At a campaign event, the popular first lady set aside her aversion to politics and entreated voters to support Clinton in race that has become deeply personal

Michelle Obama earned the nickname “the Closer” during her husband’s 2008 campaign for her ability to win over wavering voters. After two successful presidential campaigns, the first lady is being called upon to perform one last trick: elect his successor.



On Friday, the ever-popular first lady stepped on to the campaign trail to rally support for a predecessor and one-time rival, Hillary Clinton, whose victory in November is crucial to preserving the president’s legacy. Students and supporters had waited hours to hear the first lady speak.

“The presidency doesn’t change who you are, it reveals who you are,” Obama told the crowd of mostly young people at George Mason University. “The same thing is true of a presidential campaign.

‘She found her voice’: Michelle Obama’s DNC speech hailed as her boldest yet Read more

“So if a candidate is erratic and threatening, if a candidate traffics in prejudice, fears, and lies on the trail, if a candidate has no clear plans to implement their goals, if they disrespect their fellow citizens – including folks who’ve made extraordinary sacrifices for our country – let me tell you: that is who they are. That is the kind of president they will be.”

Obama is known for being averse to politics, and she has managed to remain supremely popular, especially among young people, in large part thanks to her ability to stay above the fray. But the 2016 presidential race is deeply personal.

Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, for years promoted the false “birther” movement that questioned Barack Obama’s origins – to the extent that he claimed to have sent investigators to Hawaii to search for his birth certificate in 2011. On Friday, Trump conceded that the president was born in the United States.

Trump’s careful cultivation of the lie, and his refusal to denounce it even as recently as Thursday, has crippled the Republican’s standing with black voters, who widely view the birther campaign as an attempt to delegitimize the first black president. Public opinion polls show that he draws a historically low support from black voters, with some surveys showing 0% among black voters.

In her speech at the Democratic national convention, an aspirational and devastating riposte to Trump’s vision for America, Michelle Obama remembered her daughters’ first day of school, and the lurching feeling when she realized that they would grow up in the White House.

“I realized that our time in the White House would form the foundation for who they would become, and how well we managed this experience could truly make or break them,” she said.

“That is what Barack and I think about every day as we try to guide and protect our girls through the challenges of this unusual life in the spotlight – how we urge them to ignore those who question their father’s citizenship or faith.

“How we insist that the hateful language they hear from public figures on TV does not represent the true spirit of this country. How we explain that when someone is cruel, or acts like a bully, you don’t stoop to their level – no, our motto is, when they go low, we go high.”

Obama’s swan song speech was quickly elevated to the pantheon of historic political addresses. Some delegates in the audience wept freely as the first lady spoke.

On the campaign trail, Clinton voiced appreciation for her powerful and most popular ally.



“As Michelle Obama said in her fabulous speech at the Democratic convention, when we go to the polls this November, the real choice isn’t between Democrat or Republican,” Clinton said in Greensboro, North Carolina, on Thursday. “It’s about who will have the power to shape our children for the next four years of their lives.”

Though they share a goal on the campaign trail, Obama and Clinton could not have had more opposite ambitions in their roles as first lady.

“Michelle Obama can’t wait to leave the White House and Hillary Clinton can’t wait to get back in,” said Kate Andersen Brower, journalist and author of First Women.

Unlike Clinton, who broke with many of the traditions and norms expected of a presidential spouse, including the unprecedented step of setting up an office in the West Wing, Obama has remained firmly in the East Wing. She has devoted herself to supporting military families, fighting childhood obesity and advocating for girls’ education. Under Obama’s leadership, the White House launched the Let’s Move campaign to reduce child obesity and the Let Girls Learn initiative, to improve access to education for girls around the world.

She has also cemented herself as a cultural icon, with a reach far beyond the realm of politics. Last week, she poured boxed wine for customers at a drug store with talk show host Ellen Degeneres. Before the DNC, she sang carpool karaoke with comedian James Corden. And the Obamas posed for an intimate portrait published on the cover of the October issue of Essence, a lifestyle magazine directed toward black women.

“I think when it comes to black kids, it means something for them to have spent most of their life seeing the family in the White House look like them,” she told the magazine. “It matters. All the future work that Barack talked about, I think over these last few years, we’ve kind of knocked the ceiling of limitation off the roofs of many young kids; imaginations of what’s possible for them.”

At the university on Friday, the graduate student Katie Boyette echoed the first lady’s sentiments, and recalled watching Obama’s inauguration, “walking on to the stage with his family, and they just looked so beautiful”.

“I was only 15 at the time, but seeing them, as an African American,” she said, “it was a pivotal moment for me. I started to cry. It was a moment I’ll never forget.”

Before the event, Obama reflected with former first lady Laura Bush at the National Archives, in Washington DC, about the power of their platform.

“The fact is you really have a podium, really, always. People still listen to Barbara Bush, don’t you think? I certainly do,” Bush said, referring to her mother-in-law, the wife of George HW Bush.

Obama said she would continue to the work she started in the White House: “I can’t imagine that I’ll leave here and really kick my feet up and say, ‘Oh, well, good luck with that.’”

After Obama’s rousing DNC speech, speculation – most wishful – mounted that it might launch a national political career, as such a speech did for her husband in 2004.

But Obama has swatted away any speculation that she might seek office one day and earlier this year, the president lowered the chances of a double act to zero.

“There are three things that are certain in life,” the president said during a town hall in Louisiana. “Death, taxes and Michelle is not running for president.”

And yet some still hold out hope.



“Four more years!” the college crowd chanted on Friday when Obama said her family’s time in the White House had nearly come to an end. “No!” Obama said, waving her hand and laughing. “No,” she tried again, more emphatically.

After the event, Rachelle Campbell didn’t hesitate for a moment.

“Oh, I would love for her to run for president one day,” she said excitedly. “Michelle for president!”

As she closed out her speech to the students, Obama spun one of Clinton’s slogans, “I’m with her”, into her own. “I urge you – I beg of you – to ignore the chatter and the noise and ask yourselves, which candidate really has the experience, the maturity, and the demeanor to handle the job I just described to you?” she asked the crowd.

“I need your help to do that as well. Are you with me?”