MICHELLE OBAMA ~ A WOMAN OF INTEGRITY AND STRENGTH

Change Agent

First Lady in Waiting

Who needs a warm-up campaign? Having scaled down her career to support her husband’s political goals, Michelle Obama says “it’s now or never” for the couple to take the White House. As Barack gathers momentum, Michelle speaks candidly about America’s need for change, and a different kind of political marriage.

by Leslie Bennetts WEB EXCLUSIVE

Vanity Fair

Michelle Obama at a rally for Barack Obama in Londonderry, New Hampshire, October 2007. Photograph by Brigitte Lacombe.

As Michelle Obama strolls around Mack’s Apples Pick-Your-Own orchard greeting people at the Londonderry children’s fair, she seems relaxed and friendly, her casual manner belying the pressing schedule that just whisked her from Chicago to New Hampshire and will soon rush her off to an afternoon packed with other events.

But when she addresses the crowd, there is no mistaking her sense of urgency as she makes an impassioned case for her husband’s presidential candidacy. “I am desperate for change—now,” she says, “not in 8 years or 12 years, but right now. We don’t have time to wait. We need big change—not just the shifting of power among insiders. We need to change the game, because the game is broken. When I think about the country I want to give my children, it’s not the world we have now. All I have to do is look into the faces of my children, and I realize how much work we need to do.”

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