Michelle Obama was the overwhelming star of Tuesday night's Democratic National Convention, delivering a powerful personal narrative about her husband still being the same deeply principled man she fell in love with 23 years ago when they were both broke and watching their families struggle.
Obama's speech contrasted with barnburners from the rest of the night, which attacked GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney on everything from his Swiss bank accounts to flip-flopping on abortion. But the first lady's remarks also touched on the message that others, including the keynote speaker, San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro, made earlier: Struggle and success aren't just Republican ideals, and there's nothing un-American about getting help.
Obama's speech, like Ann Romney's at the Republican National Convention last week, focused on her relationship with a candidate that she knows as a husband and a father. But while Romney's talk of saving money by eating tuna and pasta fell flat, Obama's stories of student loan debt and family hardships made for a more convincing case that the can relate to middle-class struggles.
During her remarks, the first lady said she knew Barack would make an "extraordinary" president when he first ran in 2008, but in her quieter moments, she worried about the toll the spotlight would take on their daughters. She said she feared losing "the simple joys" she shared with her family. "Saturdays at soccer games, Sundays at grandma's house," Obama said. "And a date night for Barack and me was either dinner or a movie, because as an exhausted mom, I couldn't stay awake for both."
Obama said she loved the life they had, and she didn't want to lose it because "I loved Barack just the way he was." She described first dating Barack and painted a side to him that most people would find hard to imagine.
He was a guy who "picked me up for our dates in a car that was so rusted out, I could actually see the pavement going by in a hole in the passenger side door," Obama said to laughs. "He was the guy whose proudest possession was a coffee table he'd found in a dumpster, and whose only pair of decent shoes was half-size too small."
Still, she said knew she'd found "a kindred spirit" in Barack when they talked about their families. She grew up with a father with multiple sclerosis who would "prop himself up against the bathroom sink, and slowly shave and button his uniform," and a brother who, like her, relied on student loans to go to college. Her story, said Obama, was just like Barack's story.
"I realized that even though he'd grown up all the way across the country, he'd been brought up just like me. Barack was raised by a single mother who struggled to pay the bills, and by grandparents who stepped in when she needed help," she said.
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