The fan’s voice is urgent, her eyes wild. She is 40 years old but shrieking like a teenager.
“SIGN MY BIBLE! Can you sign my Bible?” Nzati Mbengi begs, waving the book over her head as she and the crowd surge forward.
The star is unrattled, flashing her dazzling smile, clasping the fans’ outstretched hands with her perfectly manicured fingers. She snatches the book and scribbles her initials.
Mbengi lifts the Bible up and wails, then plants her lips on the cover. She has an autograph from . . . Michelle Obama!
Yes, Michelle Obama. The 44-year-old soccer mom, whose appeal is centered squarely on her plain-talking, keepin’-it-real persona, has become a rock star.
It’s a weird place to be, especially for a woman whose stump speech on behalf of her husband, Barack, is all about the plight of the Everyman, her modest upbringing on Chicago’s South Side, her struggles as a working mother.
She knows it’s weird. She says as much to crowd after crowd: “I am not supposed to be here.”
Yet here she is, the woman of the man of the people, who just happened to make Vanity Fair’s best-dressed list, who lives in a $1.65 million mansion, who recently left a $212,000-a-year job as a hospital executive to help her husband’s presidential campaign.
But forget about all that. Ask fans what they love about her, and they rattle off words like funny, classy, smart. Most of all: “real.”
It would be easy to dismiss the Michelle mania as a spillover of adulation for her celebrity husband. But read the signs at rallies that bear only her name, watch people laugh and cry over her words, and it’s clear plenty are here for her. She is pulling in crowds of up to 2,500 — on her own.
“She’s not like a plastic talking head the way that some of them can be,” Kimberly Sorrell, 41, says as she waits at the Community College of Rhode Island in Warwick for her to arrive during campaigning last month. “She’s an actual person, a real person.”
At times, she has been a little too real for some. Comments tweaking her husband have drawn criticism. And his campaign had to do major damage control when many took offense after a comment — misinterpreted, she says — about whether she was proud of her country.
Her hair flip, pearls and sleeveless shift dresses have drawn comparisons to Jackie Kennedy. So has her promise of something different and exciting. But where Jackie was demure, Michelle is bold. And Michelle didn’t come from money.
“Deep down inside, I’m still that little girl who grew up on the South Side of Chicago,” she told a New Hampshire crowd in January. “I am a product of that experience through and through. Everything that I think about and do is shaped around the life that I lived in that little apartment in that bungalow that my father worked so hard to provide for us.”
