Why Michelle Obama Soared

 PHILADELPHIA — Michelle Obama’s speech here on Monday night was so powerful because she spoke as a symbol of the progress that America has made, because she spoke as a mother, because she spoke from the heart and because she spoke gorgeously, her rhythm flawless, her passion unmistakable.

But there’s yet another reason she was so raptly heard and rapturously received.
She didn’t speak as a politician.
She wasn’t advancing a personal agenda, or at least didn’t seem to be. (More on that in a bit.) She wasn’t teeing herself up for some conquest of her own. There was no clear-cut ambition in the equation, as there was for almost every other speaker on Monday night and as there is for most of the people who take the stage at a convention.
That’s why it’s so funny that some people immediately and inevitably responded to her remarks by saying that she should run for office. The utter absence of signs that she plans to is precisely what gives her much of her power. And the day after she announced any such candidacy, she’d almost definitely see her popularity start to decline and the good will that currently greets her begin to ebb.
Just ask Hillary Clinton. As she stepped down from her position as the secretary of state and in the year afterward, a significant majority of Americans liked and respected her, as easy as that is to forget now.
According to the Pew Research Center, 65 percent of Americans viewed her favorably in December 2012, 56 percent in October 2013 and 58 percent in August 2014.
That was down to 43 percent by last August, which was about four months after she declared her presidential bid.
Yes, her rosy period of above-50 ratings came before the revelation of her use of a private email server and her initial, clumsy attempts to shrug the whole thing off. Yes, it was before Republicans intensified their chant of Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi and refocused their fire on her in other ways. Yes, it was before a bruising Democratic primary battle in which Bernie Sanders painted her as a compromised tool of corporate interests.
But her popularity during that period had as much to do with the fact that she wasn’t in the news every day, being forced to render opinions and stake out positions, and she wasn’t making any self-serving requests of Americans. A campaign may be framed and pitched in terms of public service and patriotism, but it also comes across as precisely such a self-serving request.
Clinton’s path from first lady to senator, secretary of state and, now, Democratic presidential nominee guaranteed that there’d be speculation about Michelle Obama’s political future. But Obama’s own actions have done nothing to encourage that guessing.
She has consistently signaled profound reservations, verging on regret, about life in the fishbowl of political office, and that came through anew in her remarks on Monday night, when she described her daughters’ transition eight years ago to a new life with a Secret Service detail in Washington.
“When they set off for their first day at their new school, I will never forget that winter morning as I watched our girls, just 7 and 10 years old, pile into those black S.U.V.s with all those big men with guns,” she said. “And I saw their little faces pressed up against the window, and the only thing I could think was, ‘What have we done?’ ”
She cited concern for her children when she addressed her future plans in a speech at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Tex., in March. “I will not run for president,” she said. “No, nope, not going to do it.” She added that while she intended to use her stature to effect change, she ideally wanted to do that in a nonpartisan fashion and “impact as many people as possible in an unbiased way.”
That’s not to say that she herself is unbiased, or that the sentiments she expressed in her convention remarks were. She has skin in this game. Clinton’s election would reflect well on the Obama years and burnish her husband’s legacy, while the opposite outcome would tell a story about our country that she cannot want to believe.
But on Monday night, with personal ambition out of the equation, she was able to speak — and be heard — principally as a concerned American, not a self-concerned pol. She had a special kind of megaphone. And she took full, captivating advantage of it.
Frank Bruni is an Op-Ed columnist for The Times.

If Hillary Clinton is elected president, the most important difference between Bill Clinton and the presidential spouses who came before him won’t just be that he is a man, and a former president. It will be something else entirely: his admitted and well-documented flaws.

– Kate Andersen Brower in an Op-Ed article