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A conservative friend who has been struck by the Obama campaign sent the article copied below from The Independent.

First lady in waiting: Straight talking woman
Supporting her husband in his White House campaign is easy for Michelle Obama. But this outspoken businesswoman doesn't give him, or anyone else, an easy ride

By Leonard Doyle
Friday, 25 January 2008

Michelle Obama could be called the stealth campaigner of the 2008 election. Watching her out on the campaign trail is to realise that, deep inside, she would like to give Bill Clinton a piece of her mind, or worse, for the clever way he has smeared her husband.

From a close knit working-class Chicago family by way of Harvard, she also knows any emotional outburst at this point would backfire spectacularly.
The lesson that lies, half-truths and distortions are better handled by keeping the high moral ground has been long ingrained in successful black Americans. But the strain must be great because Mrs Obama 43, is known for telling it like it is, whether it's advising her husband about his personal hygiene, his debate performances or quitting smoking. A deferential political wife, she is not. "He's a gifted man," she tells an audience to warm applause, "but, in the end, he's just a man."
Her method of getting Barack off the cigarettes speaks volumes of the sort of first lady she would be ifshe ends up in the White House. Both her parents smoked and, as children, she and her brother would pour hot sauce on their cigarettes to try and get them to quit. When she agreed to support the presidential bid, she added a non-negotiable rider to the contract: no cigarettes.
"To me it's a role model thing," she said. "You can smoke or you can be president." Barack publicly quit a few days before announcing his presidential bid.
The Clintons have let it be known they expect to lose tomorrow's South Carolina vote, damping down expectations and blaming the "race card." The presidential race is starting to get ugly.
Having persuaded so many Americans to view his candidacy as somehow beyond race, what the Obama campaign now desperately needs to avoid, is an eruption that will see him dismissed in the minds of white voters as another in a long line of talented, but angry black politicians.
With millions of white voters trying to make up their minds ahead of "Super Tuesday" on 5 February , the focus has already moved beyond South Carolina, which votes tomorrow.
Mrs Obama spent yesterday avoiding the latest Clinton outburst. She read to pre-schoolers and held a round table discussion about South Carolina's decrepit school system which has been branded "the corridor of shame". In one rural school, where her husband held a rally the night before, pupils and teachers wear coats inside during winter because there is no heating. Water leaks through the roof of the auditorium and in summer there is no air-conditioning. Some 90 per cent of the pupils are black and many 14-year-olds cannot read or write with any proficiency.
The media wanted to know, her response to Bill Clinton's latest outburst, but she responded with a curt "no" when she was asked to comment.
Mr Clinton's attempt at "dog-whistle politics" – where the message is audible to a particular audience only – reverberated around the airwaves all day.
"Shame on you," he rebuked the media, for not going after the Obamas, a message directed not at voters here in South Carolina, but at New York, California, New Jersey and other states. The strategy: to "define" Mr Obama as a dodgy black candidate before wavering voters. Mr Clinton complained that they had put out a "hit job" on him, and had played the "race card" and were now getting a free ride from the media.
Turbulence was always expected on the Obama campaign trail but perhaps not quite so nasty and from such a quarter as Bill Clinton.
Whatever she feels inside, Mrs Obama shows no signs of cracking. As the campaign goes on, she is has emerged as a star with her own pulling power. Her appeal has been eating into the solid block of women – especially black women – supporting Mrs Clinton.
After flying in from Chicago for four days of campaigning, she began with a ladies lunch. She described taking a minute to check an email from her nine-year-old daughter Malia's teacher on one of her two Blackberries – one for work, the other for the campaign trail – and conveyed that she was a mother first, political wife second and businesswoman third..
She had been shocked to read that Malia had been talking in school about "kidnapping" and "scary people". Young Malia was just joking, she soon told her panicking mother over the phone."I shouldn't say that in front of the cameras," she added, looking at the press scrum in the room.
She shook hands, posed for photos and spoke passionately about her life as a working mother. She has reduced her working hours to fight on the campaign but remains an executive for University of Chicago Hospitals and on the board of several companies.
She told the women at the lunch of her anguished decision to go back to work after having her second child, Sasha. "Every minute after I had my first child, I questioned my decisions," loving her job one day and wanting to quit the next, she said as women nodded in agreement. When Sasha was just four months old Michelle tried to sabotage a job interview by nursing the baby just before the interview and requesting a high salary. She was still hired and has been dealing with the consequences ever since.
"We've been told we can have it all. The truth of the matter is that you can't. You can't have it all at the same time," she said. Famous as her husband's greatest critic, she told the audience that he "gets it" and that her support for him "comes straight from my motherhood bones".
"He's watched my struggle and the pain that I have had as a woman."
One of the issues the Obama campaign has had to confront is that black voters, especially in the South often express reluctance to support him because they fear he will become a target for assassination if elected. The violence, deaths and burnt-out city centres that followed the assassination of the civil rights leader Martin Luther King in 1968 is still a living memory for the black community in particular.
At another event, Mrs Obama took on the fears that her husband's presidential run might put him in danger. "There are still voices, even within our own community, that focus on what might go wrong," she said.
"It's not just about fear, people," she said "It's also about love. I know people want to protect us and themselves from disappointment and failure, from the possibility of being let down again – not by us, but by the world as it is. A world that we fear might not be ready for a decent man like Barack."
The question, she says, is whether Americans are ready to let go of fear. "Are you gonna make a decision based on fear or doubt or what is not possible again," she said "Or are we gonna grasp hope and possibility? The only candidate who will snatch that veil of impossibility off the heads of all these kids is Barack," she said, "We could potentially do something big here."
Mrs Obama met her future husband when she was an intern at a Chicago law firm. Coming from the city's tough South Side, she helped reassure doubtful African-Americans that the son of an African father and a white mother was really part of their community. In a Chicago Tribune interview she explained that, when she was growing up, people said to her "You talk like a white girl," adding, "there isn't one black person who doesn't understand that dynamic. That debate is about the pain we still struggle with in this country and Barack knows that more than anyone."
"One of the things I hope happens through our involvement in this campaign is this country and this world sees yet another image of what it means to be black."
She has emerged as one of the most potent weapons in the campaign. "She's tough," Mr Obama, 45, has said of his wife "There's something about her that projects such honesty and strength. It's what makes her such an unbelievable professional, and partner, and mother, and wife."
The campaign launched the Women for Obama group, luring some of the brightest lights in the feminist world away from the Clinton campaign. They have since been busy marketing the candidate as a post-feminist man, who is beyond America's trials with race and even gender.
In a famous Glamour magazine interview Mrs Obama described her husband's messy nature, whether not picking up his socks of failing to put away the butter. She even said: "He is so 'snore-y and stinky' when he wakes up that their daughters won't get into bed with him."
However, it was clear yesterday afternoon that she had won over yet another audience to her husband's side. Her staff call her "the closer". Wherever she goes, whoever she meets, at the end of it, she has closed the deal for Barack.

Tyler- Great post.
I agree most Americans want the same thing. All of this political fighting is getting us nowhere.