Washington:
She has settled her daughters in school - and watched "the wonder in their eyes" as they met the pope and the queen of England. She has polished her image and driven her poll numbers sky high, with carefully timed interviews and magazine cover shots. She has spotlighted military families, mentored young girls and begun a national conversation on healthy eating by planting the first White House garden since Eleanor Roosevelt's day.
Now, Michelle Obama said Wednesday, she is looking to make a deeper and more lasting policy impact, by spearheading an initiative to reduce childhood obesity that, she hopes, will create a legacy by which she can be remembered.
"Until we move the ball on something - that's the legacy I want," Obama said in a wide-ranging roundtable interview with reporters for seven news organizations. "I want to leave something behind that we can say, 'Because of this time that this person spent here, this thing has changed.' And my hope is that that's going to be in the area of childhood obesity."
The effort will be the first administration-wide initiative run by Michelle Obama, aides said, and she intends to speak to a gathering of mayors about it next week. She also expects to get involved in the congressional effort to reauthorize the federal school lunch program, and she did not rule out testifying on Capitol Hill. "I'd be willing to do whatever it would take to further an agenda," she said, adding, "If it's helpful, I wouldn't say no."
Her conversation, in the butter-colored old family room in the White House residence, was chatty and casual. It touched on motherhood in the White House (the Obamas are so busy with their daughters' activities on the weekends, she said, that they cannot find time to go home to Chicago); her life as a celebrity (she sometimes asks friends, "Do you still recognize me?" and "Do I still feel like Michelle?"); some news of the day; race relations in America; her one guilty pleasure (french fries); and even fashion.
She wore a short-sleeved sienna-colored dress, bangles on her forearm and above-the-knee Jimmy Choo boots - "my answer to stockings," she said. Her hair was in a neat bob, a teensy bit shorter than usual, and she confessed to a haircut "not so drastic that it will make news."
Yet Michelle Obama did make a snippet of news, weighing in briefly on Sen. Harry Reid, the Democratic leader, who has apologized to President Barack Obama for saying in a private conversation that Obama would make a good candidate for president because he is "light-skinned" and has "no Negro dialect."
"Harry Reid had no need to apologize to me, because I know Harry Reid," the first lady "and I measure people more so on what they do rather than the things that they say."
Obama dismissed the fracas over the uninvited guests at her first state dinner as "a footnote" to a lovely affair. She declined to address the performance of her friend and social secretary, Desiree Rogers, who was criticized, along with the Secret Service, for the security lapse.
"The state dinner was an outstanding success - you know, it's just the follow-up after it," Michelle Obama said, adding, "For me, the other stuff that everybody is talking about is a footnote to what the state dinner actually was."
If the past year was about "listening and learning" as Obama said Wednesday, the coming year will help define her as a first lady. As the midterm election campaigns heat up, she will be in demand to headline fundraisers and hit the campaign trail, but she said she had not decided whether to do so.
At almost 46 (her birthday is Sunday) Obama said she had no regrets over the past year, including her high-profile trip to Copenhagen in an unsuccessful effort to help Chicago land the Olympics. "You know," she said, "I would do it again."
And she said she had achieved her primary goal for her first year: getting her daughters settled and making certain her mother, Marian Robinson, was comfortable in Washington after a lifetime in Chicago. She said the girls came home from school one day in March and declared, " 'This feels like home,' and that was the first time that I was really able to breathe a sigh of relief."
Obama said she was acutely aware of her place in history as the nation's first African-American first lady, and said she viewed the national conversation about race as far from finished. She learned last year, through a report in The New York Times, that one of her not-too-distant ancestors was a slave - a discovery that appears to have moved her profoundly.
"When you look back on my history and finding out that my great-great-great-grandmother was actually a slave - we're still very connected to slavery in way that is powerful," she said, adding: "That's not that far away. I could have known that woman."