There’s been much written and debated about how “real” Michelle Obama seems and how the first family appears to be like any regular American family. That many Americans of different backgrounds and races see the Obamas as relatable and symbolic of the larger American family is a good thing. That people have gotten so used to seeing them this way over the past two years that it’s no longer even a big deal is even better.

Still, it would be naive to believe that the rarefied and privileged lives of presidents and their families are anything like the lives led by us ordinary folks. Mrs. Obama makes me forget this sometimes though because she often behaves, well, like a regular person and not like “THE FIRST LADY.” And I mean this in a positive way. We’ve all seen her looking fabulously regal at fancy White House state dinners, being very first ladyish at State of the Union speeches or at the memorial event for those killed by the Tucson shooter.  It’s when she does things I’m not used to seeing a presidential spouse do that I find myself doing a double take and thinking: “Wow, the first lady did that?”

I was tickled for instance by this new commercial, promoting her “Let’s Move” campaign’s collaboration with the U.S. Tennis Association.  It features two cute tweens playing tennis and superstar Andre Agassi and Mrs. Obama (in a sweat-suit, no less) serving as ball boy and ball girl. I love the look on Mrs. Obama’s face when one of the young players shushes her. She looks like she’s having fun playing outside the once circumscribed lines of a traditional first lady. It’s refreshing to watch her redefine this role, and I think it’s especially good that young girls, like the ones in the video, are watching her too.

Tags: Let's Move, Michelle Obama, Tradtional First Lady Roles

Noreen, now that the much-ballyhooed divide between social conservatives and Tea Partiers has been demonstrated to be a myth, the question arises: Is there anything that divides the right, turning culture warrior on culture warrior?  I'm happy to note that the answer is yes.  A chasm is opening up on the right on the subject of healthy living.  Is eating right and exercising a liberal plot to turn us all into communist cogs, or is it just a good idea?

Team Broccoli Is Liberal Fascism features a roster of—no pun intended—heavyweights in the conservative movement. As Marjorie noted, you have Rush Limbaugh, who appears to think that while it was OK for past First Ladies to tell kids to read more and say no to drugs, having a First Lady advise kids to eat their spinach is one step removed from sending the whole country to a re-education camp.  Team Eat Your Oreos also features Michele Bachmann and Sarah "Do As I Say, Not As I Do With My Exercise Obsession" Palin.

But Mike Huckabee will have none of it, probably because he's had such a visible, public struggle with his weight and is, to his credit*, not going to play the role of a giant hypocrite trying to score cheap points.  His latest defense of Michelle Obama's nutrition-and-exercise campaign involved some startling truth-telling from a man who is going to need conservative support if he wants to run for president, pointing out that public advocacy isn't the same thing as a mandate. Hopefully, he'll soon be joined by other conservatives who see that attacking common sense healthy living advice is really just not a road they should be going down when looking for the faux outrage of the day. 

*This will probably be the last time I say this about Huckabee, though.

Photograph by Oli Scarff for Getty Images.

Tags: food, Michele Bachmann, Michelle Obama, mike huckabee, Sarah Palin

I love Mark Bittman. An entire NYT op-ed column devoted to the way we eat is genius. There's a thousand things to be said, and Bittman is the right guy to say them. His skewering of the new USDA Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2010 is dead on. Why won't we ever get food guidelines that make sense from our government food agency? Because it counts among its many missions the promotion of more consumption of the foods produced by American agriculture, and right now that means Big Ag and highly subsidized corn, rarely eaten in its natural form. "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants," will never fly as long as the subtext is "Eat corn. Lots of corn. Mostly processed."

But (of course there's a but) while Bittman is rocking his governmental critique, he's sounding a little tone-deaf on the subject of another big reason we eat the way we do. It's not all government promotion, or even powerful corporate advertising and lobbies. It's the way we live. It's two-working-parent families, single parents and people working two jobs. Convenience foods do something more than make us fat. They free up the labor that once went into all that eating of real food, and that labor was mostly female. As we encourage each other to get off the chips and back on the salads and rice and even steak, we can't forget that that "real food diet" demands real time in the making (or real money in the purchasing).

This is something Michelle Obama understands. As she ramps up her anti-childhood-obesity campaign in the coming year with a renewed focus on military families, she manages, in almost every speech, to make it clear that she understands that what she's asking of families is hard. Replacing chips with carrots isn't just a one-off switch, or even just a question of developing a taste for carrots. Carrots have to be washed and peeled, unless you spend the money to buy them that way. Carrots are tastier, or at least different, with dressing. Dressing takes a bowl, or, if it's in a lunchbox, a little container. At the end of the day said container must be removed from the lunch box and washed. Yes, that's a lot of whining about nothing. Multiply it by four kids and add in every orange that has to be peeled, every apple that needs slicing and two or three additional meals and you're looking at a lot of work. Are there tricks and ideas to make it easier? Sure. Should other family members help? Absolutely. But we have tried, in this family with helpful, independent kids (9, 6, 5 and 4), disposable income, and two involved parents, to give up all forms of packaged non-food for a week, and by the end of it, I would have crawled to the store on my knees in four feet of snow for a bag of chips. Eat real food means almost every single thing demands adult involvement. There are exceptions. There are not enough of them.

When Michelle Obama partners with Wal-Mart to make produce more affordable and packaged foods healthier, she's embracing the reality of the modern family. She's not asking the working single mother to do something that does indeed feel unthinkable—to do without the foods that help her get her kids out the house every morning without getting up to cook breakfast. She's saying, start here. This is better. And that's a fantastic thing to hear. And by involving Wal-Mart, she's recognizing that to get every family to eat better, someone out there is going to have to provide better, but still easier, alternatives to spending our busiest weekdays eating unsliced apples, nuts and berries. Wal-Mart's start with "healthier" packaged foods may feel laughable. Obama knows you have to start somewhere.

Bittman's "Eat Real Food" slogan gets, to use his words, "limited kudos." It's good advice, but in the form of a counsel of perfection that threatens to become the enemy of the good. Without a promise of more hours in the day, more patience, or more inexpensive but easy options, "Eat Real Food" is the kind of directive that can make a person throw up her hands and pass out the Twinkies. Like any quest for dietary perfection, it dooms its followers to at least some failure. What I would love to hear in a future Bittman column is "Eat MORE Real Food. Here's How."

Tags: Let's Move, mark bittman, Michelle Obama, Michelle Obama anti-obesity, USDA Dietary Guidelines, Wal-Mart

Can we flash back, for a minute, to the question of school dress codes? Once upon a time in another era, protesting youth decried the infringement on their right to be free to be you and me. Conservative stodgy types defended bans on long-haired boys and pants on girls. "Students learn better in a controlled environment," they declared. "Some limits are good." But blue jeans prevailed. An older generation still decries a too-casual, laid-back world.

Somehow, the question of how to help kids in their struggle with the temptations that lead to obesity appears to have taken place in a parallel universe. How did liberal Democrats become the standard-bearers for what's at heart a conservative position? Conservative: disposed to restore traditional conditions (like family meals and dessert as a rare treat). Traditional in style or manner; avoiding novelty or showiness (like 1st Degree Burn Blazin' Jalepeno Doritos). Cautiously moderate (in eating habits). Having a tendency to conserve (the resources it takes to produce and ship said Doritos). Seriously, is there anything more conservative, thrifty, Republican than a hearty oatmeal breakfast? I'm not surprised that many Republicans are struggling with Sarah Palin's attacks on Michelle Obama's anti-obesity initiative. How poorly we should allow our nation's children to eat may indeed be a political issue. But it's not one that splits easily on party lines.

Dress codes turned out to be less black and white than that initial liberal/conservative divide suggested, too. A few years on, that controlled environment thing started to look like a pretty good (research-supported) idea. Most schools landed on some kind of happy medium: blue jeans, yes. Exposed navels, no. How kids eat when they're at school may need both liberals and conservatives to figure out a similar balancing act.

Like many commenters, I wholeheartedly agreed when Rachael howled in outraged protest at the prospect of St. Paul, MN schools banning all sugary, fatty, salty foods from the premises, lunch boxes included. But a little research left me wondering if my gut reaction was as short-sighted as Palin's attacks on Michelle Obama's efforts to help more kids make the kinds of good choices Palin's parents helped her make as an (active, healthy-eating) child. Few of us were even willing to listen to Anne, whose kids actually went to a sweet-free school in Warsaw. It worked, she said. They ate healthier, learned plenty, and ate what she wanted to feed them at home.  Anne's pragmatism didn't convince me, either. I was searching for evidence that the ACLU was moving in on St. Paul when I found, in (red state) Georgia, a school that's been sugar-free for more than a decade.

Brown Mills Elementary School in Lithonia, GA is sugar-free, and that doesn't mean they've replaced it all with variations on Splenda. It means school lunches  of tuna on wheat with peaches for dessert (not canned in syrup). It means corn kernels and broccoli, and breakfasts of omelets and sausage. It means no birthday cupcakes or bake sales, and no lunches of chicken nuggets, or, as my kids' old school offered as a regular entree, cinnamon buns. It also means fewer disciplinary incidents, counseling referrals and truancy rates. Anecdotal evidence (there's not enough data for a definitive result) suggests BMIs and weights are down, too. The only thing that's up? Test scores.

What if we took a deep breath, set aside our raised hackles about people trying to tell us how to raise our children and our sense that this is all part and parcel of banning Happy Meal toys and sucking away our nation's collective willpower, and imagined a sweet-free school? Imagine sending your kids off to school for their seven-hour day and knowing that they'd actually only had access to reasonably healthy, balanced food there. Rachael proposed that kids who were waiting to eat when they got home because they didn't like what was on offer at school would behave poorly and learn less, but the Georgia example suggests that may not be the case, and it may be worth a try. Maybe, as with dress codes, some limitations on personal freedoms can be good in some environments. Maybe that sweet-free school zone is less an intrusion on our parental prerogatives, and more a part of Michelle Obama's nudges towards healthy living. Most of us would agree that dessert is not a right. Possibly Doritos in your lunch box aren't a right, either.

As for a life without school bake sales and mandatory birthday treats for 24 kid classrooms? I am not a "liberal do-gooder."  I continue to think McDonald's has a right (and maybe even a fiduciary duty to its stockholders) to offer whatever incentives it wants to get customers in the door. But spending the night before my kids' birthdays reading them bedtime stories instead of juggling cupcake pans? I think I can imagine that.

Tags: Michelle Obama, Sarah Palin, St. Paul school district, sugar-free school, sweet-free school zone

I’ve never ceased to marvel at the way similar issues take on a different ideological burnish depending on where they are being discussed and by whom.  Unexpectedly, we now have a new example of this phenomenon,  and in an area of public policy I didn’t even think was especially ideological at all: The banning of sweets in schools.

For historical and cultural reasons, bans on cookies and candy have lately come to be associated with the American Left. But in Europe, the Right wants to ban sweets in schools. Or anyway the Right, in the form of a super-Catholic group of school administrators, banned sweets in my sons’ Catholic school in Warsaw.  Being Catholics, they did make some exceptions for Christmas and Easter, but they were still pretty thorough: Cookies would be physically removed from lunch boxes if they weren’t supposed to be there.

Why? I’m guessing they were working from the Burkean principle that things are the way they are for a reason: For decades, nobody brought sweets to school because there weren’t any, or not many. So why change now? In the US, the banning of sweets has a more Leninist-revolutionary connotation, partly because it is associated with Michelle Obama, but also because it upsets the established order.

But here is a deeper truth: It works. When nobody brings cookies in their lunch box, then your child doesn’t complain that he doesn’t have any. After  awhile, he forgets to ask about sweets, and eventually he doesn’t even care if you have them at home either.  “Dessert” becomes a special occasion, not an automatic part of the meal.  Once upon a time, pragmatism was the dominant philosophy in American life—maybe it’s time we went back to it?

Tags: dessert, kids lunches, Michelle Obama, Sarah Palin, sweets

Sarah Palin is so much cooler than Michelle Obama. She doesn't go in for all that sincere, let's help people stuff. People can help themselves! Encouraging efforts to change, to be healthier, to move more and eat less cool fun stuff—that's just so honor-society. So condescending, too. Only rich, snotty people think they know what's good for you better than you do. That's no doubt why the New York Daily News says that Palin's been on a roll lately, cracking snide jokes about Obama's anti-obesity campaign on Sarah Palin's Alaska ("This is in honor of Michelle Obama, who said the other day we should not have dessert," Palin said as she pulled graham crackers, marshmallows, and chocolate from her cabinets) and on Laura Ingraham's radio show ("What she is telling us is she cannot trust parents to make decisions for their own children.")

Of course, Palin's parents taught her to make good decisions, or at least healthy ones. As she told Runner's World in August of 2009, "[M]y parents instilled in us that fitness and running were going to be a part of our lives growing up." She says she ran throughout her vice-presidential campaign and feels "crappy" if she goes more than a few days without a run. But that's all her choice, of course. She wouldn't want to impose—or even encourage—others to follow in her healthy footsteps. Because she trusts the American people. And maybe because promoting healthier living isn't nearly as popular as pretending you can have your cake and be thin too.

That's disappointing. Sarah Palin may like her sweets, but it's more than clear from her running habits, her fit appearance, and even her TV show that she makes a healthy lifestyle a priority—much like the Obamas themselves. Promoting good food choices and exercise shouldn't be a political issue. Maybe she could tackle it with a little Palin snark. I'd rather see her look out at her fans and ask the parents of the one in three American children who are overweight of obese: "Hey, people. How's that s'moresy-desserty thing workin' out for you? Maybe it's time for a change."

Photograph of Sarah Palin by Allison Shelley/Getty Images.

Tags: childhood obesity, Let's Move, Michelle Obama, Sarah Palin

Michelle Obama is apparently not living up to the expectations of DC insiders, according to an article in Politico today. They see her as standoffish, because she mainly keeps to her small circle of old, trusted friends from Chicago. But Obama has been great about giving time and resources to her two major issues: Childhood obesity and military families. So why the griping?

Part of the disappointment in Obama is that expectations were so high. As Washington socialite Sally Quinn tells Politico, "I think when they came in, there was this expectation that they would be this young hot couple and they would be out on the town and would pump some new blood into the social scene and that just hasn’t happened." People in political circles saw how Michelle was during the campaign—vivacious and stylish and smart—and can't understand why she hasn't reached out to them more.

But I can understand why Michelle Obama has kept her socializing to a minimum. Whenever she showed her true self during the 2008 campaign, she was criticized, and in turn, stifled. In this new media universe, any social misstep she would be seized upon and exploded (see the Salahis crashing the White House party for evidence). What's more, it seems like most modern women who have come into the pretty retrograde role of first lady—Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton included—have trouble mastering it in a way that critics find acceptable. The Politico piece pointedly remarks that the Obama White House is "not Camelot." The Kennedy Presidency was about 50 years ago. It's clearly time to create new standards of measurement.

Tags: first ladies, laura bush, Michelle Obama

Huffington Post reports that the dress Kate Middleton wore at the announcement of her engagement to Prince William has already sold out at Harvey Nichols. Meanwhile, knockoffs of the renowned sapphire-and-diamond ring are in hot demand, suggesting that Middleton joins Michelle Obama in her super-womanly ability to move product. Her market influence is not surprising; royal weddings and coronations have always prompted a frenzied commerce in commemorative and imitative items, and evidence to date suggests Middleton, who once naughtily appeared in an undergraduate fashion show wearing only underwear, is particularly well-equipped to give the American first lady a run for her money as a style icon, and may even drive Carla Bruni into fresh spasms of envy. Not for Kate the muddy Wellies and threadbare tweeds of the ancient aristocracy.

But there's something else noteworthy about Kate. As the New York Times this week noted, if Middleton does someday ascend the throne alongside her husband, she will be the first British queen to have graduated from college, or even to have attended college at all. According to the Times, the late Princess Diana was "indifferently educated," while Wikipedia tells us that Queen Elizabeth II was schooled at home by her mother and an array of governesses and tutors. Much has been made of Middleton's refreshingly ordinary qualities—she is the middle-class daughter of a pilot and flight attendant who went on to make a pile in mail-order children's party items, and her mum may or may not have revealed her roots by uttering the word "toilet" in the presence of the current queen; indeed her last name seems Dickensian in its aptness—but it strikes me that Middleton is most representative in this, her education. She is part of what could be called a greatest generation of women: In the U.K., as in the United States, women now outnumber men on university campuses, and also outperform men in academic honors. Kate herself apparently graduated with upper-second-class honors, as did William, who is reported to have struggled in his first year at St. Andrews but got through with Kate's coaxing, raising the question of whether this maybe future queen is maybe also the tiniest bit smarter than her fiance. She represents the rise and ascendancy of the well-schooled woman.

Looking through the biographical pieces about her, though, I can't find evidence that Kate has done a heck of a lot with that education. Upon graduating she seems to have spent time working as an accessories buyer, and also perhaps (there seems to have been some odd controversy about this) learning photography even as she warred with paparazzi. She has also dabbled in the family business. Aside from that, she has done a good bit of traveling and attending high-profile parties and outings. All of which sounds like a fun way to spend your 20s, and there's no doubt you can be smart and look good, both. Still, one worries, a little, that she may emerge as yet another female partner of a public man who, accomplished though she may be, makes herself both noteworthy and nonthreatening mostly by wearing swank clothes and looking good in them. Also, this being England, hats.

Kate's immediate predecessors may not have had the formal schooling she did, but they showed themselves women of character with a massive sense of public service. It will be interesting to see whether and how she rises to meet their example. Given the drive that young woman today are exhibiting, and given her own seeming lack of a focused calling, in some ways Middleton seems not typical at all, but out of the mainstream. Then again it would probably be inconvenient if even a modern princess had a law or medical or journalism career she was excessively attached to. Middleton is described as kind and warm-hearted, likable as well as tough. Her evolution as a public figure will be interesting to watch.

Photograph of Kate Middleton's blue sapphire engagement ring by Arthur Edwards/Getty Images.

Tags: educated women, Kate Middleton, Michelle Obama, Prince William, St. Andrews

Hanna, I have a confession to make, one which apparently condemns me to a life as someone our first lady wouldn't even care to know: My children are not the center of my world. And when I hear world-traveling Michelle Obama, campaigner for kids' health and a savvy politician in her own right, offer us a lame trope about putting her kids first as she did earlier this week, my back goes up. "Like every parent I know, my children are the center of my world," she said. "My hopes for their future are at the heart of every single thing I do." It's a generic first lady line. But coming from someone who, before reluctantly donning the first apron, worked high-profile and demanding jobs with young children at home, it's both disingenuous and troubling. Why do women, even women like Obama, feel compelled to pretend to embrace and then to saddle one another with this ridiculous standard?

Would Obama have said "my children are the center of my world" to her boss at the University of Chicago Hospitals? I doubt it. Do Michelle Pfeiffer or Allison Sweeney (both recent contributors to the persistent magazine interview myth that successful actresses put their children first) inform the director on the first day of shooting that they're delighted to be there but that their children will always take precedence over the role? Doubted, again. Do Obama, Pfeiffer, Sweeney, and other successful women really put their children at the center of their worlds? How's this for a perfectly acceptable answer: sometimes.

I've no doubt that in between meetings and the other demands of her life, Obama puts her girls front and center. Some of the time, on some days, I have no doubt that they're the entire focus of her attention and talents. But Obama is a talented and successful woman, and she has a partner (and, for that matter, a mother, a staff, and a community) to help raise her children. She has—and she should have—a whole lot going on that goes above, around, beyond, and along with her girls' daily lives. Further, can you imagine how she'd respond if Malia and Sasha turned to her and said, "Mom, when I grow up, I'm going to have children and I'm going to put them at the center of my life?"

You may think I'm ascribing too much to a small comment, a single moment in one of hundreds of speeches. "The center of my life," you could say, could mean a whole range of things—and I agree. Obama could, and probably would, say that much of the outside work she does is done with thoughts of her girls and their future in mind. But giving credence to that "my children are the center of my life" line of thinking feeds into the kind of doubt, spoken and unspoken, that still pursues working mothers. When Sarah Palin was in the race for vice president, both men and women questioned whether a woman with five kids, one pregnant and one still in diapers, belonged in the White House. In my home state, New Hampshire, Republican Senate candidate Kelly Ayotte has been attacked for considering spending six years in Washington while leaving her 2- and 5- year-old children at home with her husband. Those objecting usually put a gender-neutral spin on it, claiming no parent should leave kids that young—but the fact remains that this is simply not a question that comes up for men, no matter how young their progeny.

Men are allowed to hold out their young families as evidence of their ties to the real world and their good intentions toward the future. Women, doing the same, are immediately saddled with the baggage of "my children come first." Because no woman who puts her children at the center of her world would even consider a job where she might one day be required to put a congressional hearing over watching Junior perform the role of Native American No. 3 in the Thanksgiving pageant. And every time a prominent woman endorses that particular cliché, she makes it harder for other women who are, and should be, considering doing just that.

Tags: kelly ayotte, Michelle Obama, mom-in-chief, working mothers

Slate's chief political writer John Dickerson poses this question: Which first lady said this? The current one, the last one, or every one...

[T]his isn’t something I do very often.  As a self-described Mom-in-Chief, my first priority in the White House has been making sure that my girls are happy and healthy and adjusting to this new life.  Like every parent I know, my children are the center of my world.  My hopes for their future are at the heart of every single thing I do.  And that’s really why I’m here today.  You see, more than anything else, I come at this as a mom.  When I think about the issues facing our nation, I think about what it means for my girls…and I think about what it means for the world we’re leaving for them and for all our children.  As I travel around this country, and look into the eyes of every single child I meet, I see what’s at stake.  I see it in the child whose mom has just lost her job and worries about how her family will pay the bills.  I see it in the child whose dad has just been deployed and tries so hard to be brave for his younger siblings.  I see it in the child stuck in a crumbling school, who looks around and wonders, What does this mean for my future? That’s how I see the world.  And I think that’s how most folks see the world.  That’s something that we all share…that regardless of where we’re from…or what we look like…or how much money we have…we all want to leave something better for our kids.

Tags: Michelle Obama, mom in chief