Hillary Clinton campaigned hard for health care reform during her tenure as First Lady. The soft-spoken Laura Bush put her background as a librarian to work promoting literacy in American children. But what cause should we expect Michelle Obama, the self-described “mom-in-chief,” to champion during her years in the White House?

“The issues facing working women and their families are closest to my heart,” Obama confessed in an interview with Marie Claire.

The elaborate balancing act required of working moms is one Obama is intimately familiar with. Raised on the South Side of Chicago by working-class parents, Obama graduated from the public school system to attend Princeton University and Harvard Law School. She met her husband while working at the Sidley and Austin law firm in Chicago. (She had been assigned to mentor and advise the firm’s newest hire, Barak Obama.)

Michelle juggled her growing family and career skillfully, moving into the public service sector as her husband forayed into politics. She finally took leave of her career as the vice-president of community and external affairs at the University of Chicago Medical Center to join her husband on the presidential campaign trail, and now in the White House.

“The work-life balance is something I think about a lot. I’ve struggled for so many years to get it right, and I still haven’t figured it out,” Obama wrote in an October 14, 2008 post at BlogHer.com. She admitted that she was lucky to have a mother who was “always ready to pitch in and help,” and a flexible career with great benefits. But she says that “the work-life balance is a harsh reality for so many women, who are forced every day to make impossible choices. Do they take their kids to the doctor… and risk getting fired? Do they work weekends so they can afford to send their kids to better childcare… even though it means less time with their families? Do they take another shift at work, so they can pay for piano lessons for the kids… even though it means they have to stop volunteering for the PTA? It just shouldn’t be this hard to raise healthy families.”

Obama’s family-focus and assertion that her most important role is “being Malia and Sasha’s mom” has disappointed and downright outraged some progressive feminists, who hoped the Ivy League-educated powerhouse would take an independent role in the Obama administration. But most people have been supportive of Obama’s stance. “I don’t know any moms, working or not, who don’t put their kids first,” said Leslie Morgan Steiner, editor of the anthology Mommy Wars, in a November 18, 2008 essay for The Root. “What she (Obama) and we should be talking about is work/life balance. Michelle brings something to the table, and we need her at the table, suring up all women’s choices.”

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(Original photo by the Obama-Biden Transition Project, used under Creative Commons license).