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Barbara Pressly, 69, a former state senator from Nashua, isn't interested in another "husband and wife team" in the White House.

"I don't expect the president's spouse to have a specific job," she says in Windham, where Michelle Obama spoke. "A spouse grows into a spot, and there shouldn't be any requirement or expectation that she has a policy role."

Maria McNaught, 58, of Merrimack, disagrees. "Most first ladies have sort of faded into the woodwork," she says after listening to Obama in Windham. "She won't."

Paul Amato came to the Old Town Hall here to listen to Obama talk about her husband's presidential campaign. Afterward, he was asked what he liked best about her.

He doesn't mention her degrees from Princeton and Harvard Law School, her high-powered job, her sales pitch for her husband or her homily about the values she learned from her parents. Instead, Amato, 54, who owns a candle factory in Milford, says he admired her comment that "she's going to be home for dinner" with her girls.

Obama's emphasis on being a working mom meshes with her goal of connecting with voters, particularly women who might be inclined to make Sen. Clinton the first female president. That message "certainly will resonate with some women," Gutin says. "I've always maintained that we take some measure of the candidate by looking at his or her spouse."

If that's the case, part of Obama's job is to tamp down the heightened expectations that some voters have invested in her husband since he burst onto the national political stage with a stirring keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

"It's important at this time for people to feel like they own this process and that they don't turn it over to the next messiah, who's going to fix it all, you know?" she says. "And then we're surprised when people turn out not to be who we've envisioned them to be.

"There is a specialness to him," she says, but "if he's doing his job, he's going to say things that you don't agree with."

She refuses to buy into the expectations of some supporters that her husband could unite the country and recreate the "Camelot" of John F. Kennedy's presidency. "Camelot to me doesn't work," she says. "It was a fairy tale that turned out not to be completely true because no one can live up to that. And I don't want to live like that."

'She hates to lose'

Michelle Robinson grew up on Chicago's South Side in a small apartment behind windows and doors reinforced with iron bars. Frasier and Marian Robinson expected their son Craig and his sister, who is 16 months younger, to think for themselves and to excel, and both children were competitive in school and sports.

Michelle's friend Valerie Jarrett, an executive at a Chicago housing company, says Michelle's childhood instilled in her the idea that family comes first. "She grew up in a family where her father and mother were both ever-present in their lives, not just emotionally but physically," she says.

One of the reasons Michelle hesitated when Barack Obama decided to run for president, Jarrett says, was that she knew it would affect her children.

"You have to ask yourself, are you prepared to make that sacrifice? … After really thinking it through, she decided she was."

Craig Robinson, now the head basketball coach at Brown University, says his sister "really does hate to lose, and that's why she's been so successful."

After graduating from law school, she came home to Chicago to work at a corporate law firm. She was an associate when she was assigned to mentor Barack Obama, a summer associate.

"I found him to be charming and funny and self-deprecating, and he was very serious but he didn't take himself too seriously," she tells her audience in Windham. They married in 1992.

Qualms about politics

The Obamas didn't always agree on his political career. She told the Chicago Sun-Times three years ago that she sometimes felt "politics is a waste of time."

In his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope, he wrote that during his failed congressional campaign in 2000, she told him, "You only think about yourself. … I never thought I'd have to raise a family alone."

Michelle Obama tells USA TODAY that "there was a lot of tension and stress." She overcame it, she says, when she realized "that I needed to focus on what kept myself sane instead of looking to Barack to give me the answers and to help fulfill me. … I need support. It doesn't always have to come from him, and I don't need to be angry because he can't give me the support."

Now, she says, her mom and her friends also provide that support.

Obama and her husband have acknowledged concerns about their personal security. Last week, the Secret Service began protecting him and their home — the earliest for any presidential candidate. The reasons for the move have not been disclosed. "It's a good thing and something that we are appreciative of," she says.

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