Michelle Obama: Barack's powerful weapon

When Barack Obama asked his daughters if they wanted to join him on stage to celebrate his Super Tuesday night victories last week, nine-year-old Malia told him: “Daddy, you know that’s not my thing.”

It used not to be his wife’s “thing” either. But while Malia and her sister Sasha, six, played upstairs in a hotel room, Michelle Obama bounded onto the stage in Chicago, doing a celebratory dance with her husband to the Stevie Wonder hit Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours.

	Watch: Obama does a victory dance with his wife

The once reluctant political spouse cut a striking figure, her statuesque 5’11” frame clad in a bright red jacket and skirt, pearls around her neck and hair styled in a flip reminiscent of Jacqueline Onassis, the wife of the assassinated president, John F Kennedy.

One of the most potent weapons in Mr Obama’s ground-breaking campaign to become America’s first black president, she was back on the campaign trail later in the week.

But despite the intensity of the election battle, she has an unbreakable rule that nothing must get in the way of weekends with her children. So it was only after breakfast with the girls on Friday morning, in the family’s red-brick Georgian Revival mansion, that Mrs Obama, 44, notched up 3,100 miles and eight hours aboard a small jet to address crowds in Nebraska and Washington state, arriving home late at night so she would be there when they woke up this morning.

“Michelle will always make sure her family comes first,” said Santita Jackson, the daughter of veteran African-American politician Rev Jesse Jackson and a friend of Mrs Obama's for 30 years.

“She does everything she can to make sure the disruption to her daughters' lives is minimised and that they are not swept away by this tsunami surrounding Barack. She is a rock, an oasis of calm and humanity in the midst of all this chaos.”

Miss Jackson, a radio talk show host who is Malia’s godmother, added: “Michelle gave Barack the sort of stability that he had never had in his own upbringing. And he depends on her absolutely, because he knows she is going give it to him straight. It is impossible to overstate her importance to him.”

Raised in black working-class district of south Chicago, Mrs Obama is a high-flyer in her own right.

She studied at two Ivy League institutions and then pursued a career as a corporate lawyer and hospital executive. She has now put her own professional life on hold, but at times during Mr Obama’s political career in Illinois, she was less enthusiastic.

Indeed, in his memoir The Audacity of Hope, he noted her anger when he first decided to run for Congress in 2000.

“I never thought I’d have to raise a family alone,” she told him bitterly.

	Stage presence: Michelle Obama introducing her husband in Las Vegas

Dan Shoman, a political consultant who worked on Obama campaigns for nearly 10 years, recalled how sometimes she ignored her husband’s pleading to attend political events, citing family and work commitments.

“They were living from pay cheque to pay cheque and she wanted to know her family would be OK financially,” he said. “But now she’s completely bought into this campaign. She’s all fire and passion and brimstone. I was with them at a fundraiser last June, and Barack said to me: 'Isn’t it amazing to see how into this Michelle is?’”

At the heart of her stump speech is her own compelling personal biography - a young woman who defied expectations with the support of a loving determined family.