Now or Never says Michelle Obama

Leslie Bennetts speaks to Michelle Obama in the latest Vanity Fair edition:

at 46, Barack Obama—a first-term senator and the youngest presidential contender in either party—has great potential but is relatively green. Most of his rivals are over 60, and many analysts have viewed the 2008 campaign as an exploratory run that could set the groundwork for a future race when Obama is more seasoned and the electorate has adjusted to the idea of America’s first black president.

But Mrs. Obama has no interest in an ongoing quest for the White House. “To me, it’s now or never,” she tells me a few days later, in Chicago, where we’ve met up again at the campaign’s Michigan Avenue headquarters. “We’re not going to keep running and running and running, because at some point you do get the life beaten out of you. It hasn’t been beaten out of us yet. We need to be in there now, while we’re still fresh and open and fearless and bold. You lose some of that over time. Barack is not cautious yet; he’s ready to change the world, and we need that. So if we’re going to be cautious, I’d rather let somebody else do it, because that’s a big investment of time, just to do it the same way. There’s an inconvenience factor there, and if we’re going to uproot our lives, then let’s hopefully make a real big dent in what it means to be president of the United States.”