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.

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.

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.

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

I don't like corporate diversity workshops.

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.

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