Isn't she lovely?

In her prime-time speech Monday, Michelle Obama foiled her harshest detractors and perhaps even won over Middle America.

By Rebecca Traister

Read more: Politics, News, Democratic National Convention, Rebecca Traister, Barack Obama, 2008 election, Michelle Obama

Reuters/Mike Segar

Michelle Obama waves as she arrives at the podium to speak at the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver Monday night.

Aug. 26, 2008 | DENVER -- Michelle Obama had one job on Monday night: to not be scary.

As the first black woman ever to make a beeline for the East Wing, Obama, a lawyer with degrees from Princeton and Harvard, has been dogged by an aura of suspicion: about her brains and politics and attitude and all sorts of things that stand in for both racial and gender discomfort. Early on, Maureen Dowd tagged her "emasculating"; she's been attacked over her patriotism; there were the insidious "whitey" whispers. The infamous New Yorker cover summed it up by caricaturing her as a slinky, Afro'd Angela Davis, saucily giving her man a so-called terrorist fist bump.

Which is probably why her remarks to the convention on Monday night were the opposite of political, the antithesis of the angry opener delivered by Zell Miller in New York in 2004, or for that matter, the whacked-out feminist barn-burner given by the truly exotic (and scary!) Teresa Heinz Kerry on the second night of the Democratic convention. On paper, Obama's speech was so aggressively comforting, so just-folksy, so daughterly and wifely and motherly, that it made Nancy Reagan sound like an ambitious hussy with a wandering eye.

But man, can Michelle Obama ever slam a soft pitch straight out of the park.

Dressed in a peacock green frock that was surely the hottest dress ever seen on a convention floor, Obama was introduced first in a video by her mother, who referred to her as "my baby" and then by her older brother, Craig Robinson, as "my little sister." See? She's just a baby little sister! Nothing scary about that!

Robinson, now the basketball coach at Oregon State University, bolstered the evening's theme ("Black First Lady Contenders: They're Just Like Us!") with anecdotes about how his lil' sis woke him up early on Christmas morning and memorized every episode of "The Brady Bunch." Then there was how, though she eventually quit her potentially threatening powerful law firm job, she did take something from it: "a young lawyer by the name of Barack Obama." That's right, folks, she got her M.R.S.

The written text of the Robinson-Obama siblings was nearly retro in its firm placement of Michelle in the sphere of acceptable, traditional femininity -- daughter, sister, wife and mother, rather than lawyer, administrator, intellect and political animal. It would have been hard to take were it not for the reality that Obama looks so different, and lives so differently, from so many of the people who must come out to vote for her husband in November, making it crucial to stress everything she shares with great white Middle America.

And for the fact that the woman is a killer on the stump. Throughout the campaign Obama has shown off her gift for delivery: her lilting cadence and hypnotic tone, trying out new jokes at every stop, reading her audience like a book and playing straight to whoever is in front of her.

On Monday night, in her deft hands, the potentially soggy material seemed light as air -- soft and warm, yes -- but also honest and direct and emotional. First, her discussion of her brother conveyed the closeness of their relationship, one that seems to be friendly, long-lasting and funny. After the Clintons and the Bushes, tolerable siblings might just be a refreshing change.

Then there was her tribute to her father, a filtration plant shift worker who suffered from multiple sclerosis and died in 1991, and whom she described movingly as "my rock ... our provider, our champion, our hero." "I can feel my dad looking down on us," said Obama. "Just as I've felt his presence in every grace-filled moment of my life."

Obama has talked a lot about her parents on the trail. It is from them that she gets her idea of what it used to mean to be working class in America, a life that becomes increasingly difficult in today's fractured economy, and which she described again here on Monday night. When her father was in pain from his illness, she said, "He just woke up a little earlier, and worked a little harder," hard enough to put his son and daughter through college. And when she met Barack, with his single mother and Kansas grandparents, the story goes, she recognized in them the American spirit with which she was raised. "Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values," she said, in a line she used often on the campaign trail, "that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say you're going to do; that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don't know them, and even if you don't agree with them." Here she got a wild round of applause.

And if it was slightly dispiriting to hear this dazzlingly smart and accomplished woman sum herself up in relation to the other people in her life -- "a wife who loves my husband" and "a mom whose girls are the heart of my heart and the center of my world" -- then it was leavened by the fact that she was using every bit of her power and charisma to keep the crowd wrapped around her little finger.

Next page: Hitting the mother lode: Women's suffrage and the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.