Michelle Obama graces cover of Vogue... in clothes she chose for the shoot herself | Daily Mail Online Michelle Obama graces cover of Vogue... in clothes she chose for the shoot herself comments In her new role as the White House's 'Mom-in-Chief', she runs the First Family while her husband runs the country. But as you can see, Michelle Obama still has time for the occasional copy of Vogue. As the cover girl, of course. Every first lady since Lou Hoover - save Bess Truman - has been featured in the high-fashion magazine, but Mrs Obama is only the second to grace the cover. The First Lady invoked the image of former First Lady Jackie Kennedy in the Vogue cover. Mrs Obama's image is often likened to an imitation of Mrs Kennedy's The only other First Lady to do so was Hillary Clinton. Michelle's brand of pared-down elegance has been admired since Barack Obama first emerged as a contender for the Presidency. Mrs Obama appears wearing a magenta silk sheath dress by Jason Wu that she herself chose for the shoot. Wu also designed her inaugural gown.

The coverline declares: ' The First Lady the world's been waiting for.' Mrs Obama was captured by legendary photographer Annie Leibovitz at the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington during the inauguration. Much of the eight-page feature inside is devoted to Mrs. Obama's self-described role as 'mom in chief' to 10-year-old Malia and seven-year-old Sasha. 'I'm going to try to take them to school every morning, as much as I can,' she said. Mom in chief: A delighted Mrs Obama hugs children after reading them a book at Mary's Centre in Washington yesterday Mrs Obama receives more hugs from the children at Mary's Centre yesterday. She has sworn that her daughters Sasha and Malia will remain her priority 'But there's also a measure of independence. And obviously there will be times I won't be able to drop them off at all. I like to be a presence in my kids' school. I want to know the teachers; I want to know the other parents.' Being Vogue, though, the conversation eventually turns to clothes. Mrs.

Obama said she is aware of how her wardrobe is being scrutinised, but she makes no apologies for her choices - even the Election Night combination of ripped-from-the-runway, fashion-forward dress and plain-Jane cardigan. Wu also designed the gown Mrs Obama wore on the night her husband was inaugurated as president Mrs Obama chose other designers she has worked with before for the Vogue photo shoot - including Narcisco Rodriguez, who designed her dress for Election Night, above 'I'm not going to pretend that I don't care about it,' she said. 'But I also have to be very practical. In the end, someone will always not like what you wear - people just have different tastes.' Hillary Clinton was the first First Lady to appear on the cover of Vogue for the December, 1998 issue She did choose outfits for the Vogue photos by labels she has worn before. They included Wu, who made her inaugural gown; Narcisco Rodriguez, the designer of that Election Night dress; and J. Crew, which she and her children have famously worn. Most cover models have their clothes chosen for them by Vogue, or at least editors work as advisers. Not this time. 'She doesn't need any help.

She loves fashion and knows what works for her,' Vogue's editor at large Andre Leon Talley said. 'She's never had a conversation with me about, 'What do you think?' or 'How did this look?' And I'm glad for that.' Talley called his interview with Mrs Obama ahead of President Barack Obama's swearing-in ceremony 'one of the best experiences of my life.' 'She's so accessible, natural and normal. There's nothing affected about her,' he said. 'It's the warmest cover you've seen in a long time on Vogue,' he said. 'Models pose, actresses pose. This is a real woman.' Is Hillary Clinton Getting a Vogue Cover? | StyleCaster Is Hillary Clinton Getting a Vogue Cover? What's hot 2 years ago Photo: Getty Is Hillary Clinton about to appear on the cover of Vogue? That is the rumor going around ever since Vogue editor Anna Wintour and Clinton were spotted at Michael Kors‘ studio for a fitting.

This isn’t the first time that Clinton has graced the cover of the fashion magazine—she appeared on the December 1998 issue in velvet Oscar de la Renta dress—shot by Annie Leibovitz, becoming the first First Lady to appear on the fashion bible’s cover. MORE: Miley Cyrus is the New Face of MAC Viva Glam Now that Clinton is a presidential hopeful though, Wintour seems particularly keen on scoring her for a cover. Last year at an opening for a de la Renta retrospective at the Clinton Presidential Center Wintour said, “All of us at Vogue look forward to putting on the cover the first female President of the United States.” MORE: Vogue Actually Used Models On Its September Cover Adding an interesting twist to this rumor, Clinton was actually scheduled to appear on the cover of Vogue in 2007, but pulled out at the last-minute. In an Editor’s Letter the following year Wintour wrote: “Imagine my amazement, then, when I learned that Hillary Clinton, our only female president hopeful, had decided to steer clear of our pages at this point in her campaign for fear of looking too feminine.

The notion that a contemporary woman must look mannish in order to be taken seriously as a seeker of power is frankly dismaying…This is America, not Saudi Arabia. It’s also 2008: Margaret Thatcher may have looked terrific in a blue power suit, but that was 20 years ago. I do think Americans have moved on from the power-suit mentality, which served as a bridge for a generation of women to reach boardrooms filled with men. Political campaigns that do not recognize this are making a serious misjudgment.” Would you be excited to see Clinton on the cover of Vogue? Share your thoughts in the comments! From the Archives: The Extraordinary Hillary Clinton - Vogue Vogue From the Archives: The Extraordinary Hillary Clinton November 6, 2009 5:23 pm email The First Lady has never been more popular—or effective. As Mrs. Clinton begins a campaign to restore America’s decaying historical treasures, Ann Douglas finds that in her personal life, too, she seeks inspiration from the past.

During Hillary Clinton’s four-day Save America’s Treasures tour to various historical sites in the eastern United States last July, large crowds of people, “presidential-size crowds,” as one reporter put it, packed every place she stopped. On July 14, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where the First Lady visited the Colonial Theatre, a turn-of-the-century architectural jewel that now houses an art-supply store, about 3,000 people had already gathered in the street outside by noon, though she was not due until 4:30 P.M. One man I spoke to said he was happy to wait. “She’s my girl,” he explained. A “phenomenal person.” A woman who expressed concern about jobs leaving the region was confident that “Hillary’s visit will be a shot in the arm for Pittsfield.” Earlier in the day, in Newburgh, New York, headquarters to George Washington for sixteen months during the American Revolution, I talked to various members of the African-American community as they cheered her arrival. “She looks much better and younger than on TV,” one woman commented. Several young men were more outspoken: “Mrs.

Clinton got it going on!” “She’s the Chief!” “She can have me anytime!” People lined the roads in and out of the towns, holding up their babies, eager to get a glimpse of her. Near Auburn, New York, a small girl outside DB’s Drive-In ice cream store waved a sign at the First Lady’s bus: HI MRS. CLINTON! DO YOU WANT AN ICE CREAM CONE? To everyone’s surprise, the bus stopped, Hillary Clinton got out, bought a cone (a small vanilla-chocolate twist), and chatted with Marilyn Biss, the proprietor, a widow with five children. She insisted on paying, though Mrs. Biss tried to dissuade her: “It’s totally inexpensive, and you’ve been great for my lunch-hour business.” A boy with a blond crew cut rode his bicycle up to the store and looked through the window to see what all the excitement was about. “Holy cow!” he exclaimed. “It’s Hillary Clinton!” Outside the Washington area, there was only one reminder of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

A small plane circled over the site of the Kate Mullany house (Mullany was a pioneering nineteenth-century union organizer) in Troy, New York, on July 15, with a trailer reading, WHO’S WATCHING BILL? None of the bystanders I talked to brought up the scandal. When I asked a woman in Troy her opinion, she dismissed the whole thing as “nonsense” and “no one’s business,” adding that men, including her own husband, “have been unfaithful since the beginning of time.” Hillary Clinton told me that she wasn’t as comfortable speaking before a TV screen as in person.

“I like live audiences, with real people—virtual reality is no substitute.” When I asked her if the tour had tired her, confessing that it had exhausted me, she said that getting out and talking with people, especially people who are “struggling against incredible odds but have hope and optimism and the feeling that they can make progress together” was “invigorating,” even “thrilling.” Attending a fancy dinner party, however, “where everyone sits around being cynical and pessimistic while they’re enjoying the highest standard of living known in the history of humankind—that I find exhausting.” The photographers on the tour, many of whom had been covering the White House for a decade or more, were ardent fans. Campaigning with Reagan or Bush or even Clinton got boring, they said, because the speeches were always the same. But Hillary Clinton kept surprising them, veering off from her prepared text, emphasizing her themes at each stop, yet always adding new thoughts and words, responding to the particular audience she was addressing. In Victor, New York, she met with Clan Mothers of the Iroquois Nations for a roundtable discussion.

When she spoke at the Ganondagan State Historic Site near the burial place of Jikohnsaseh, known as the “Mother of Nations,” an hour later, she invited the group to imagine what the “first millennium” in America was like, when there were no white people in the land. This, too, is the American heritage, she said, and she ruminated on the Iroquois modes of decision-making that the Clan Mothers had just discussed with her: Will this decision be one that leads to peace, honors Mother Nature, and holds good for seven generations? Speaking in Auburn at the home of Harriet Tubman, an escaped slave who became a leader of the Underground Railroad, she picked up on a line the Reverend Paul Carter, the manager of the site, had used in introducing her: “It’s better to live for a cause than to just live because.” She likes wisdom literature, the shared insights built up from a long collective experience within a community, and she seconds Eleanor Roosevelt’s observation that “there is not one civilization…from which we cannot learn.” July 29, the day of our first interview, was the day that President Clinton’s lawyer announced Clinton would testify before Kenneth Starr’s grand jury.

As I waited in the White House pressroom for an aide to fetch me, a group of reporters returned from an event at which the First Lady had announced a new stamp in honor of breast cancer research, one of her long-standing causes. A journalist explained to me that they didn’t care about the stamp; they wanted to “see how she’s taking it.” Yet when I sat down with Hillary Clinton in the Map Room, once Franklin Roosevelt’s war room, where President Clinton would be interrogated on camera by Starr’s aides a few weeks later, there was a sense of enormous, focused energy and, oddly enough, a kind of radiant peace. Crises can throw people onto their best, most fundamental reserves, resources no one taps voluntarily. Nor was she remote. She asked me questions, too, about my teaching and writing, talking as if we were friends. Her voracious curiosity about the world around her is never sacrificed to the putative requirements of her position—the personal self isn’t buried within the vault of the public persona, but rather appropriates its official role as a fuller means of self-expression. When you talk to her, there is no rind, no crust of official pretense barring the quick of the person from access.

She’s right there, alive from the start—the first spadeful comes up gold. Her ability to respond on the spot to the people she meets doesn’t suggest what most of us mean by spontaneity, however; she’s not unguarded. One photographer told me that she always knows exactly where the cameras are when she’s speaking in public and how to play to them. She is so thoroughly disciplined as a public performer, and possibly as a private person, that she can trust her unconscious impulses to elaborate and vary, but not betray, her conscious designs. She has the inestimable advantage of being all of a piece, a quality all public officials try to convey—that air of really meaning what they say, promising that what you see is what you get—but which few can actually pull off. There’s nothing cold or mechanical here—passion organizes the self more completely than calculation ever can. The press corps, skeptical by profession and currently caught up in what historians will surely consider the supremely irresponsible instance of media madness in the twentieth century, has not accurately presented Hillary Clinton to the public that has not directly encountered her.

Most of the sites she visited on her Save America’s Treasures tour commemorated white, black, and Native American feminists, a first for such First Lady initiatives, and she repeatedly underscored the fact that only 5 percent of our national historical sites are dedicated to women. Yet the mainstream press gave the tour comparatively little coverage. Nor have they paid attention to her ongoing attempt to view women’s and feminist issues as diverse and global, to link the achievements of suffragists, abolitionists, and labor organizers in the United States with the struggles of women for economic and social opportunity in China, Africa, and Latin America today. The media have decided that feminism, by which they always mean feminism in the United States, is in decline. Evidence to the contrary seldom interests them. Speaking on July 16 in Seneca Falls, New York, in honor of the 150th anniversary of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “Declaration of Sentiments” (which officially kicked off the suffrage movement), Hillary Clinton noted the shrinking numbers of American voters and reminded her audience that only votes can “guarantee results.” By not voting, “today, women, we silence ourselves.” Yet she has hardly been silent.

In our two interviews, in Washington in July and in Westport, Connecticut, on October 7, after a Democratic fund-raising dinner, I was struck by her height, the level quality of her blue-eyed gaze, her erect, head-held-high carriage, the hum of authority that attends her, the confident air of wide intellectual command. Eleanor Roosevelt, the predecessor to whom she is most often compared, possessed a superb moral intelligence, but in no sense was hers a trained intellect. Temperamentally, Roosevelt was “perfectly insecure,” as she once described herself, driven by a need to be needed that both opened and at moments blinded her to wider concerns. Hillary Clinton loves popular novels by women (Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood is a recent favorite) and reads detective fiction, or “cheap thrills,” in her words, to relax, but she is also the first First Lady who is an intellectual, who has exhaustively researched her goals and can defend them in meticulous detail, who looks to structural analysis as well as description to make her points, finding no arena of policy debate unfamiliar or intimidating.

She is simply smarter than any press person she talks to, an experience that Washington officials do not routinely offer the media personnel who cover them. The daily media make their living by violating the traditional line between the public and the private. Anyone, particularly a woman, who refuses to help them do so, whose life offers little dirt to be dug up, who shows no interest in the confessional mode, becomes in some sense an enemy. As the Monica Lewinsky affair, in every sordid detail, became public knowledge, even Patricia Ireland, the president of NOW, was quoted in People magazine as saying, “A lot of people willfully don’t know what their spouse is up to. But as somebody said, ‘At least we want to know she kicked his butt.’ ” In the tell-all postmodern age of Oprah Winfrey and Jerry Springer, Hillary Clinton has mounted a heroic, one-woman campaign to reestablish the boundary line between public and private that the media have erased. The real self always requires a veil among its costume possibilities. Minimizing or distorting coverage of the public Hillary Clinton is in part the revenge the media take for the withdrawal of the private woman from their gaze.

In fact, Hillary Clinton’s entire career has been dedicated to a goal that in some sense is the opposite of the media’s. She was particularly happy that the people of Newburgh turned out to see her on a sweltering July afternoon when they would ordinarily be off the streets, in their homes and offices. She wants to persuade people to be “participants,” not “dropouts,” “to come back into the public space again,” not as confessional subjects but as citizens, a word she values enormously, and to make that space “enjoyable” and “fun.” No one in public life today stresses the importance of families as strongly and in such intelligent detail as Hillary Clinton, yet she constantly acknowledges that the family cannot do the job alone. “Of course, parents are the most important people in a child’s life,” she told me, “but we’re also shaped by the forces that shape our families”—the schools our children attend, the police who guard the streets on which they play, the political bodies that legislate what health coverage and day care will be available.

While not advocating a return to the full-fledged New Deal state, she has asked repeatedly who benefits from the dismantling of federal programs that has been the political fashion in the past several decades. Certainly not her special constituents, those “struggling against incredible odds.” Her mother, the child of divorced parents, had “a perfectly miserable childhood,” but others outside the family circle stepped in, and their help made all the difference. You can’t condemn people to the luck of the first draw, not if you have looked, as she has, into the faces of abused children for whom the first hand they were dealt was nearly fatal. For the First Lady, the public space is not the place where the private dysfunction is to be revealed and exposed for media profit, but the larger, more neutral ground on which the solitary self can be made functional, part of the community again. Where the media cannibalize and contract the public sphere, she wants to expand it.

In her address at her graduation from Wellesley College in 1969, which got her picture into Life magazine, her first moment of national exposure, Hillary Rodham spoke of her generation’s dissatisfaction with America’s public policies and values, of its search for a way of living “more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating” than that of their elders. Yet she noted a “conservative strain” amid the collegiate protests that “harkens back to…the old virtues, to the fulfillment of original ideas.” It is her long-standing mix of old and new feminist and political styles that prompted Wendy Wasserstein’s recent protest at what she takes to be Hillary’s “confusing signals” to feminists, and compounds the media’s ongoing difficulty in reading her. A successful operator in the modern male world of secular power politics, unsentimental, “very sharp, very Chicago,” as an early observer described her, with a wicked sense of humor and a quick laugh that can approach a shout, she is also deeply religious in ways that her reform-minded Victorian predecessors would have instantly understood. Like them, she wants to bring the religious and spiritual values that sustain her into the public discourse, though she knows how difficult that is today.

(The Christian ideals advocated by politicians too often bear the “heavy imprint of coercive” moralizing and partisan institutional and political aims.) Lucretia Mott, one of feminism’s nineteenth-century founders, used the habit of prayer as a divining rod to appropriate political action. Hillary Clinton has said that her strong religious faith is guiding her through these difficult days, and for her, too, prayer is part of a daily discipline. It’s “a multipurpose kind of experience, that moment of respite that the entire body gets refreshed from. It’s not just mental, it’s physical and emotional and spiritual.” Her avoidance of the language of pop psychology or psychoanalysis, her practice of situating every aspect of her experience in what she calls “the larger context of faith,” her constant emphasis on being “positive” and “optimistic,” have something in common with the turn-of-the-century mind-cure movements that produced Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science.

Like many nineteenth-century women, she keeps a commonplace book, though she doesn’t get much chance to write in it these days, filled with quotations she finds helpful, “to derive support from what somebody else has gone through and how they articulated it.” At first glance her new book, Dear Socks, Dear Buddy: Kids’ Letters to the First Pets (Simon & Schuster), seems a throwback not only to Barbara Bush’s book on her dog Millie, but to the sentimental writings of early feminists like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps on their pets. Dear Socks, Dear Buddy is, in fact, a characteristic Hillary Clinton mix of old and new. The kids’ letters to the First Pets are full of questions—”How do you like being a dog, Buddy? I like being a person.” “Do you have a Secret Service agent?” The children have thrown their imaginations out into space to land on a cat and a dog. In her introduction, Hillary Clinton notes that at five, her daughter, Chelsea, wrote a letter to a politician but received no answer—she never wrote such a letter again. The letters to the First Pets are answered, by the veterans in the U.S.

Soldiers’ and Airmen’s Home in Washington, D.C.; these kids have been heard. Pets provide a safety zone for the affections, a first step toward the larger, more dangerous “public space” Hillary Clinton is re-creating. Uninterested in fashion before she came to the White House, Mrs. Clinton has learned to dress with style, often in smart suits by Oscar de la Renta, large hats, and practical but chic heels. Yet she’s not a trendsetter. On the tour, her daytime wear didn’t vary much except by color—beige one day, peach or blue the next—and the pearl strand and brooches she favors are familiar to any woman who remembers the 1950s. She’s settled on a look that’s good for her, serviceable but extremely becoming, a kind of uniform or habit, designed as much to deflect attention as to catch it. Her clothes work, but they work for her, never the other way around. People in uniforms don’t have to resemble nuns or postmen—or lack sex appeal.

The cabdriver who took me from the Washington, D.C., train station to the White House, an immigrant from Nigeria, described himself as a love-struck fan of the First Lady, adding, “You’d be surprised how many men in Washington have crushes on her.” Watching her on tour, talking to her in person, I knew exactly what he meant. It’s not just her good looks, though she’s in that small select group of women who are far more beautiful at 50 than they were at 30. It’s also the public power so easily carried in her person. Power as an aphrodisiac, as sex appeal, is generally associated with men because they long monopolized it, but when a woman wears it, as increasing numbers do, it works just as effectively—on other women as well as men, perhaps more so because we’re not trained to expect it. Hillary Clinton has charisma, an inescapable aura magically altering the atmosphere she occupies. By its design, Hillary’s Save America’s Treasures tour was a mercy trip to the dying, to parts of the American heritage that have fallen into disrepair because their communities no longer know how to use them.

The home for elderly African-Americans that Harriet Tubman established in Auburn is open to the public and eloquent in its spartan simplicity, but Tubman’s private residence on the same plot has deteriorated to the point that a local Methodist pastor, Richard Stewart, told me it would take a minimum of $200,000 to restore it; Bitsey Folger’s $10,000 donation, announced that day by the First Lady, could barely begin the job. The task of preservation is a hard one, particularly in a country where its funding has always been largely private, and where, as Roberta Brandes Gratz and Norman Mintz, authors of Cities Back from the Edge: New Life for Downtown (John Wiley & Sons), put it, restoration of monuments like Tubman’s home, which “happens in small increments, hasn’t gained the star status that big stadium and casino projects have.” By saving such landmarks and living with them daily, Hillary Clinton believes that “you begin to tell yourselves and your children the story [of your town].

That makes America more real.” She has pledged the proceeds from Dear Socks, Dear Buddy to the National Park Service Foundation, within whose purview fall many of the monuments she visited. And what has become of the feminist legacy that the Save America’s Treasures tour dramatized and honored? Various commentators have suggested that the committed feminist has been replaced by the shallow, self-centered, Ally McBeal-style narcissist. For Princeton feminist historian Christine Stansell, compared with their great predecessors, young feminists like Katie Roiphe and Elizabeth Wurtzel look “whining and self-indulgent,” “unable to grasp the requirements of the world outside the self.” Hillary Clinton, who believes that feminism is in “a time of transition,” is not discouraged. In today’s world of constant change and “fatigue with analysis,” “it’s natural for people to fall back on themselves, and think they have to work through their own issues before they can take them to the public arena…. The real grace of this period is that we have so many options to choose among with respect to our individual lives. The key will be how we take those individual decisions and turn them into a new kind of community.

It took time for the women of 1848 to reach their clarity of purpose, as it will today to find out what we really want to stand up and fight for, but I think that is coming.” She may well be right. In the first half of the nineteenth century, when white middle-class American women began collectively to formulate their grievances and seek to redress them, they built their case on the argument for universal human rights embedded in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. “We hold these truths to be self-evident…,” the Seneca Falls “Declaration of Sentiments” boldly states, “…that all men and women are created equal.” Yet side-by-side with this argument, another line of reasoning developed, one based on special gender privilege rather than universal equality. The only recognized authority that the Victorian lady possessed rested on women’s putative moral superiority to man—”Man the murderer, woman the mourner,” “a fiend and an angel,” was the way Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, described the sexes in 1835.

Understandably, women sometimes argued that they should have the vote on the grounds that they alone could rescue society at large from the contamination of the inherently masculine preoccupations with money-making and sex. The early feminist movement’s sometimes shrill commitment to Prohibition, its outspoken resistance to civil liberties for “inferior” African-Americans, and its overzealous crusade against prostitutes and their clients were all part of this purity tactic. Women’s real business was punishing masculine immorality. In the past several decades, amid successful efforts to revise laws that offered little recourse to female victims of rape, sexual harassment, and economic discrimination, the same self-righteous, blinkered tone has occasionally been sounded in white feminist ranks, as women ask for both equal rights and special protection. The Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky cases have not prompted feminist leaders to call for a return to yesterday’s legal and social sanction of male irresponsibility, but a number of feminists have recently made strong statements about what does and does not constitute actionable conduct in the workplace, and about the limits of male culpability.

Appearing on Larry King Live on September 22, 1998, Patricia Ireland, despite her expressed dislike for President Clinton’s sexual behavior, could not be bullied into condemning the public official for the sins of the private man, insisting that she was more offended by the attempt to overturn the results of a national election against the wishes of two-thirds of the American people than by the president’s being “serviced,” as Larry King provocatively put it, by an intern. Even when a clearly frustrated King suggested that her position was equivalent to a German highway worker supporting Hitler because he built the autobahn, Ireland remained cool. Clinton’s policies have helped women, she pointed out, and as a grown-up participant in the political process, she finds that fact important for her and the women she represents. Jean E. Howard, a leading academic feminist and head of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia University, told me that the focus on the personal aspects of the Jones and Lewinsky scandals, the emphasis on a private act rather than its public consequences, was a “grotesque trivialization of real feminist issues.” Did either woman lose a job? Was either forced into unwanted sex?

Did the president’s private acts of themselves hamper or corrupt his performance of his public duties? To Howard, the answer is clearly no on all three counts. Feminists, Howard says, are refusing to take up the old role of “sex police” or play into the hands of those whose interests it would serve if they did so. They are drawing much the same distinction between the public and private realms that Hillary Clinton exemplifies. Howard has nothing but admiration for Hillary Clinton’s achievements and conduct, though she doubts that even Clinton can succeed in modernizing the First Lady role. Only when we have a woman president, Howard believes, and see a “First Gentleman” forced to renounce the authority to which his brains and training entitle him, becoming a hostage or handmaiden to the state, will Americans grasp how outdated the position of First Lady has become. Yet Hillary Clinton’s finest achievement over the past six years has been to do what is possible, finding a productive middle ground as First Lady, using the symbolic powers of her office to work for broad yet concrete change in the face of what sometimes seem nonstop right-wing opposition and willful media obtuseness.

The philosopher William James thought the “will to believe” was a distinguishing mark of the American character. What Hillary Clinton gives the people who hear her is her own form of evangelical purpose, fresh contact with the ideals on which America was founded. Without denying the violations to which those ideals have been subjected—ideals that exist on paper only “can be a cruel hoax”—she knows that most Americans, no matter how disillusioned and disinherited they sometimes feel, are waiting to be given the chance to believe in them, too. MEDIA; The First Lady Strikes a Pose for the Media Elite - The New York Times The New York Times Business Day |MEDIA; The First Lady Strikes a Pose for the Media Elite Search Continue reading the main story Last week, the First Lady came to town to light the five and a half miles of lights stapled to the branches of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, and while she was in Manhattan she also electrified a clutch of the town's media executives. It was a most worthwhile schmooze for all involved.

During a week when she appeared on the cover of Vogue's December issue -- the first time a First Lady has done so -- Hillary Rodham Clinton swept through the media world, having lunch with editors from Time, Teen People and People magazine on Tuesday, greeting a table of Vogue editors at breakfast on Wednesday, and delivering a 15-minute oration in praise of Harvey Weinstein and his media company, Miramax Films, on Thursday. You will be reading more about Mrs. Clinton very soon: Newsweek and Time magazines are working on profiles of the First Lady for the end of the year, and she is under consideration by Time to be its Person of the Year, although that will depend on how the impeachment proceedings of Bill Clinton are resolved. (If he is impeached, she will not be considered; if he is not, she will be.) Mrs. Clinton's visit demonstrated the fact that magazine editors need famous faces to generate a little heat and light for their publications. They can feed off the prestige of the First Lady while she uses them as a vehicle to support her favorite causes. And it also showed that at least in the case of Mr.

Weinstein, a generous campaign contributor, the principle of the favor bank is alive and well in the world of media, as it is in the political arena. She called him ''my friend Harvey.'' And he said she was ''the First Lady of all our hearts.'' (Gwyneth Paltrow, however, was the First Lady of Miramax, Mr. Weinstein said.) Advertisement Continue reading the main story Carl Sferrazza Anthony, a biographer of First Ladies, said Mrs. Clinton had only recently begun to deal with the media in a way that was both shrewd and yet comfortable for her. For example, the Vogue cover article -- something coveted but never attained by Nancy Reagan -- would not have been possible until this year. ''As she has become more comfortable with the reality that she has been made into a symbol upon which everyone can write all of their frustrations and aspirations, and she has accepted this creation of her as a symbol, she has become more comfortable with the media,'' Mr. Anthony said. ''And thus more comfortable with the lengthier and more in-depth kind of story that a magazine would do.'' By sitting for the cover of Vogue, Mrs.

Clinton generated a storm of international press so thick that the Vogue publicity department sent it out in a binder. Anna Wintour, the editor in chief of Vogue, said the magazine sold 900,000 newsstand copies of the October issue, which featured Oprah Winfrey as its gamine cover model; Ms. Wintour expects that Mrs. Clinton's cover will exceed the Winfrey cover in newsstand sales. ''The press hit way before the issue was out, and now we can only keep our fingers crossed,'' Ms. Wintour said. And Vogue, a Conde Nast publication, validated Mrs. Clinton in a way that no other venue could: the article, written by the historian Ann Douglas, scarcely touches on the Monica S. Lewinsky debacle, choosing as its frame Mrs. Clinton's devotion to historic preservation. Mrs. Clinton gets to appear on the cover of a fashion magazine in a velvet dress, looking self-assured and -- perhaps most important -- well-coiffed. ''People have seen it as a vindication for her, that being on the cover of Vogue is beyond power and politics,'' Ms. Wintour said.

''It proves in a way that she is a woman of stature and an icon to American women.'' Score: Vogue, one. Mrs. Clinton, one. On Tuesday, Mrs. Clinton spoke at a lunch given by Ann S. Moore, the president of the People division of Time Warner and Patricia Fili-Krushel, president of the ABC Television Network. Mrs. Clinton sparked waves of murmurs as she walked into the room with her Vogue makeover: she wore a slate-gray suit, a cluster of glittering red beads twisted around her neck, and her hair was smooth and straight, in the same sleek, I-will-survive hairstyle that Princess Diana adopted in the pages of Harper's Bazaar after her divorce from Prince Charles. The lunch was ostensibly to celebrate Mrs. Clinton's work with the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, but Mrs. Clinton -- standing at a podium emblazoned with the bright blue Teen People logo before a bank of news camera crews -- praised Teen People ''and its 10 million readers'' for the magazine's articles on teen-age celibacy. Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to.

Sign Up Privacy Policy Mrs. Clinton, in turn, got to gather a roomful of influential people in broadcast news (like Lesley Stahl, Barbara Walters and the entire cast of ABC's midmorning talk show for women, ''The View'') and print (Time's managing editor, Walter Isaacson, and editors from every major Time Inc. magazine and Hearst Magazines' Ladies Home Journal) and asked them to send the message of teen-age celibacy to readers. She also urged Ms. Fili-Krushel to infuse the plots of ABC network shows with the same message. After lunch, everyone was given a bag with a coffee mug, a reprinted article about teen-age pregnancy from Teen People wrapped in a shot of a dreamily gazing Leonardo DiCaprio, and a copy of Mrs. Clinton's book ''It Takes a Village.'' Advertisement Continue reading the main story Score: Teen People, one. Mrs. Clinton, one. On Thursday evening, Mrs. Clinton walked into the Ziegfeld theater for the premiere of the Miramax film ''Shakespeare in Love'' on the arm of Mr.

Weinstein, who is the co-chairman of Miramax with his brother, Bob, and is a generous contributor to the Democratic Party and the Clinton Legal Expense Trust. Mrs. Clinton further earned the devotion of Mr. Weinstein. As the First Lady walked to the stage, a thousand folding movie theater seats simultaneously flipped up for an ovation, with a noise that sounded like a flock of large sea birds taking off. She delivered a speech praising the 20-year history of Miramax, and spoke about how much she and the President enjoy watching Miramax movies in the White House screening room. ''Harvey and Bob have really given us a lot of pleasure,'' she said. ''They've raised the bar for excellence.'' She spoke about the ''buzz'' behind Miramax movies and media ventures, and said that the Miramax company ''has done a great service.'' Mr. Weinstein blushed like a newlywed. Score: Mrs. Clinton, one. Miramax, one. Mr. Anthony, the biographer, said Mrs. Clinton had learned to be at ease with the press over the last six years. When the couple first arrived at the White House, he said it was not a personal priority for her to get attention from the magazine world.

''Now, it's a matter of maybe acquiescing more, in rounding out the picture of being First Lady,'' he said. ''I think she's realized that there is a halfway point.'' He added, ''Maybe the willingness to do a Vogue article is not so much a compromise to some traditional role of First Lady, but a way of complying with the traditional expectations, yet still managing to do it in her own way.'' Ms. Douglas, the author of the Vogue profile, said she was surprised by the article's eventual status as the cover piece. Ms. Wintour had not initially intended the article that way, and by late summer, Ms. Douglas had assumed that Vogue would cancel the piece. ''When the scandal heated up, I assumed it was dropped,'' Ms. Douglas said. Actually, the opposite happened. Ms. Wintour thought the Lewinsky affair made the article more important. Ms. Douglas pointed out that the cover was especially successful in light of the Democratic Party's gains in the November elections . Advertisement Continue reading the main story ''Just think how she would have looked on the cover of Vogue if the Democrats had lost,'' Ms. Douglas said.

''My original title for the piece was 'The Triumph of Hillary Clinton.' And they didn't go with that. But putting her on the cover said it anyway.'' Michelle Obama Appears on the Cover of <em>Vogue</em> Pinterest Annie Leibovitz/Vogue Michelle Obama is making history again – by becoming only the second president’s wife to appear on the cover of Vogue magazine. The newly-minted first lady was photographed by famed shooter Annie Leibovitz at the Hay-Adams Hotel, where the Obamas stayed before the Inauguration. While nearly every first lady – beginning with Herbert Hoover’s wife, Lou, in 1929 – has been photographed for the fashion bible, only Hillary Clinton was featured on the cover, in Dec. 1998, Vogue spokesman Patrick O’Connell tells PEOPLE. In the March issue of the magazine, Obama is seen wearing a magenta dress by Jason Wu, who designed her inaugural gown, and also pictured in a black dress by designer Narciso Rodriguez, according to The Washington Post . “I am thrilled to have dressed Michelle Obama again, this time for the cover of America Vogue,” Wu tells Entertainment Tonight Canada.

Future Plans In the interview, Obama talks about getting used to Washington and her plans for being a first lady – and first mom. “I’m going to try to take [our two daughters] to school every morning – as much as I can,” she says, according to the Post. “But there’s also a measure of independence. And obviously there will be times I won’t be able to drop them off at all. I like to be a presence in my kids’ school. I want to know the teacher; I want to know the other parents.” As for why Vogue chose to feature Obama on the cover, the magazine’s editor Anna Wintour writes, “Change was the clarion call of Barack Obama’s election campaign, though I don’t think any of us at Vogue initially realized that would include the difference that was going to be made by First Lady Michelle Obama’s wardrobe … It’s inspiring to see our first lady so serene and secure in her personal style.” Show Full Article Michelle Obama returns to Vogue cover as a first lady who’s melded style, influence - The Washington Post Michelle Obama returns to Vogue cover as a first lady who’s melded style, influence The inside track on Washington politics. Be the first to know about new stories from PowerPost.

Sign up to follow, and we’ll e-mail you free updates as they’re published. You’ll receive free e-mail news updates each time a new story is published. You’re all set! Michelle Obama on magazine covers View Photos Michelle Obama is set to appear on the cover of Vogue magazine for the second time. Here’s a look at a few magazines that have turned the first lady into a cover model. Caption Here’s a look at a few magazines that have turned the first lady into a cover model. Michelle Obama is featured in the April 2013 issue of Vogue. It is her second time appearing on the magazine's cover. Annie Leibovitz/Vogue By Robin Givhan By Robin Givhan March 14, 2013 Follow @RobinGivhan The bangs made it into Vogue. First lady Michelle Obama will appear on the cover of the fashion glossy when the April issue arrives on newsstands in less than two weeks. But with this sophomore turn on the Vogue cover, the sight of her smiling visage and freshly cut locks in the pages of the fashion industry’s guardian of establishment aesthetics is less of a surprise and more of an expectation.

Obama seems to have settled comfortably into her pop-culture status as a fashion icon, having boldly indulged in such who-the-heck-are-they designers as Thom Browne and Bibhu Mohapatra. With the aid of celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz and a village of stylists led by Vogue fashion editor Tonne Goodman, there was a near guarantee of a flattering image for the historical record. Vogue magazine boasts a circulation of some 1.2 million readers. It is not the political press. And Anna Wintour, the magazine’s influential editor, was one of President Obama’s most tireless fundraisers during the last campaign. The White House says Michelle Obama was merely following in the footsteps of other first ladies who interviewed with the magazine and continuing her own tradition of speaking to media outlets, whether it’s the AARP magazine or “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon.” First lady Michelle Obama, on the April 2013 cover of Vogue magazine. (Annie Leibovitz/Vogue) Vogue “is such a fascinating institution,” says Jonathan Van Meter, who wrote the accompanying story, for which he interviewed both the first lady and the president. “It’s always had this strain of politics in it.

But Vogue likes to like people. And I like to like people when I write about them. There’s a certain comfort level with the environment. And there’s something very ceremonious about Vogue and a Vogue shoot.” Van Meter, who says he began angling for the interview more than three years ago, sat down with the first couple for 40 minutes in January, during which they discussed parenting, staying grounded, constituent impatience, political urgency and, of course, style: his lack of it, the attention paid to hers. “If you’re comfortable in your clothes it’s easy to connect with people and make them feel comfortable as well,” the first lady told Van Meter. Michelle Obama’s debut appearance on the Vogue cover in March 2009 was indeed an East Wing rite of passage going back at least to Mamie Eisenhower. Being photographed for the magazine is one of the few remaining bipartisan gestures. For that portrait, she sat curled on a sofa with her long, toned arms lightly wrapped one over the other in a protective gesture. The April 2013 cover shows her in a more open, more assertive stance.

She leans against a table and looks directly into the camera’s lens with her bare arms — still lean, perhaps a bit more toned — resting at her side. She’s wardrobed from her own closet in a Reed Krakoff sheath in cerulean blue with a flourish of purple at the neckline. She wears the same look in the photograph inside with the president, who’s dressed in a pinstriped shirt and a blue — but not matchy-matchy — tie. Finally, another photograph captures her in a traditional, pensive White House pose, in profile wearing a black slim-fitting Michael Kors sweater and ball skirt. It’s a look that harks back to the sporty elegance favored by Vogue favorites such as socialites C.Z. Guest and Babe Paley. It firmly places Obama in the world of “classic” beauties — a place that had once been off-limits to women of color. Obama has appeared on the covers of countless magazines, from Essence to Ladies’ Home Journal, but the Vogue cover — with its enduring legacy of high fashion, high society and an obsession with a particular kind of gilded beauty that drives size-14, short, brown or round women to distraction — holds a different place.

“When you’re on the cover of Vogue, it means that your personal imagery has power, not only your career realm or your political realm,” says Constance C.R. White, author of “ Style Noir ” and former editor in chief of Essence. “Fashion has become more powerful,” she says. “Style can be used as a powerful tool, and any number of powerful women wield their power through incredible style.” She points to finance executive Mellody Hobson and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer as examples. Vogue’s increasing ability to corral female power brokers suggests that the conventional wisdom is becoming obsolete. Women who are viewed through the lens of fashion are not doomed to be declared frivolous. “It gives these women a chance to be three-dimensional,” says Dee Dee Myers, former Clinton White House press secretary and now a political analyst. “Can you be powerful and feminine? Can you be authoritative and beautiful? The answer is yes.” In an era when social media has made image management part of the daily life of anyone on Facebook or Twitter, few entities are more adept at old-school image-making than Vogue.

“It’s all part of the tool kit, now,” says Myers, who had her own Vogue moment when she first stepped behind the lectern in the White House briefing room in 1993. When first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton appeared on the cover of Vogue in December 1998, in the shadow of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, she wore a garnet Oscar de la Renta velvet ball gown — not a career woman’s pantsuit, not a stuffy Washington luncheon suit. The image was studiously regal and dignified, presenting Clinton with her head held high and existing above the pity, anger and recriminations. “It foreshadowed the Hillary we’ve come to know, who she has become in the public consciousness, this formidable figure,” Myers says. As Michelle Obama enters her fifth year in the White House, her image has shifted from that of an African American woman who grew up on the South Side of Chicago, to an assertive lawyer and career woman, to a non-threatening mom-in-chief harvesting sweet potatoes, to a kind of glamorous hybrid who — based on approval ratings hovering around 70 percent — both inspires and reassures.

Style has been inexorably related to this evolution and her ability to command attention. “She’s become very savvy about her image and using it to further her husband’s goals,” White says. “Now she’s a fashion icon. She’s willing to play all those cards.” lifestyle CNN - Fashionable first lady -- Hillary strikes a pose for Vogue - November 24, 1998 Fashionable first lady -- Hillary strikes a pose for Vogue Hillary Rodham Clinton was photographed inside the White House in relaxed poses. RELATED VIDEO Watch the interview with Anna Wintour Windows Media November 24, 1998 Web posted at: 4:26 p.m. EST (2126 GMT) (CNN) -- Despite a backlog of political scandal, Hillary Rodham Clinton appears to be weathering it well in the public eye -- touring Haitian hospitals, visiting Central American hurricane victims, posing for the cover of Vogue . Yep, Clinton does a glamour girl turn with a photo spread and story in the December issue of Vogue. "She's emerged so triumphant this year that we really wanted to capture her extraordinary good looks," said Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour.

Clinton dons a Oscar de la Renta evening gown in the White House's Red Room for the top shot by famed photographer Annie Leibovitz. Inside pages show a relaxed first lady with wearing a black sweater and pants or a crisp white Ralph Lauren shirt. "We kind of wanted to get her out of those suits she tends to wear when she's campaigning," Wintour said. The Vogue issue, the first to feature a first lady on the front, will hit newstands this week. Related stories:

Question: In 1998 who was the first 'First Lady' to appear on the cover of Vogue?
Answer: Hilary Clinton