Picture: Michelle Obama’s childhood home.
“I was raised in a working-class family on the south Side of Chicago. That’s how I identify myself, a working-class girl,” she has told the voters, time after time.
“Michelle was from a middle-class family,” confirmed one of her long-time friends, Angela Acree.
“She came from a regular family. They had a nice home. It wasn’t a mansion, but it was just fine. It was a decent neighbourhood.”
According to family friends, Michelle’s father was a volunteer organiser for the city’s Democratic Party, a by-word for machine politics in America, and his loyalty was rewarded with a well-paid engineering job at Chicago’s water plant. Even before overtime, he earned $42,686 - 25 per cent more than High School teachers at the time.
(At Princeton) she was obliged to take out loans to pay her way and this rankled, as she revealed in a 1985 thesis.
The document, now locked away by the university until after the election in November, betrays an angry, campaigning brand of politics which in no way fits with the mild-mannered advocate of common sense now winning hearts and minds from coast to coast.
An acquaintance of Obama’s family compares her with another political wife, another lawyer as it happens, with a keen interest in making money.
“Michelle is very much like Cherie Blair. She is a middle-class girl who has discovered that money is nice and doesn’t see that as a contradiction with having radical beliefs,” he said.
The rewards have been significant. Despite the image she projects on the Newsweek cover, Michelle owns an impressive collection of diamond jewellery, designer outfits and 400(pounds)-a-pair Jimmy Choo shoes.
“When I’m off the road, I’m going to Target [a U.S. chain store] to get the toilet paper.”
She did not bother to mention, however, that the paper, like the rest of the family shopping, is taken to an 825,000(pounds) three-storey red-brick Georgian revival mansion, set amid beautifully manicured lawns in one of Chicago’s most affluent districts.
Even the house became a source of controversy when it emerged that the wife of a Chicago slum landlord, Tony Rezko, helped them buy land to enlarge its grounds.
Renowned for leaving tenants of one of his squalid buildings without heat in the city’s brutal winter, Rezko now is facing federal corruption charges.
More contentious still was Michelle’s appointment as the 150,000(pounds)-a-year vice-president of external affairs at the University of Chicago hospital in 2005.
It came only two months after Barack was sworn in as a U.S. senator, and was attacked by critics as a blatant attempt, critics claim, by the hospital’s hierarchy to curry favour with her husband, in an era when some politicians want to rein in the vast profits of America’s medical system. They questioned why the wife of a committed Democrat would work for a hospital that has been accused of ruthless greed. Michelle’s image was further tarnished in May 2006, when it was revealed that the centre - despite earning some 50million(pounds) a year - had refused to treat a man who could not afford to pay his bill. He died.
All of which has led some political veterans to accuse Michelle of the very lack of compassion and moral scruples that her husband has lambasted in his Republican rivals for the White House.
Michelle also is under attack for joining the board of a food company where she allegedly took part in a 2005 decision to close a pickle and relish plant in La Junta, Colorado, putting 150 mostly Hispanic labourers out of work.
The small town was devastated. “It totally amazed me when they closed it,” said La Junta Mayor Don Rizzuto, who had believed that Michelle and her husband were “the champions of the little guy”.
To Joe Novak, this only goes to prove that Michelle is distorting reality when she attempts to depict herself as a champion of the masses. “For the past year (she and Barack) have jetted around the country with Oprah Winfrey and Robert De Niro, enjoying penthouse parties and living the high life,” he said. Perhaps, when she contrasts her current red-carpet lifestyle with the unassuming world of South Euclid Avenue, she genuinely may think that her childhood was impoverished. And the one thing that is certain about the incredible Mrs O is that she never intends to have to live that way again.’ - UK Daily Mail