Interview with the First Lady

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You've also said, and it's a very poignant comment, that you think back on kids you grew up with were really talented and really bright and there was such a — I think you said there's such a flimsy difference ...
There is. There absolutely is, right.

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... between the ones that ...
The difference in a parent who sees the value in investing in education. That was my — you know, I had many friends who could have gone to college but they didn't have parents who thought that they should go into debt to pay for them to go to college.

So they struggled to get to school without — unlike my father, who told my brother when he was deciding between schools, he had picked a school that was more of a basketball-focused school, and my father asked him, Is this the school you really want to go to? And my brother confessed that he would have rather gone to Princeton, but he just thought this one would be more affordable. And my father got really angry with him and he said, "Don't make a decision about your education based on what I can afford. I'll figure it out."

So there were kids in my neighbor ... who didn't have a father that felt that way or could even think that way, right. So you don't go to college or you don't go to the school that you wanted to go to, or when you get there you're worrying every semester about whether you can register, which were ... you know, many kids that I knew felt that way. And when I worked in the University of Chicago, I saw kids like me who were using their loan money to help their parents pay the electric bill, and therefore they'd run out of money for books and couldn't feed themselves over the course of the semester. I saw those kids, right, but they didn't have a parent that said, "Do not look this way with your education money; you go to school, you learn, you grow."

Those are the ... and that's beginning at college. Let's not think about the flimsy differences that happen to kids who were 7 and 8 and 3 and 4. So when you grow up in communities where you see, where you're surrounded by, and you grow up with really bright, talented kids and you slowly see people slipping through the cracks, you know that there but for the grace of God.

We were so blessed, my brother and I, because we had everything you needed. It had nothing to do with money, but we had two parents who loved us, a father that had a steady job all of his life. We had a strong external family unit. I grew up with grandparents and uncles and aunts. People didn't go to college, but you had Christmas dinner together. You know, they were just this huge, strong support system. The neighborhood that I lived in wasn't wealthy, but it wasn't crime-ridden, so you could play in the streets, and there were gangs, but there weren't gangs that would keep you from going to school.

So you sort of think of all that balance, and we were lucky because we could have ... anything could have happened, you know, and I realize ... looking back on the ... where my grandparents lived, they lived in this housing development called Parkway Gardens. I was actually born there. But I saw it as a wonderful, small apartment building. That's how I remember it. But now when I pass it, it's — I was like, God, I never saw that apartment in the way that I'm seeing it now ... you know, without ... but that's where my grandparents lived. But it was different in the '70s than it was in 2009. Those were different neighborhoods, different communities.

So I just keep thinking about those kids who are missing opportunities by a hair, by a breath, by a parent, by a teacher, by a dollar amount, and I'm kind of working to make up some of that difference to the extent that I think I can.

Switching gears a little bit, I wanted to ask you about the, sort of the public perception of Michelle Obama to the extent that you have to grapple with it. During the campaign, the sort of prism was, Is she radical? Is she too negative? Is she this, is she that? And since the Inauguration, there's a Pew poll that says even among Republican women, since the Inauguration, since January, your approval rating has gone up 21 points or something like that, to high levels, even by First Lady standards. What do you make of that shift and how things have changed since then?
You know, I think that today there is consistency and probably a depth to people's exposure to me. When you're in a campaign setting, there's just a narrow prism through which people see not just the wives but the candidates themselves. That's why it never really bothered me ... because I got these questions on the campaign trail — Well, what do you make of this and what people said about that and that? — and I always felt like, Well, they just don't know me. [Laughter.] I haven't changed. People don't change fundamentally. That, I know as a grownup. You don't change in a year or two.

Kids do. My children change rapidly over months and years. But once you hit, once you're a grownup, you don't. Your life doesn't make these — you don't internally make these sweeping changes.

I'm pretty much who I've been for a long time. So that ... I just think that people have the opportunity to see all of who Michelle Obama is over a longer period of time. And hopefully, they like what they see. And I think they actually — to the extent that they saw all of me — liked what they saw then. It's just that ... because if that weren't the case, I don't think Barack would be President, you know?

See pictures of the Obamas waltzing at the Inauguration.

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