First Lady Takes on the Role of Staff Energizer

November 17, 2011 First Lady Takes On the Role of Staff Energizer By JODI KANTOR Young campaign workers looked up from their pizza at Obama re-election headquarters in Chicago one evening last month to find an unexpected guest: the first lady of the United States, there to deliver a surprise pep talk. Michelle Obama, who often calls herself the mom in chief, is taking on the new role of motivator in chief. After nearly three years of limiting her time in the public sphere, she is suddenly ubiquitous: headlining seven fund-raisers in October, promoting new initiatives for veterans and her husband’s stalled jobs bill, even appearing at job fairs run by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the business lobbying group that has frequently been a nemesis of her husband’s administration. If the initial stage of her time as first lady was identified with glamour (magazine covers, a high-flying social secretary) and the second was about advocacy (for child obesity prevention and military families), she is entering a third stage: as an upbeat ambassador for a struggling administration, and more than at any time since the inauguration, a designated narrator of her husband’s story. At her White House events, she avoids any mention of re-election, to avoid seeming overtly political. And there are no big public campaign events yet, no huge crowds she is rallying to vote. But she is stepping up her private events, with one goal: throwing the considerable force of her personality into rousing deflated, restive fund-raisers and volunteers. “Her mission is to energize folks and give them encouragement to go out and do the work,” David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s chief strategist, said in an interview. On her visit to the Chicago re-election offices, she worked the room, remembered as many names as she could, dispensed handshakes and hugs, and then gave a speech about the importance of the campaign staff’s work, not just to the president but to the country’s future. She has been repeating various versions of that performance in recent months, using a teleprompter even at some small events, but also ad-libbing wherever she goes. (Appearing at a New York fund-raiser with her husband in September, she called the event their “date night,” adding in a mock-flirtatious voice, “Who knows what might happen?”) Her central message revolves around something the president has often told advisers lately: that he craves an opportunity to be measured not just by his record, but on how he stacks up against a Republican candidate. In her speeches at fund-raisers, Mrs. Obama broadcasts that point: “In just over a year now, we are going to make a decision between two very different visions for this country — very different,” she said at a fund-raiser on her Chicago trip. The president does fund-raisers too, but “she has the freedom to be fully passionate,” said Marilyn Katz, the owner of a Chicago public relations firm and a longstanding Obama supporter who attended the first lady’s event. “There’s a kind of constraint that comes with the office, and she can be the unbridled campaigner.” White House aides say Mrs. Obama recognizes that the administration has lost considerable good will among supporters, and she has devoted herself to winning back as much of it as she can. After the recent dedication of the new memorial to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington, former civil rights leaders and other dignitaries were invited back to a reception at the White House. Transportation was a problem and they arrived frustrated, an aide said. But Michelle Obama posed for every last picture and sent every guest off with a kind word. A week after seeing Mrs. Obama at an October fund-raiser in Detroit, 70-year-old Dorothy Syfax Rhea found a handwritten thank-you note from the first lady in her mailbox. (Her son, John Rhea, raised over a half-million dollars for Mr. Obama in 2008.) In an administration in which so much has gone awry, Michelle Obama has become a dependable source of good news. She makes announcements about successes (last week, she talked about new private-sector hiring commitments for veterans) and spreads the White House’s message in inventive ways — for instance, appearing on an episode of the reality television show “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” devoted to housing for veterans. Mrs. Obama wants to be a reliable, popular performer for her husband’s cause, current and former White House aides say, and five years after the start of her crash course in public life, she almost never flubs a speech or attracts negative attention, as she did for a Spain vacation in the summer of 2010. (Two exceptions: in September, she was criticized for wearing tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of borrowed diamonds to the New York fund-raiser and for pictures of her shopping at a Washington-area Target store that appeared to have been planned.) The prospect of Mrs. Obama riding to her husband’s rescue has a certain twist to it: Will the president’s no- nonsense wife, who never wanted to be in politics in the first place, save the day for him? Mr. Obama will wield various weapons, of course, when the race is in full swing. But White House and campaign aides tend to gush about his wife’s power as a surrogate, and about her transformation from a charismatic but inexperienced campaigner during the 2008 race to a far more seasoned presence. She is especially popular with independent, blue-collar and Latina women, all key groups for her husband, said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster. The first lady’s popularity has a protective effect on her husband, Ms. Lake said. “She inoculates against a lot of the attacks on him, because when you like her so much, it’s hard to make the president into a stealing-your-mother’s-Medicare -Muslim-baby-killer,” she said. Mr. Obama certainly will not be the first president to lean heavily on his wife in a re-election effort. During the 1992 race, Barbara Bush was so much more popular than President George Bush that he began slipping phrases like “and Barbara and I think” into his speeches, said Myra Gutin, a historian at Rider University. But Mr. Obama will not need to make any such change. According to a search of presidential transcripts, he has regularly been using that kind of phrase since the start of his presidency.