Michelle, the relaunch

If at first you don’t succeed—and the first round of press for Michelle Obama in February (which included an interview on Larry King, profiles in the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, as well as the New York Times and the WSJ) was a resounding failure, since it was totally overshadowed by “undernews” [i.e., "gossip" about the chip on her shoulder]—try, try again:

The campaign to soften her hard edges is in full swing. Today she was on The View—and event that was live-blogged by reporters for the New York Times—and today her struggle to build a better media image for herself is also analyzed in a front-page puff piece (er, I mean “report”) in the NYT.

Whatevs. She’s the wife of a presidential nominee, and might well become First Lady. We all need to get used to her, at the very least …

Question of the day: Can someone be both overexposed and unknown? (Answer: no. She is known [and overexposed] in a way the campaign doesn’t want her to be known, so they’re trying to rebrand her.)

Bonus question: Has the Obama campaign read Matthew Baum’s research about “soft news” being a good place to reach “low information voters”? (I’ve written about this here and here.) It sure seems like it, since this relaunch of Michelle includes primarily the “soft news”—and I use the word “news” advisedly—outlets (like The View and US magazine).

Final question of the day: Doesn’t anyone else wonder where the Obamas’ number-one champion

has been lurking since her candidate’s triumph? I detect the (invisible) hand—or at least the method—of Oprah behind the Oprahfication of Michelle.