Michelle Obama’s Cross of Gold

In an elegant high-rise apartment overlooking the Chicago Loop Monday night, Michelle Obama ascended a spiral staircase to address a private party of campaign contributors as they dined on sushi and sipped wine. But as she spoke she frequently gestured toward the wall of glass windows and to the streets beyond the downtown business district, talking of the problems that face residents on the city’s South Side and in other struggling neighborhoods around the country. “They don’t want much,” she said of the South Side residents, her neighbors when she was growing up in a working class neighborhood there. “They are just asking for a shot. They want decent schools . . . They want a clean environment, so their children don’t have to be taken to the ER every other day because they suffer from asthma.”