Jodi Kantor Quotes

You make real progress when somebody is honest enough to say something that's really uncomfortable.

Michelle Obama has mostly stuck to pretty anodyne topics. She's anti-childhood obesity, she's pro-veteran.

Candidates' wives are supposed to sit cheerfully through their husbands' appearances.

Interpreting anyone's marriage - a neighbor's, let alone the president's - is extremely difficult.

People who face too many demands - two careers, two children - often scale back somehow. The Obamas scaled up.

I've learned that the best political reporters never make predictions!

I would say that Barack Obama has always been a real optimist about what can be accomplished. He believes that government can be used to create systemic, long-term, real change. And the first lady is more of a skeptic.

Every presidential candidate highlights patriotism, but Mr. Romneys is backed by the Mormon belief that the United States was chosen by God to play a special role in history, its Constitution divinely inspired.

It's not that Michelle Obama is trying to conceal her true feelings, it's that she does not want to be a political liability to her husband.

The Michelle Obama that her old friends remember, that people knew in Chicago, she was a really incisive social critic. She knew how to drive an argument home. People liked her both in the workplace and socially because she was so frank.

I don't like corporate diversity workshops.

You make real progress when somebody is honest enough to say something that's really uncomfortable. Of course when you're a candidate's wife and when you're first lady and the first African-American first lady to boot, that is very, very hard to do.

Michelle Obama kind of has two identities. In private, she is actually often much more vehement than her husband about Republican opposition. It was very hard to get sources to put it on the record, but they would describe the way she talked about Republicans and opposition in private. And, you know, her remarks were scorching. The level of heat that she can give off in these conversations is often much greater than what Barack Obama does.

Michelle Obama is somebody who really wants to take the high road.