Michelle Obama's New Campaign Role: Pizza Patrol

By Jodi Kantor, NY Times

Young campaign workers looked up from their pizza at Obama re-election headquarters in Chicago one evening last month to find an unexpected guest: the first lady of the United States, there to deliver a surprise pep talk.
Michelle Obama, who often calls herself the mom in chief, is taking on the new role of motivator in chief.

After nearly three years of limiting her time in the public sphere, she is suddenly ubiquitous: headlining seven fund-raisers in October, promoting new initiatives for veterans and her husband’s stalled jobs bill, even appearing at job fairs run by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the business lobbying group that has frequently been a nemesis of her husband’s administration.

If the initial stage of her time as first lady was identified with glamour (magazine covers, a high-flying social secretary) and the second was about advocacy (for child obesity prevention and military families), she is entering a third stage: as an upbeat ambassador for a struggling administration, and more than at any time since the inauguration, a designated narrator of her husband’s story.