Michelle Obama spent some of her summer promoting activities for children.
Despite stinging criticism of her summer vacation to Spain with daughter Sasha — aides warned her not to go, and the backlash was fiercer than they had imagined — Mrs. Obama is the most popular member of her husband’s administration. Having worked to build good will through nonideological causes like fighting obesity and assisting military families, aides say, she is ready to spend some of her political capital to advance President Obama’s agenda — and her own.
Her fresh burst of activity will begin the day after Labor Day, when daughters Malia and Sasha return to school. She will inaugurate a White House dance series on Tuesday, travel to New Orleans on Wednesday to start the second phase of Let’s Move!, her healthy eating campaign, and join her predecessor, Laura Bush, in Shanksville, Pa., on Sept. 11 to observe the ninth anniversary of the terrorist attacks.
Behind the scenes, Mrs. Obama is planning to expand her work with military families this fall. And in a sign that she is extending her reach into foreign affairs, she will address the Clinton Global Initiative late this month. Speakers at the high-profile event typically unveil some new plan to tackle a global problem; Mrs. Bush pledged $60 million for clean water in Africa.
But it is Mrs. Obama’s decision to campaign that poses the biggest risk for the first lady, who arrived at the White House as the self-described “mom-in-chief” and has pursued, until now, a relatively risk-free path. She agreed, somewhat reluctantly, to make limited political appearances after Congressional Democrats, desperate for a boost in a brutal election year, begged the White House for her help.
Representative Joe Sestak of Pennsylvania, who is running for Senate, said he repeatedly asked for Mrs. Obama, but the White House put him off. Privately, she told aides that if the West Wing needed her to help re-elect Democrats, she would oblige — so long as they laid out a clear strategy that made wise use of her time, and fit with her signature issues.
“She’s aware that it’s too easy, for whatever the crisis of the moment, to throw her at it,” said Susan Sher, her chief of staff. “She said: ‘I don’t want this to be a one-off. Give me the whole plan and tell me where you think I can most effectively fit in.’ ”
Mrs. Obama’s fall strategy is the result of months of work by the first lady and a coterie of advisers who have known her for years — Ms. Sher, her longtime mentor and onetime boss, Jocelyn Frye, her policy director and a friend from Harvard Law School, and Valerie Jarrett, the president’s senior adviser. Ms. Jarrett calls it a “natural progression,” not a turning point.
The stepped-up pace reflects the first lady’s desire to balance the competing forces in her life: her obligations as a mother, as a wife who wants to help a beleaguered husband, and as a popular public figure determined, as she said in an interview this year, “to leave something behind that we can say, because of this time that this person spent here, this thing has changed.”
The trick is making sure those goals do not collide, advisers say, which is one reason Mrs. Obama was hesitant to re-enter politics. (Another, perhaps, was the drubbing she took during her husband’s primary campaign, though she later became a hugely popular surrogate.) Her schedule and stump speech are still being developed, but aides insist she will not attack Republicans. She will be positive and upbeat.
“I think she’s happy to go out and support folks who have stood up for things that she thinks are important,” said David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser. “But I don’t think she’s eager to jump into the fray in a very political way, and I don’t think she will.”
With her husband’s poll numbers sliding, and many Democrats distancing themselves from him, Mrs. Obama, political analysts say, is the White House’s best hope for exciting the party’s lethargic base.
“Her favorability is the highest of anybody we’ve got on the Democratic side right now,” said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster, adding, “The risk is that she becomes controversial and polarizing, which she is not right now.”
And as Mrs. Obama discovered in Spain, she is not immune to criticism. Aides say privately that they warned her there would be a cost to the trip, but she overruled them, insisting it was a rare chance to spend time with Sasha and with a friend whose father had died. But the intensity of the uproar — including accusations that she was a “modern-day Marie Antoinette” — caught the White House and Mrs. Obama off guard.
An advocate of work-life flexibility, Mrs. Obama insists on it for herself. She restricts her public events to no more than three days a week and builds her schedule around recitals and soccer games. She takes August off, and has managed to slip away with the girls to places like Mount Vernon, Monticello and, just the other day, Gettysburg, Pa.
Last spring, she shook up the East Wing staff, hiring Ms. Sher as chief of staff. Mrs. Obama told aides that she felt overscheduled. “She kind of looked at us,” Ms. Sher said, “and said: ‘We’re not in the middle of a campaign. Let’s only think about doing things where we are adding value.’ ”
Since then, Mrs. Obama has focused most intensely on Let’s Move!, lining up support from major corporations, doctors groups, chefs and sports stars. (In New Orleans on Wednesday, she will announce a new partnership with the National Football League to promote exercise.) And she took pains to keep the effort bipartisan, arranging her debut interview on Fox News with Mike Huckabee, the Republican former governor of Arkansas, and a school visit with Gov. Haley Barbour, Republican of Mississippi.
She has also quietly cultivated allies on Capitol Hill, especially the Senate Democratic leader, Harry Reid, who put a long-awaited child-nutrition bill on the Senate’s agenda in July at her urging. It passed.
She has enlisted her husband’s help as well. When the nutrition bill seemed stuck, the president took Mr. Reid on an impromptu tour of the White House garden, in a not-so-gentle nudge to get it moving.
And aides said that when Mr. Obama set a budget for the Veterans Affairs Department this year, he picked the highest of three options, telling aides that Mrs. Obama expected it.
“I’m hearing about veterans and military families on a very regular basis,” one adviser recalled the president as saying.
Now, aides say, Mrs. Obama wants to set specific targets for measuring progress. In New Orleans, she will outline benchmarks for healthy school lunches, well-child visits and the like. She is also revamping her military-families initiative in the mold of Let’s Move!, with the aim of improving education, housing and employment, aides say.
Flashier than Mrs. Bush, not quite as sharp-edged as Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mrs. Obama has confounded professional women and scholars who thought that with her Harvard law degree and background in hospital management she might take a more aggressive stance. Some, like Myra G. Gutin, who has written two books about first ladies, do not know what to make of her.
“I’m having trouble pinning down where she falls on the spectrum between ceremonial and activist,” Ms. Gutin said. Others, like Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the University of Pennsylvania, see Mrs. Obama as “a very accomplished individual whose talents appear to be circumscribed.”
To that, aides say, Mrs. Obama has a standard retort: “I’m his wife, not his senior adviser.”
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