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If You Knew Barack Like She Knows BarackHow Michelle Obama will humanize her husband in tonight's speech.

By Liza MundyUpdated Monday, Aug. 25, 2008, at 7:13 AM ET

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"I knew he was special and that he connected with the people," she told a crowd during his U.S. Senate race. "That is how I fell in love with him."

By telling of her own emotional journey, from feeling skeptical about his résumé and upbringing to falling in love with his eloquence and moral values, Michelle becomes the traditional proxy for the audience. She acknowledges that it's OK if your first impulse is to find Obama's background puzzling or even to dismiss him—because she did once, too. The idea is that you, too, will soon perceive the many ways he is wonderful; you, too, will fall for him, just as she did. She is here to walk us through the process. It's a clever, nuanced expression of wifely adoration.

The other person we are likely to hear Michelle talk about is her late father, Fraser Robinson. Because it is not only Michelle's job to explain Barack Obama: She also must explain herself, now more than ever, given that she has become a celebrity in her own right and controversial in many quarters. Surveys regularly show that Michelle gets much more media coverage than Cindy McCain, and both her negatives and her positives tend to be higher. She is a more high-profile and more polarizing potential first lady.

There are many reasons for this. Her "deflating" comments about her husband can come off as either endearing or a little mean. Her statement in February that this is the first time she has been proud of her country drew criticism and attack videos. She has also said there is an "inconvenience factor" to the presidential campaign and that this is the only chance Americans will have to vote for Obama. Rightly or wrongly, some of her statements have contributed to the image of hauteur. But she has also been unfairly targeted by opponents determined to paint her as a black militant, a kind of Angela Davis in a designer sundress—a charge that is absurd.

To counter this, she works hard to assure middle-class audiences that she and Obama are just like them: the parents of small children who were until recently beset by debt, including a mortgage and student loans. "Deep down inside, I'm still that little girl who grew up on the South Side of Chicago," she habitually says, talking about her dad, who for most of his adult life worked as a "stationary fireman" at a Chicago water treatment plant, tending boilers, despite being afflicted with multiple sclerosis. She may—as she often does—wax nostalgic about how it used to be possible for a working man to support his family and for a mom to stay home.

Often, she uses the example of her dad when addressing the topic of family life, expressing her view that things used to be easier for parents, that family life has gotten harder, more complicated and stressful, with two parents often required to support a household.

This nostalgia is a tricky part of her presentation. Michelle did grow up on the South Side of Chicago, in a middle-class neighborhood that during her girlhood was transformed by white flight. Chicago was a city of enormous racial tensions in the 1960s and '70s. Some things may be worse than they were then, but many things are better—a fact she does not talk a lot about, which is how she has gotten a reputation for being more bleak than her husband. Her purpose, however, is not to engage in a long discussion about 1970s America vs. the present. It is to invoke her father as representative of hardworking Middle America, a Middle America for whom things are tough just now.

She may be best known for her zingers, but in the end, what Michelle Obama does best is reassure Americans that she and Barack Obama are just like everybody else. That they, too, as Langston Hughes put it, sing America and are America.