Michelle Obama's military strategy

Talking to Norfolk servicemen's wives, the potential first lady hopes to prove her empathy -- and the corrosiveness of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars -- in a battleground state's most contested area.

By Aries Keck

Read more: Military, Virginia, Barack Obama, 2008 election, Life, Michelle Obama, Aries Keck

Aug. 8, 2008 | NORFOLK, Va. -- Amanda McBreen's 82-year-old father is a World War II veteran who's in danger of losing his house to pay for long-term care. Her 80-year-old mother-in-law is in the hospital with a broken leg. McBreen is house-hunting in Norfolk, Va., while her Marine Corps husband meets with his superiors at the Joint Central Command to get details on what may be his ninth military deployment. Where? They don't know yet. That's part of the problem.

"I have three children, a cat, a hamster. And I may have two parents moving in with us. It's not likely to work this way."

Smoothing her hands over her brightly colored miniskirt, McBreen sits on a small stage with a handful of other military wives, some local political leaders, more than 50 television, print, Internet and radio reporters -- and Michelle Obama.

The wife of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama is holding a round table here at Old Dominion University -- in the heart of conservative America, just down the road from the world's largest U.S. Navy base, in a state that last supported a Democrat for president in 1964. But this year, Virginia may be up for grabs, and the Democrats are pushing hard.

It's difficult to overemphasize the appeal that the presumptive Republican candidate, John McCain, may have in this part of the state. The ex-Navy pilot and bona fide war hero should be a natural to win this military stronghold. But the Obama campaign believes it may be able to sway the hearts and pocketbooks of the military families living on base.

Democrats have already made headway with a very popular Democratic governor. And if the party could somehow flip Virginia from red to blue in the presidential election, well, it would be a major coup.

That's why Michelle Obama is sitting onstage in Norfolk, and that's why the event features almost more media members than military wives -- Obama may be listening to military spouses, but she's being seen by all of Virginia.

"Washington has talked a very good game about family values, but Barack believes that we have to have policies that actually value families, especially our military families," she says, and with that she holds up a slick, square, navy blue brochure.

"Today I've brought along copies of a new brochure that we put together that talks about Barack's plan for supporting military families. See?" She squints at the blue square she's holding aloft, "It's pretty, isn't it? And it's for Virginia, too."

The audience cheers at the shout-out and the disarming way Obama seems to be both part of, and apart from, her campaign machine.

It could be tough for Michelle Obama to connect to these military women. She is, after all, a Harvard-educated lawyer and Princeton grad. But listening to stories of missing medical paperwork and moving from base to base, Obama seems less Ivy League businesswoman and more mother and wife, a woman whose husband's job is consuming her entire life.

It has been a long, hot summer for Michelle Obama. First, the man who baptized her two children and officiated at her wedding, pastor Jeremiah Wright, found he liked hearing himself talk about black America more than he wanted a black American to become president. Then came the scuffle over her statement about being proud of America. (The actual line was: "For the first time in my adult life, I'm proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback." Conservative pundits focused on the first bit and ignored the second.) New York Times Op-Ed columnist Maureen Dowd complained that Obama's jokes about her husband's snoring were no way to the keep the campaign's "Camelot mystique."

So Michelle Obama tried to do the first lady thing. She gamely put on a sundress and made chitchat with the women of the daytime talk show "The View."

But just as the campaign's image of a softer Obama began to take hold, the now infamous New Yorker cartoon cover portrayed her "fist-bumping" her husband, sporting an Afro, a scowl and an AK-47.

The woman appearing at this Virginia university couldn't be further from that caricature of an angry black militant. After her opening remarks, Obama nestles into one of the comfy chairs set up onstage. Popping open a bottle of water, she looks at the half-moon of military wives arranged around her and says, "OK, who's going to go first?"

The military wives sit blinking under the klieg lights of the television cameras, many crumpling tissues in their hands as they tentatively lay out their problems. And Obama is right there with them, commiserating over all the little things, like missing hamsters -- and the big things, like the fact that their husbands may never come home. This cruel question mark hangs over all the women's comments, making it hard for them to say that anything's wrong, because how can you fret over yet another deployment when others never made it back from the first one?

"Trust me. Barack and I know that we're blessed." Obama sweeps a strand of her chin-length bob back behind her right ear.

"That is what most Americans, most military spouses, are saying. That's our tendency in this nation, to say that I am blessed. Because we are. In so many ways we're blessed to live in this country. We're blessed to have the opportunities that we have. But sometimes things just still aren't right."

Obama gives a weak laugh. "And, ah, we should be able to talk about that."

Michelle Obama is walking a tightrope with both audiences -- the carefully selected men and women in the room and the millions of Americans judging her every move. How do you criticize a military system without criticizing the military? How do you say that America needs to address racism without calling America racist?

Next page: Her humor works in person. But without context, it can sound like complaining