US election 2012: Michelle Obama emphasises humble beginnings

While Mr Romney enjoyed a cloistered start in life at the private Cranbrook
prep school in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, one of America’s most affluent
enclaves, Mrs
Obama
tells how she had to fight to carve out time for the studies
that would propel her to Ivy League universities and beyond.

“Because we lived in such a little-bitty apartment it was hard to
concentrate at night when everybody was awake, so often I woke up at 4:30,
5:00 in the morning just to study in quiet,” she said at a campaign
event last month,

“And eventually, I was accepted to Princeton University, and I went onto
Harvard Law School.”

In another version of the humble origins speech, Mrs Obama also makes plain
that despite her personal success, her family still hasn’t lost touch with
its roots and the lives of ordinary voters.

“My mother still goes home there every time she’s not with us. My room is
the same – same bed sheets, same pictures,” she said to laughter, “Everything
is the same. I don’t know how long she’s going to keep it like that, but
[more laughter] I’m okay with it, it’s her house.”

Mrs Obama has become a key figure in her husband’s re-election campaign. Since
2008 her work supporting war veterans and campaign to tackle childhood
obesity has seen her 66 per cent personal Gallup soar just as Mr Obama’s –
now hovering around 47 per cent – plummeted.

But citing her husband’s own tough upbringing – “the son of a
single mother, who struggled to put herself through school and pay the bills”
– Mrs Obama said her husband’s ideals of a “fair shake” for
everyone, rather than Republican economic austerity, is best for America in
hard times.

“Barack knows what it means when a family struggles,” she concludes
in her letter, “He knows what it means when someone doesn’t have a
chance to fulfil his or her potential. Those are the experiences that have
made him the man and the president he is today.”

Mrs Obama’s fund-raising letter, published on the Politico website, comes as
the Obama campaign tries to ramp up its efforts to raise money for an autumn
campaign which polls suggest will be a close, attritional contest fought
across 11 key ‘swing’ states.

Financial reports for the two campaigns for the month of May showed that since
being confirmed as the Republican nominee, Mr Romney and his party had
out-raised President Obama and the Democrats by $17m (£11m).

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