Michelle Obama can now speak her mind. Will she?

her own worldview, based on a life full of dramatic changes and contrasts.

When she attended Princeton, one of her roommates moved out rather than live with a black girl; one of her aunts worked asamaidintown.herfatherwasachicago water worker, part of the vast municipal work force. Later she worked in the mayor’s office. Though she attended Harvard Law School and worked at a top firm, the job that seemed most formative involved public-service training for young people of disparate backgrounds. Though she was influenced by others, including her husband, she fused these experiences into her own point of view and a distinctive voice: warm, sceptical, funny, blunt.

When she worked at the University of Chicago, she pointed out the institution’s isolation amid the black South Side. A professor, Cathy Cohen, remembers Mrs Obama telling her, “I grew up not far from here and the university never once reached out to me.”

In interviews, she shredded the script of the dutiful helpmeet. “What I notice about men, all men, is that their order is me, my family, God is in there somewhere, but me is first,” she told The Chicago Tribune in 2004 when her husband was running for United States Senate. “And for women, me is fourth, and that’s not healthy.”

Some of those aides make a powerful case that even as Michelle Obama is likely to be spending time writing a memoir and giving speeches now, she will be most effective if she sticks to the calibrated tone she has employed for her husband’s two terms. She has always admired Laura Bush’s restrained approach, they say.

Besides,thebestwayformrsobamato preserve her popularity and authority may be to hold back, to avoid jeopardising what she has worked to build. Even when she is bathed in public admiration, she is the target of revolting attacks, and speaking out more could provoke worse.

But others who know her predict that with time, Mrs Obama will find a new voice. Both Obamas, two of the few unifying figures in a fractured Democratic Party, willfaceenormouspressuretohelpoppose and rebuild. Some Democrats dream of her running for president in 2020, and though Mrs Obama and those close to her say the idea is out of the question, the general appetite to hear from her may not be as easy for her to dismiss.

The world has only one observant, original, wildly popular African-american firstlady,andforhertohoardherideasand views would be a waste. NYT