brother Craig to Princeton, a desire in which she was, friends recall, initially discouraged by teachers who thought her grades would not be good enough.



But they were, and she enrolled in 1981 to study sociology, one of four roommates (including Catherine Donnelly) who were all on financial aid and shared a sparsely decorated common room a world apart from some of the more privileged white students with their expensive home furnishings.



Support: Michelle played a key part in her husband's presidential nomination victory

Today, one of her roommates, a fellow black student called Angela Acree, now a Washington-based lawyer and a good friend of Michelle's, recalls the university of the time as a 'sexist, segregated place' where some of the white students would sometimes deliberately walk past the black students and pretend not to see them.



'It was like "here comes a black kid", she recalls. As a result, Michelle spent much of her time on campus with Angela and another black student, Suzanne Alele.



She was never an activist, however, but she felt the tension acutely enough to make it the subject of her senior sociology thesis, titled 'Princeton-educated Blacks and the Black Community'.



At her request, the thesis is embargoed until November 5, 2008, the day after the Presidential election, but leaked segments demonstrate her acute awareness of her skin colour.



In one part, she writes of how she had never been more acutely aware of her blackness since arriving at Princeton. '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 still feel like a visitor on campus as if I don't really belong.'



These sentiments, it must be said, were kept away from her mother, who says today that her daughter rarely brought up the issue on visits home.



Nonetheless, it has proved enough for Michelle to be caricatured in some parts of America as the 'Angry Black Woman', an image her friends say is hugely wide of the mark.



'The last thing Michelle wants is to be defined just as a black woman,' one friend told me this week. 'She is proud of her heritage but she wants to take race out of the equation, not make it the focus. That's what she's about.'

Another friend, Cindy Moelis, a white woman who worked alongside her in Chicago in the 1990s, points out that Michelle retains an earthy sense of humour about the colour of her skin.



She recalls attending a spa with Michelle to celebrate her birthday. 'We were getting healthy food for breakfast,' Moelis recalls. 'Everyone was saying "Hey Michelle!" I wondered why no one was greeting me the same way.



"See any other six-foot tall African American women," Michelle replied with a laugh. "I don't think so. So stop taking it personally."'



Any resentments she may have felt back then, however, certainly did not stand in the way of further academic success.



Michelle graduated from Princeton with honours and moved on to Harvard to study law, from where she was recruited as an associate into the smart Chicago headquarters of blue chip law firm Sidley and Austin, one of only 14 black lawyers out of several hundred working in the city at the time.



Michelle has told how she recalls gazing out of the window of her plush 47th-floor office in downtown Chicago and realising that she could barely see, literally or metaphorically, her beloved South Side.



Misconstrued: Right-wingers said this gesture of celebration between Michelle and Barack was 'terrorist fist jabbing'

She immediately impressed partners at the firm with her quick intellect and focus, among them Newton Minow, a attorney who still works with the firm.



'If she had stayed, she would have been a superstar,' he says. She did not stay however, leaving after five years to pursue a life in public office.



The death of her beloved father in 1991, as well as the death of close Princeton friend Suzanne from lymphoma, had forced her to re-evaluate her life.



She was bored, she realised. She had unthinkingly stepped onto a corporate path, and wanted to do something different, something with more of a calling.



No doubt her handsome beau also gave her the courage to make the break: while still at Sidley and Austin in 1989 Michelle was asked to mentor a summer intern named Barack Obama.



She initially refused his constant requests for a date before finally caving in. Three years later, in 1992, the couple walked down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ.



By then, Michelle had started a new job working in the office of the Chicago mayor.



It necessitated a big pay cut, but she was adamant it was the right move.



Valerie Jarrett, who recruited her and has since become a close friend, recalls being instantly impressed. 'I think I offered her a job at the end of the first meeting,' she says. 'She was impressive.'



Avis Lavelle, the mayor's former press officer and a contemporary also recalls her as a formidable force in the department.



'She was smart, she was successful, well liked and popular. Long before there was a Barack Obama, there was a Michelle Robinson who was a star in her own right.'



She has remained in public sector jobs ever since, albeit increasingly well-renumerated ones, latterly as a £135,000-a-year vice president of external affairs at the University of Chicago Hospital, an appointment she was offered two months after her husband became senator and is seen by some as a cynical attempt by the hospital to cash in.



Cashing in, it must be said, is something that the Obamas themselves have also been accused of.



Certainly, the couple's financial fortunes have bloomed in recent years, aided by Michelle's salary and sales of her husband's best selling autobiographies.



It has enabled them to put £200,000 into trust for their daughters, Malia, nine, and six-year-old Sasha and £500,000 into other investments.



Michelle likes to make a point of saying she shops at the discount store Target, especially for the little essentials such as loo roll, but detractors, among them Chicago political consultant Joe Novak, believe she is motivated more by personal gain than her public image might suggest (detractors have on occasion compared Michelle Obama to the acquisitive Cherie Blair).



Joe Novak points out that she wasted no time following her husband's election as Senator in joining a corporate board, signing up in 2005 to the board of Tree House foods, a post that earned her $45,000 in 2005, plus stock options.



'She got on the corporate board of someplace where she could make money, and make money quickly,' Joe Novak says today. 'She's cashing in.'



Her friends, of course, dispute this, pointing out that if Michelle had continued to pursue her legal career she would be earning many hundreds of thousands more by now.



Her motivation, they say, is providing security for the couple's two daughters, nothing more.



She is, by all accounts, a devoted mother and, according to her husband, co-ordinates play dates, ballet, gymnastics, tennis and piano lessons 'with a general's efficiency' whatever the demands of the campaign.



While she has now given up her job, she has spoken often about the conflicts of the working mother.



'Every other month since I've had children I've struggled with the notion of "Am I a good parent?" Should I stay home? I have gone back and forth every year about whether I should work.'



She also insists that Barack fly home to attend crucial dates such as parent teacher conferences whatever his schedule.



It would be fair, indeed, to say that - like her wifely rival Cindy McCain - Michelle's ambition for her husband is matched in equal measure by her misgivings about his candidacy, and its impact on family life.



Notably, like Cindy, she refused to move to Washington when her husband became a senator, fearing it would cause too much disruption to family life.



Having pledged to give her children the kind of dinner-together-every-night childhood that she had growing up in Chicago, discovering her husband's presidential ambitions gave rise to conflicting emotions.



While sharing her husband's vision, Michelle took time to adjust to his candidacy.



According to one friend, she hated confronting the fact that her husband could be away from home for several nights a week (her solution to this, incidentally, as well as insisting to his campaign team that her husband has at least two nights a week at home, has been to equip both her husband and daughters with camera computers so they can kiss each other goodnight online.)



On the few occasions she has to be away overnight, her mother, Marian, puts the children to bed - Michelle does not want to get a nanny, joking that she has 'granny nanny' instead.



She has always preferred to rely on family and friends where the care of her children is concerned.



Tellingly, too, campaign members recall that in the run-up to the final decision for Barack to run for the Democrat nomination, it was Michelle who led the questioning in the final intense meetings.

'She wasn't talking about policy, she was asking questions about what demands would the campaign place on their lives? Where would the money come from? Could they really take on the Clintons and win? In other words, would it really be worth it?' one campaign insider reveals.



The sentiment is echoed by longstanding law school friend Verna Williams, who confirms that Michelle will have had the final say over the timing or indeed over whether to do it at all.

'Of 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 or as opposed to eight years from now,' she says.



But now it is, and friends say she has reconciled herself to the fact.



And as well as the sacrifices she has had to make to her family life, Michelle has made great personal sacrifices too, most notably her job.



She resigned in January, aware that it was simply untenable to continue.



It was, according to friends, an obvious but difficult decision, and one about which she still expresses some ambivalence.



One close friend told the Mail that the subject had come up as recently as a couple of weeks ago, over a casual quiet dinner with girlfriends shortly before Barack was to win the democratic candidate presidential nomination.



'Of course, Michelle is right behind him, but she has misgivings about giving up her independent life. It was hard-fought for, after all. She said it's a sacrifice for her,' the friend says.



Her attachment to her professional life was revealed in January when, by way of a leaving gift, staff at the University created a volume documenting her accomplishments intended to mirror a similar book celebrating Obama's Senate victory.



Mrs Obama, according to those present, burst into tears when she saw it. Her skills have since been put to use on her husband's campaign, of which she has become an integral member, flying all over the U.S. to deliver rousing speeches, often 40 minutes long and without notes.



But the knives came out for her again when some commentators tried to turn a gesture of celebration between the couple - touching fists at a rally in Minnesota just before he claimed the nomination - into something sinister.



One or two Right wingers accused the couple of 'terrorist fist jabbing', dismissed as nonsense by their supporters.

She often drops in references to popular culture, alongside words like 'freaky', and asides about American Idol, which cynics say are an attempt to 'normalise' her in the eyes of voters.



Others pooh pooh this vehemently. 'There is no difference whatsoever between the public Michelle and the private Michelle,' one campaign insider says.



'Truly there isn't. The point about her is that she doesn't need to adopt an image.'



Maybe not, but it hasn't stopped efforts at a little re-branding, particularly in the wake of the 'national pride' debacle Michelle so unwittingly sparked in February.

On Wednesday, sporting a chic, but simple black and white sundress, she was drafted in to co-host a popular afternoon network discussion programme, deftly navigating her way through hour-long chatter largely devoted to what to serve for breakfast, the merits of wearing tights and the cuteness of children.



It was largely well-received by the viewing public and afterwards, according to production staff, Mrs Obama delayed her schedule for half-an-hour to pose for photographs and sign autographs for the crew - requests that had not befallen her wifely rival Cindy McCain when she appeared on the same show some months ago.



'Everyone was very charmed by her,' one source confirms. 'There was this sense she was 'one of us'.



The revelation that sales of her $148 sundress 'spiked' throughout America can, surely, only have further served to delight the Obama campaign team.

A dress, of course, does not win an election. America may apparently like her sartorial style, but whether it is ready for a black First Lady as its figurehead will only be revealed by the polls in November.



In the meantime, however, Michelle can be heartened by one thing: Alice Brown, a woman who was so horrified by the colour of her skin that she didn't want her daughter sharing the same dorm room, is now considering casting her vote for Barack Obama.

NEXT WEEK: The demons that haunt Cindy McCain

