Jenice Armstrong: Michelle Obama - isn't she lovely?

WE LIKE OUR first ladies strong but not too opinionated.

We want them stylish but in a demure way. No die-hard policy wonks need apply. America wants first ladies we can imagine baking a tray of chocolate- chip cookies, bouncing a baby on a knee and playing hostess to foreign dignitaries.

When her husband was in office, Sen. Hillary Clinton struggled mightily against the confines of this kind of traditional thinking. Future first ladies are forever in her debt. And should Michelle Obama make it into the White House, this would be a baton that she would have to pick up and run with.

But as you might have noticed Monday night at the Democratic National Convention, Obama is already trotting down the track with her hand outstretched behind her, reaching for it. That is why she spent so much time playing up the fact that she's a mother first. She introduced herself by saying she was a sister, a mom, a wife and a daughter. Obama never mentioned the fact that she's also a Harvard Law School grad and a career woman.

Instead of dwelling on that, there was lots of talk of family and the values instilled in her while growing up on Chicago's South Side. And Obama didn't pull out her Barbara Bush-esque pearls either. Instead, she kept it as simple as that knee-length, blue sheath, saying, "I come here as a mom whose girls are the heart of my heart and the center of my world.

"They're the first thing I think about when I wake up in the morning and the last thing I think about when I go to bed at night," she said early on. "Their future - and all our children's future - is my stake in this election."

Her speech was short on specifics about Sen. Barack Obama's proposed policy initiatives and puffy with references to her husband's ideals and vision for America. Every so often, the camera would zero in on her elderly mother, who incidentally, was a stay-at-home mom.

Michelle Obama also shared an endearing story of the senator's driving their new baby home from the hospital 10 years ago, "inching along at a snail's pace, peering anxiously at us in the rearview mirror, feeling the whole weight of her future in his hands, determined to give her everything he'd struggled so hard for himself, determined to give her something he never had: the affirming embrace of a father's love."

Through it all, Michelle Obama was eloquent and gracious. Demure but confident. And her hair was bangin'. It was a "how-you-like-me-now" moment, if ever there were one. It went a long way toward countering the "angry black woman" label that has dogged her throughout the campaign.

And while Obama never morphed into the stereotypical image of a minivan-driving soccer mom she might have been angling for, you understood what she was trying to do - strip away the upper-class trappings and reveal that she and Barack are a whole lot like the rest of us.

She closed, not by talking about what her own role might be should her husband win, but by referring again to those precocious daughters of theirs, who upstaged their parents when they came on stage.

"And as I tuck that little girl in and her little sister into bed at night, you see, I will think about how one day, they'll have families of their own. And one day, they - and your sons and daughters - will tell their own children about what we did together in this election."

When she finished speaking, convention organizers played the Stevie Wonder song, "Isn't She Lovely" - the kind of safe, sentimental tune you expect to hear at the Miss America Pageant.

And while that made for a cringe-inducing moment for those concerned that it might place undue attention on her appearance, it worked because it broadcast the message that Michelle Obama isn't threatening or someone to be feared. She's not unpatriotic as critics have tried to paint her. She's, well . . . lovely. Just as we like our first ladies. *