Michelle Obama graces the cover of Time magazine this week, and she gives them a really long interview. She’s not breaking any news, and as far as I see, the piece is mainly about how quickly Michelle’s image has jumped from the “angry black woman” caricature to today’s public perception of a groundbreaking First Lady that even many conservatives are moony over. The New York Times ran a similar story last month, making the story about how Michelle and her staff guard her image.

Time’s interview seems to glorify the fact that Michelle’s current image is apolitical. This is probably based on polling – more Americans prefer a First Lady who seems at home with children, entertaining, and doing work that isn’t controversial in any way:

[Michelle] admits that the sheer symbolic power of the role is perhaps greater than she anticipated. “I tried not to come into this with too many expectations one way or the other,” she says on a sunny May afternoon in her East Wing office.

“I felt like part of my job — and I still feel like that — is to be open to where this needs to go.”

She’s always shown a shrewd eye for the strategic detour, suspending her career in favor of helping her husband get elected, then getting her daughters settled and her garden planted and, in the process, disarming the critics who cast her as a black radical in a designer dress.

She will say she’s just doing what comes naturally. But whether by accident or design, or a little of both, she has arrived at a place where her very power is magnified by her apparent lack of interest in it.

“Over the years, the role of First Lady has been perceived as largely symbolic,” Hillary Clinton observed in her memoirs. “She is expected to represent an ideal — and largely mythical — concept of American womanhood.”

That was not Clinton’s favorite part of the job. Maybe this is Michelle’s true advantage: she appears at peace, even relieved, that her power is symbolic rather than institutional. It makes her less threatening, and more potent at the same time — especially since her presence at the White House has unique significance.

[From Time]

The majority of the Time cover piece is the interview with Michelle, but they do get some interesting quotes from President Obama. He tells Time: “Among the many wonderful things about being President… the best is that I get to live above the office and see Michelle and the kids every day. I see them in the morning. We have dinner every night. It is the thing that sustains me.” President Obama also tells Time that he makes sure he gets to have some “Michelle time” during the day, just work breaks where he stops in the White House residence to chat about their days. I’ve pulled some selected quotes from Michelle’s interview – I love her, but she can talk anyone’s ear off. Don’t get me wrong, she’s very eloquent, but she’s very… verbose:

“[As] I grew up and came to work in those places, right, and got to know them, I realized that the misunderstanding or the disconnect goes both ways; that folks outside of these communities have no idea what goes on within these institutions, and sometimes the people in the institutions have no real understanding of the people who live outside. You know, everybody is dealing in these misperceptions about one another because there is no bridge.”

“And I just feel like through the small things that we can do here at the White House, we can start exemplifying the importance of building those bridges, in real meaningful ways, so that when you come … when young people come here, they don’t have to come here and be something they’re not; they can come here and be who they are, and the folks here will listen. And we can go out and be ourselves and listen in their communities, as well.”

“I had this vision when … as we were going through the campaign and you started thinking about, okay, what if my husband wins and I’m the First Lady, what are the kind of things that I’d like to do? And you always get that question … or, I got that question a lot over the course of the campaign. But one of the things that I thought was, well, how powerful would it be for young girls to come into this space and hear from other really powerful, impressive, dynamic women, and to have that conversation go on here in the White House?”

“And as we sort of started thinking through the event and thinking about how I wanted to relate to the D.C. community, as well, I always thought whenever we invited somebody in, I wanted to go out to their space, too. I wanted that to be a mutual exchange; that it’s not just people coming here where I live, but it’s me going out to where they live.”

“So we’ve tried to do that in almost every event that we’ve done from, you know, the White House Kitchen Garden to whenever we go to a school and read to kids. Either their teachers or the kids will be invited back here very soon. That’s sort of a theme.”

“So the event started coming together. And it came off so beautifully. I think it was … it’s one of those events that stand out in my mind as, this is why I’m here … to help make this possible and to see the faces on those girls as they entered the East Room in all its glory, and to be sitting around these tables with women they saw on TV, or saw on the news, and to have them having real conversations. Alicia Keyes, who’s the idol of every single girl under 30, probably, when she came in, she literally walked around to every single table, because everybody is still a little sort of … I’m in the White House, let me behave, I can’t get up.”

“It’s rare [for most families] to have dad at home for dinner, to see him in the mornings, to have him there when you go to bed at night, just to be able to have the casual conversations that happen about life at dinnertime… That’s been terrific. It’s normal. It’s more normal than we’ve had for a very long time.”

[From Time]

I’ve said it before, but I don’t think this is really who Michelle is. Yes, I’m sure she’s at peace with this apolitical image, but she’s a lawyer, a professional woman, and highly educated woman. I find it hard to believe that this current image of Michelle as “apolitical wife and mother” is the last we’ll see. Even if she keeps her political thoughts and advice between her and President Obama, something’s got to give. For now, though, I’m happy the majority of the American public has embraced Michelle. My only hope is that they’ll still embrace her when they figure out she’s just as smart as her husband – maybe even more so.

Michelle Obama is shown on 5/18/09 at a ribbon cutting ceremony at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Credit: WENN.com