Justin's Political Corner

With charm, hidden steel and growing political skill, First Lady Michelle Obama is injecting a timely jolt of verve into her husband’s battered political brand.

The price of a sluggish economic recovery weighs heavily onPresident Barack Obama as he wages a tough reelection fight against Republican Mitt Romney.

But the first lady, once an uncertain and reluctant political performer, is seeking to energize what will, win or lose, be her husband’s last campaign.

Acting as a fundraiser, catalyzing grassroots efforts and pumping up the president’s crowds, Michelle Obama is also drawing implicit, yet striking contrasts between her husband and his wealthy foe.

Obama is also a character witness for the man she married 20 years ago.

“The one thing I share with people is that over the last three and a half years, as first lady, I have had the chance to see up close and personal what being president really looks like,” Obama said in Iowa on Wednesday.

“And I’ve seen some things,” she joked.

Obama, wearing a Stars and Stripes themed red-and-white checked dress with a blue belt, described “the judgment calls where the stakes are so high and there’s absolutely no margin for error,” and tugged at the heartstrings of Iowans she hopes will turn to her husband again.

Her flirtatious manner also drew the president out of himself, lifting his fatigue after a three-day bus tour of the Midwestern swing state.

Obama has largely avoided direct political combat, preferring to build goodwill with healthy eating and fitness campaigns, and a drive to help families of military veterans.

As a result, she is more popular than her husband, and a political asset to boot.

Gallup pegged Michelle Obama’s favorability rating at 66 percent in May, better than the president’s current Gallup approval level of 45 percent.

“One of the big differences between 2008 and 2012 is that the president now has a record, and his favorability ratings have declined,” said Brian Frederick of Bridgewater State University.

“She hasn’t suffered in the same way to any great degree over the last four years, so it’s helpful for the president to have a more popular surrogate.

“The campaign is well aware of that and they want to exploit it as much as possible,” said Frederick, who has studied the political impact of political spouses on the fortunes of presidential candidates.

In America and abroad, Michelle Obama has a common touch that sometimes evades her husband as when dancing with children at a school in India, and befriending black girls from inner city London.

Obama also flew the flag, and was photographed hugging US athletes, at the Olympics.

While eschewing partisan combat, Obama’s rhetoric appears to be driving a sharp implicit comparison between the president and a wealthy opponent who rarely talks about his past.

“We all know who my husband is, don’t we?” she said in Dubuque.

“We all know what he stands for.

“What I remind people is that your president knows what it means when a family struggles. This is not a hypothetical situation for him.”

h/t: Yahoo! News