Michelle Obama's TIME

Our beautiful and intelligent First Lady, Michelle Obama has an open candid interview about her position as First Lady. There's an excerpt below from the interview as well as behind the scene photos:

Interview with the First Lady - TIME

Switching gears a little bit, I wanted to ask you about the, sort of the public perception of Michelle Obama to the extent that you have to grapple with it. During the campaign, the sort of prism was, Is she radical? Is she too negative? Is she this, is she that? And since the Inauguration, there's a Pew poll that says even among Republican women, since the Inauguration, since January, your approval rating has gone up 21 points or something like that, to high levels, even by First Lady standards. What do you make of that shift and how things have changed since then?
You know, I think that today there is consistency and probably a depth to people's exposure to me. When you're in a campaign setting, there's just a narrow prism through which people see not just the wives but the candidates themselves. That's why it never really bothered me ... because I got these questions on the campaign trail — Well, what do you make of this and what people said about that and that? — and I always felt like, Well, they just don't know me. [Laughter.] I haven't changed. People don't change fundamentally. That, I know as a grownup. You don't change in a year or two.

Kids do. My children change rapidly over months and years. But once you hit, once you're a grownup, you don't. Your life doesn't make these — you don't internally make these sweeping changes.

I'm pretty much who I've been for a long time. So that ... I just think that people have the opportunity to see all of who Michelle Obama is over a longer period of time. And hopefully, they like what they see. And I think they actually — to the extent that they saw all of me — liked what they saw then. It's just that ... because if that weren't the case, I don't think Barack would be President, you know?

via http://www.time.com/