Commentary:  JACK CAFFERTY

I think I am developing a crush on America's first lady. Michelle Obama is more compelling than her husband. He's good, but she's utterly fascinating.

Mrs. Obama has blown away the stale air in a White House musty from eight years of the Bushes.  It's like the sun came out and a fresh spring breeze began wafting through the open windows.

It's the people's house, and Michelle Obama totally gets it. So much so that she has taken to inviting people in from the streets to see her home. Nice touch -- one completely lacking in her recent predecessors.

Watch her when she visits a local school and you see the warmth and affection she instantly triggers in people.  Kids are pretty much totally honest with very good BS-detectors.  If they sense you're a phony, forget it.  But around the first lady, they want to hug her and laugh with her and tell her stories.

You can see the same qualities these kids recognize in her daughters.  She is the consummate mother as evidenced by the poised, polite smiling children she and her husband are raising. I have four daughters, and trust me -- they don't turn out like the Obama children without devoted parents.

New to the Washington neighborhood, Michelle Obama has taken it upon herself to go around and introduce herself to the people in the various agencies of government.   When's the last time a first lady did that? I don't ever remember it before.  And during her visits she listens rather than lectures.  And people respond to her.

She was raised on the south side of Chicago by blue-collar parents.  She went to Princeton University, and Harvard Law School.  But in many ways she's still a kid from the south side of Chicago, and that's what makes her special.  She knows exactly who she is.

The Obama's bring a humanity and humility to their tasks which sets them far apart from the run-of-the mill phonies who populate Washington.  It's exactly what the doctor ordered for this wounded nation.

Michelle Obama's unassuming, but dead-on, sense of style has the fashion press gushing all over itself.

Her arms are becoming the stuff of legend.  Who appears sleeveless on the cover of Vogue, let alone in front of a joint session of Congress while her husband delivers one  of the most important speeches of his life? And the reviews were rave.

Cindi Leive, the editor of Glamour magazine gushed, "Oh my god! The first lady has bare arms in Congress in February at night!" If she keeps it up, Seventh Avenue will soon stop making women's clothes with sleeves.