'I was always told this would not be possible'

Chicago: When Barack Obama asked his daughters if they wanted to join him on stage to celebrate his Super Tuesday 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 on to the stage in Chicago and joined her husband in a celebratory dance to the Stevie Wonder hit Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I'm Yours.

The once-reluctant political spouse cut a striking figure, her statuesque 5 foot-11 inch frame clad in a bright red jacket and skirt, pearls around her neck and hair styled in a flick reminiscent of Jacqueline Onassis, the widow of John F. Kennedy.

One of the most potent weapons in Obama's ground-breaking campaign to become America's first black president, his wife was back on the campaign trail later in the week. Despite the intensity of the election battle, however, 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 last 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 her children woke up on Saturday morning.

"Michelle will always make sure her family comes first," said Santita Jackson, the daughter of veteran African-American politician, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and a friend of Mrs Obama 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."

Stabilising influence

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 to give it to him straight."

Raised in a 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 her husband's political career in Illinois, she was less enthusiastic than she is today. 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.

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. "I should not be here. I am a statistical oddity," she told one crowd. "I was told this was not possible."

The young Michelle Robinson and her older brother, Craig, were brought up in a small, rented flat. Their father, Frasier, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at 30 but defiantly went to work each day as a city water pump worker, while their mother, Marian, stayed at home until the children reached high school and then went to work as a secretary in a catalogue business. Mr Robinson died in 1991, the year before his daughter married, but Mrs Robinson, now 70, still lives in the same flat where she raised her family. Several times a week she makes the 15-minute journey to Hyde Park where her daughter and son-in-law now live, often to look after her beloved granddaughters.