JOIN USMichelle plans a careful return to campaign trail
Despite stinging criticism of her summer vacation to Spain with daughter Sasha, Michelle 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 Labour 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 on September 11 to observe the ninth anniversary of the terrorist attacks.
Foreign affairs
Behind the scenes, Michelle 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.
Representative Joe Sestak of Pennsylvania, who is running for Senate, said he repeatedly asked for Michelle, 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 is 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.’”
Michelle 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.”