Illustration by Jason Seiler

Amid all the speculation about Barack Obama’s newfound mojo, a hotly anticipated stiffening of his political spine inspired by his decisive victory in November, a somewhat more intriguing question has scarcely been asked.

Will Michelle finally step out?

The Harvard-trained attorney has always been, for those on the right, a more threatening character than her husband. After all, Mr. Obama merely received that famous fist bump—or as Fox News had it, “terrorist fist jab”—in the moments before delivering his speech at the Democratic National Convention; Michelle initiated it. It was she who revealed that the future president woke up “snore-y and stinky” in the morning, part of the campaign’s aggressive bid to humanize him that had the side effect of further elevating her (After all, if America’s demigod wakes up less than perfect, what would she think of us?) And it was Michelle who included a line about how the nation is “just downright mean” and “guided by fear”—in her 2008 stump speech—and once notoriously allowed that she was “for the first time in my adult lifetime ... really proud of my country.” And, of course, it was Michelle who finally extended the right to “bare arms” to political spouses and, as the Times Style section put it, “spurred an epidemic of sleevelessness.”

My goodness, the guns on that woman!

Whether the infamous “whitey” video—a Holy Grail of the right, in which Michelle is said to employ the dated epithet—ever existed at all outside the fever dreams of dirty trickster Roger Stone Jr. (which it almost definitely did not), the first lady has worked hard to dispel our fears. Over the last four years, the perceived Angela Davis-style radical has been replaced by a smoothly competent political professional, whose causes seem more Lady Bird Johnson than Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Not that there haven’t been a few missteps: wearing Lanvin sneakers to a food bank, eating Shake Shack (albeit in moderation) despite her healthy-food exhortations and hugging Queen Elizabeth. In general, though, Ms. Obama has been a notably careful FLOTUS, campaigning for exercise (what could be less controversial than that?) and embodying the role of wholesome mom-in-chief. Far from reinventing the job of first lady, the first black woman to set up house in the East Wing has turned out to be something of a traditionalist. At least so far. Now, with the exigencies of a second presidential campaign behind her, some are hoping Ms. Obama will finally let her freak flag—whatever that might look like—fly.

“There’s this sense that the real Michelle Obama, this endearingly frank woman we met in the spring of 2008, is going to come back to the fore,” noted New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor. “I think any change in her during the presidency is going to be one of degree. The real change is going to be in the post-presidency. Once she’s out of the White House and her husband will no longer hold office, she truly will be liberated. She will still be a young woman, and she’ll be one of the most famous and influential women in the world.”

“For first ladies, I do think second terms tend to be a bit more interesting,” said Daily Beast fashion writer Robin Givhan, whose beat is the intersection of style and politics and who has often written about Michelle. “It was in the second term when Laura Bush spoke out about Burma. So I will be intrigued to see if Mrs. Obama decides that she’s going to add a third leg to her platform, which now is divided between the support of military personnel and the Let’s Move campaign.”

While Ms. Givhan declined to speculate as to what that third project might be, conservatives are plainly terrified. As a piece on Right Side News ominously put it, “Much like Hillary, she will be assigned more involvement in affairs of state, appointed to committees, and public appearances of a political nature will become more frequent, not to speak of a barrage of friendly television repartee on shows like The View, late night talk, and more. In essence, the grooming will begin.”

Blame Ms. Clinton for the lofty expectations: the former first lady-turned-well-liked senator-turned-presidential candidate-turned-secretary of state-turned-beloved Internet meme is the new paradigm for first ladies. (Even Laura Bush, the very picture of a traditional political spouse, went on an extensive book tour in 2010, during which she spoke out on her policy differences from her husband. Turns out she’s pro-gay marriage and supports Roe v. Wade!)

Ms. Obama, in spite of her rather rocky introduction, has the skill set of a politician, as she amply demonstrated with her 2012 Democratic National Convention speech, in which she passionately recounted the story of her early marriage and her dad’s health struggles, making Ann Romney’s tuna-salad recollections look hopelessly drab and out of touch. Though Ms. Obama was hardly the first first lady to get an advanced degree or work outside the home—Laura Bush has a master’s and was a teacher and librarian, and Nancy Davis acted in films after her marriage to Ronald Reagan—she was the first one to have a higher-profile career than her husband for a time. While Barack was working on his memoir and commuting between Chicago and Springfield as a state senator, Michelle was climbing the ladder at the University of Chicago Hospitals system; even when he became a U.S. senator, she was the spouse bringing home the real bacon. It’s not surprising that with Illinois Senator Mark Kirk up for re-election in 2016, speculation has already emerged that Michelle will make a run at the seat. A recent poll had her trouncing the Republican 51 to 40 percent. Trouble is, the first lady may not be interested.

In her book The Obamas, Ms. Kantor reported that Michelle Obama strongly considered the idea of remaining in Chicago and letting Barry turn the White House into a bachelor pad in order to allow little Sasha and Malia to continue their school year in Chicago. “It’s hard to overstate how little she wanted to go into politics,” Ms. Kantor told The Observer, “and it wasn’t just because of the family reasons she sometimes cites. She had a real objection to the nature of politics. She thought it wasn’t the right way to create social change.”

She’s disappointed liberals before. Many expected her to advocate strongly for progressive causes during her husband’s first term, but she largely kept quiet. Historian and America’s First Ladies author Betty Boyd Caroli said that she’d expected Mrs. Obama to more aggressively champion the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in 2009, for instance. “I was disappointed,” Ms. Caroli said. “I expected her to be Superwoman. But it doesn’t work that way. Enough voters, it is feared, are not ready.”

And blame Hillary Clinton for that, too, having so disastrously overreached with health-care reform. “Everybody learned a lesson from that. It’s not good to be too political as a first lady,” said Dr. Caroli. (The PR disaster was compounded by Mrs. Clinton’s maelstrom of press over everything from Whitewater to her ever-evolving hairdo, and the fact that her ambitions for a time outpaced her political talent.)

The result: Hillary entered the East Wing as a full-throated political player and left as a Vogue cover-girl and hostess.

“Hillary’s trajectory was the opposite of Michelle’s,” noted Rebecca Traister, the author of Big Girls Don’t Cry, a book about women and the 2008 election.

As for Ms. Obama, the conservative blogosphere still lights up with outrage whenever the healthy-eating crusader is seen nibbling a French fry, but the first lady’s childhood-obesity-prevention campaign Let’s Move and her advocacy on behalf of military families are not exactly Hillarycare. As Ms. Kantor noted, “There’s the question with Let’s Move about how aggressive and confrontational she was willing to be when it came to taking on corporate interests. With the military families initiative, is it rah-rah patriotic, or does it get into darker material? I’m curious to see how complete and thorough a conversation she wants to have with the country about the issues veterans face.”

In the first term, Mrs. Obama’s “mom-in-chief” moniker, derided by the left, allowed her to occupy an apolitical space. “There was some frustration among women, thinking she should do more,” said Anita McBride, former chief of staff to Laura Bush and a scholar of the history of first ladies. “But the women’s movement is about choice, and this was her choice.”

Others agree that Ms. Obama’s old-school approach during the first term was in itself somewhat radical. “I consider myself a feminist,” noted MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry. “But I’m also a critic of second-wave feminism, which was bourgeois, white middle class, and said that work done outside the home is the most liberating kind of work. That ignores the fact that through vast periods of U.S. history, black women were not provided the income or space that they could make that decision. I find it kind of subversive and interesting that a black woman with a law degree from Harvard who’d been the primary breadwinner through college said, ‘I’m going to do what generations of white women have done, do the Junior League kind of work.’”

But even Dr. Harris-Perry sees an untapped political potential in the first lady. She cited Ms. Obama’s work negotiating between the University of Chicago and the city’s South Side: “It’d be really interesting to see if she could navigate that at a higher level—bridging this gap between the powerful and well-resourced and those that are being denigrated.”

Besides, a certain distaste for politics might just turn out to be an asset, creating a sense that, should she venture into the arena, she would be doing it not because she wants to—heaven forbid—but because her country truly needs her. A “Michelle Obama 2016” T-shirt with a snazzy stars-and-bars design can be found for about $25 on Google Shopping.

Ms. Traister compared Michelle to another formerly nonpolitical person who ended up taking out a sitting Republican senator. “Elizabeth Warren is somebody who did not have a political career, who was tremendously influential in terms of how we see the chasm between rich and poor,” Ms. Traister noted. Ms. Obama, she said, “could get very active in immigration reform, she could start talking about climate change.”

Dr. Harris-Perry had a different role model in mind: a first lady who, as “a dutiful soldier,” kept silent about her disagreements with her husband during his presidency but campaigned vociferously as a conscience of the Democratic party in the years that followed: Eleanor Roosevelt. “She became the legacy; she held the Democrats’ feet to the fire. She was very active in party leadership,” Dr. Harris-Perry said, adding that Ms. Obama “might be able to be a kind of queen-maker for women running for office. I could see her on the campaign trail.”

“It’s very natural for that to be the next-step fantasy for people who appreciate her brilliance—oh, she’ll run for office!” Ms. Traister said. “One thing all those who want her to run could think about is other jobs she may want to have in her life, using her own model of working within communities. We need to be aware of is not letting her identity as a former first lady hold her back from having an independent life.”

Then again, you never know. Back in the 1990s, Dr. Caroli predicted that Hillary Clinton would never run for office: “She didn’t look at ease with groups of people,” she said. “But people change!”

And if they don’t, there’s always Sasha and Malia. 2040, perhaps?

Martha Levin, the publisher of Free Press, said in an email that Ms. Traister plans to weave her personal experience of "questioning her own feminism while choosing between Clinton and Obama."

Obviously, Ms. Traister has been writing about related topics throughout this campaign. In a column published yesterday, for example, she examined how the election has affected the careers of Katie Couric, Rachel Maddow, and Campbell Brown.

Ms. Levin declined to comment on Ms. Traister's advance for the book, but a source at another house said it was at least $300,000.

From the piece:

In August, The Observer spoke with Rachel Maddow.

“I wasn’t exactly aware that I was writing about marriage,” he said in his rumbly alto. “I just thought of myself as writing about Alice. And that’s why some of those letters I got surprised me.”

Mr. Trillin was perched on the edge of a white armchair, talking about the unexpected phenomenon of “Alice, Off the Page,” the love ballad he wrote to his late wife—Alice—in The New Yorker last spring. Published nearly five years after her death, the essay seemed to trip some kind of secret wire in urban romantics’ hearts. For weeks following its publication, women (and, yes, men too) passed their tear-stained copies on to friends, blasted e-mail alerts to pals, even recommended it to strangers on the subway. Quite a few took to writing Mr. Trillin letters—mostly “about what they were looking forward to in a marriage,” he said.

Now, nine months later, Mr. Trillin has turned the essay into a book, a 78-page heartbreaker called About Alice, and the tears have begun to flow again: tears on the street, tears in the office, tears for an “epic romance” (as one woman called it) between two people whom most of its readers have never met.

All of which baffles its author, who insisted he had no desire to be a mascot for marriage, let alone for male enlightenment.

“Somewhere I read something like, ‘He’s in touch with his feminine side.’ And I said, ‘Jesus Christ! I hope no one I went to high school with is reading that,’” Mr. Trillin said in mock disgust. “I am not in touch with my feminine side!”

But try telling that to the women who fell in love with Mr. Trillin for his love of Alice, who have nursed serious Calvin crushes ever since they first discovered his foodie adventure book, Alice, Let’s Eat.

“Whatever my admiration for his whole body of work, the core of why I love Trillin has been the way he wrote about Alice,” wrote Salon’s Rebecca Traister in an emotional ode to both halves of the couple. “I grew up loving Alice because her husband loved her so eloquently.”

LIKE MOST ALICE ADMIRERS, Ms. Traister never met her heroine. But she knew her, or felt she knew her, because of the years she had spent reading Mr. Trillin’s wild Americana adventures in The New Yorker, and the books he seemed to exhale by the year. In story after story, Alice popped up as the sensible but indulgent straight woman, the foil against which his antics loomed large and hilarious. She was the prudent gourmet to his lovable glutton, the wise spouse to his excitable husband—and, of course, the muse.

She was also a force in her own right, a dedicated educator and vigorous writer, and as she and her husband aged, they became a lovable New York institution. When she died of heart failure—on Sept. 11, 2001, of all days—her admirers found time amid the general heartbreak and wreckage to send her husband condolence notes.

For all this, it took more than four years, and a “cautious” question from New Yorker editor David Remnick, for Mr. Trillin to think about “verbalizing” his own thoughts about her death. When he finally did, he was inspired as much by a desire to pay tribute as an urge to correct the historical record, refine the broad-strokes character he had created in his writings.

“I felt that I had written about her, as I say in the book, as a sort of sitcom character—I mean, an admirable sitcom character, but still a sitcom character, and she was an actual person,” he said. “That’s why I was doing the piece.”

Alice herself had been ambivalent about playing the sitcom mom. On at least one occasion, she likened her portrayal to that of the “dietician in sensible shoes,” and since she was neither a dietician nor a fan of the beige orthotic pump (she was, instead, a serious teacher with a flare for elegant heels), this wasn’t exactly an endorsement of the image.

And so Mr. Trillin finally set about busting her out of her dietician’s duds. He recounted the way she “seemed to glow” the night he met her,” and how, from that moment on, he’d made it his life’s mission to impress her. He extolled her “incorrigible” optimism, praised her dedication to her daughters, and generally cataloged the wisdom of her character as if she were the philosopher queen of some great undiscovered nation.

In the process, he created a portrait of Alice—and, even more than that, of husbandly devotion—that was as liable to set readers’ hearts aflutter as Joan Didion’s sinew-by-sinew autopsy of grief, The Year of Magical Thinking, was to give them angina.

And readers—particularly those of the female persuasion—responded.

“My apologies for the slow start this morning. I was busy crying in the bathtub while reading Calvin Trillin’s About Alice,” wrote Jessa Crispin, the editor of Bookslut.com, on Jan. 4, in a typical blog post.

No doubt, Mr. Trillin’s way with the written word had something to do with the storm of emotion. But, as the therapists say, there’s also something else going on here. The dearth of decent men who can emote, let alone write a sentence about it, might well have something to do with it. Or perhaps nostalgia—a longing for a certain tradition of marriage, to say nothing of a New York where a writer-teacher couple could afford a Grove Street townhouse without having to sell off a kid. Or perhaps a large number of ladies simply want to be adored.

Katy McColl, the lifestyle editor at Jane magazine, is what one might call the Patient Zero of the Calvin crush phenomenon. She has been a Trillin-phile for years, and in 2001, shortly after Alice’s death, she wrote a condolence letter in which she admitted to looking at her boyfriend sometimes and wondering, “But will he love me like Calvin loves Alice?” (Yep, she was that girl, or so she believes.) Mr. Trillin quoted the letter in his New Yorker essay, and then in About Alice, and the comment quickly went viral, became a mantra that women would quote, Krishna-style, as the reason for their Trillin obsession.

(Interestingly, no one has posed the reverse question: Will I love him like Calvin loved Alice?)

Ms. McColl was momentarily flummoxed when she spoke to The Observer about her famous question. “Oh, gosh—how do I explain this?” she said. “My boyfriend at the time, he wanted to know why I was writing a condolence note to Calvin Trillin, because he was like, ‘You don’t even know him.’ And, I don’t know—my parents are divorced, and I think we sort of seek out couples that have the relationship that you aspire to.”

Needless to say, Ms. McColl’s relationship with that particular beau was not for the ages. But she kept up the search, and, not long after, she found a man whose rightness was confirmed not just by his habit of making her coffee in bed every morning, but also by “a sign”: Ms. McColl’s sighting of Mr. Trillin on the subway the morning after the second date.

“I told my parents I met the man I was going to marry,” she said of her reaction to the sighting—and the date. And, in fact, three and a half years later, she did marry him: “He’s very much my Calvin Trillin.”

“I’m not sure I would have known how high I could shoot for,” she added, “if I hadn’t read all the things Calvin had written about his wife.”

But the Trillin obsession isn’t just about marrying right. While some women dream of finding their own earthly Calvin, others just want him as their dad—and Alice as their mom.

For a generation raised on divorce, the Trillins—who married in 1965, just before the marriage-hopping baby boomers came of age—represent a kind of prelapsarian parental ideal. Their set-up was traditional enough to be recognizable to a kid of the 70’s or 80’s: Alice, for all her wit and strength, was very much the wife and mother, and Mr. Trillin was the charming, goofy dad. But they were also glamorous enough to be exciting—the wedding photograph on the back cover of About Alice could easily be mistaken for a sepia still from some Jacques Demy movie, with Alice playing stand-in for Catherine Deneuve. And they actually liked each other.

“They seemed like they got along so well and lived together so well,” Ms. Crispin sighed during a phone interview. “It’s just the ideal parent relationship that my parents didn’t have.”

For his part, Mr. Trillin seemed a bit uncomfortable with the whole familial-icon thing. As he sat in his living room, he listened politely to questions about his dream-husband status and would even parry with a joke from time to time. But mostly he did his best to tamp down the wide-eyed wonder that his happy marriage has inspired.

He seemed unusually reluctant, for instance, to wax confessional about his marriage, despite having just written a book about the subject. And when asked the secret to his happy relationship, he ascribed it, above all, to luck—to walking into the right party, which is how he met Alice in 1963—rather than any particular theory, philosophy or therapeutic intervention.

“It’s not a very admired notion, because people think you’re sort of kicking at the dirt and saying, ‘Oh, this is all luck.’ But it’s a huge factor in everybody’s life,” he said. “It’s luck to meet the right person, it’s luck to find something you like to do for a living, and it’s luck to be able to do it, to a great extent.”

Certainly, it was luck—or at least lucky—to find someone with whom, during 36 years of marriage, he never felt bored. “If she felt bored, she was kind enough not to say so,” he said.

As for stumbling on a mate with whom he could recall (and then only after prodding) having just one noteworthy fight—well, there’s really not even a word for that.

“It had to do with a dog being in a scene or something in a [home] movie called The Sound of Egg,” he said of the fight, which occurred during one of the summers they spent in Nova Scotia with their daughters. “And I said, ‘We have to have this or we have to have that,’ and she thought I was saying she didn’t understand humor, or something like that. And on those occasions, I used to say, ‘I’ve heard the phrase ‘hyper-sensitive Jewess.’

“But you know, that lasted for 10 minutes or something,” he said.

Such stories of marital bliss might become irritating—or at least easy to dismiss as writerly yarn-spinning—if Mr. Trillin didn’t seem to miss his wife so much all these years later. His voice had a way of getting quieter, deeper, when he found himself put upon to answer certain questions about her. And something about the hiking boots he wore seemed lonely.

Or maybe that, too, was a girl’s projection, as delusional as the desire to search for “signs” of Alice in every nook, cranny and picture frame in his house.

Mr. Trillin himself seemed to have little interest in indulging maudlin moments. When asked whether he had recovered at all from the grief of losing Alice, he replied with an optimistic, “Yeah, I’m really fortunate in having my daughters and grandchildren, and they’re obviously sort of the center of my life now.” As for the thorny question of dating, he responded that he could conceive of it, though “not in some organized way.”

“I don’t want to be fixed up with your aunt, if that’s what you mean,” he said.

Still, if dating is conceivable, the idea of sharing his life with anyone else, of falling in love again, is a different matter. “I guess I still think of myself as Alice’s husband,” he said quietly. “And that’s what makes it difficult.”

In the great war against Salon.com, do we need any more evidence of their disfiguring ideologies, their disgusting and deleterious doctrines which they so perniciously advance, than this screenshot from their website?

Below are the reward fliers our militia is sprinkling about University Place. At right, white wine and torture-loving New York editorial director (and man!) Kerry Lauerman; on the reader's left, an artist's rendering of what an imprisoned Rebecca Traister might look like. Resist! Refuse! Our fine American reward money can be yours.