Word: chicago
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...love to do and you'll be good at whatever you do," says Craig Robinson, Michelle's brother, who left his banking job after a decade to coach college basketball. That didn't stop Robinson from being surprised when Michelle left Sidley Austin to become an assistant to Chicago mayor Richard Daley. "Her father asked her, 'Don't you want to pay your student loans?' " her mother, Marian, recalls. One of her college roommates, Angela Acree, remembers being stunned. "I'm sure at Sidley she made more money than her parents ever made," says Acree. "It just seemed incredible...
...move was not without its benefits. Michelle Obama's stint at the mayor's office gave her, and her husband, access to Chicago's political class. Combined with her own Southside roots - she went to high school with Santita Jackson, the Rev. Jesse Jackson's daughter - Michelle's job gave her husband entrée into the best political machine in Illinois, augmenting her ties to Jackson's powerful civil rights group, Rainbow Push...
...tremendous asset," says Habitat Inc. CEO Valerie Jarrett, a close friend of both Obamas and a key campaign adviser. As Daley's deputy chief of staff at the time, Jarrett hired Michelle to help troubleshoot for companies having problems navigating the city's bureaucracy. "Her being from Chicago, from the Southside of Chicago, was an asset to Barack in terms of enhancing his ties to the community...
...Michelle helped give Obama an invaluable new base in Chicago politics, he helped her get back in touch with her home base. It was at the end of her first year as an associate at the law firm that she had been assigned to mentor Obama. In a now famous story, she at first refused to date him, feeling their work relationship would make a romance improper. But Obama's courtship helped her discover anew her childhood home on Chicago's Southside. Dates often took them to church basements and protests. "He could've gone to Wall Street; those offers...
...Obama gradually moved further away from grass-roots organizing and into business and politics, Michelle seemed to fill the vacuum. After 18 months, she left the mayor's office to head up the Chicago office of a new charity that was forming: Public Allies, which helps place young people at nonprofits...