They have already been on the best-dressed - and worst-dressed - celebrity lists. Profiles of each have been written in all the key news magazines and their backgrounds and parentage thoroughly scrutinised. Their minor scuffles with controversy have been pored over - a plagarised cookie recipe and an ambiguous statement about national pride to date.
As their husbands search for vice-presidential candidates, Michelle Obama and Cindy McCain are readying themselves for the strange supporting-role approval contest that comes with being America’s First Lady.
The term itself may be anachronistic - Jacqueline Kennedy said she dreaded becoming one: ‘It sounds like a saddle horse.’ There is no official job description, though puritan values good housekeeping are unspoken expectations. The presidential spouse should support her husband - no longer is there any possibility is will be anything but a ’she’ - and involved herself in some carefully chosen charity, non-political preferably.
But for Cindy and Michelle, both clever and successful, and both mothers, this political showbusiness means very different things. Last week the heiress Mrs McCain, 54, was in Coronado, San Diego, sorting out the beachfront apartment she and her 71-year-old husband have just bought near the beach hotel made famous in the film Some Like It Hot. Mrs Obama was on the campaign trail with her husband, getting a foretaste of the nasty attacks she can expect if he wins the nomination after Tuesday’s final Democratic party primary polling in South Dakota and Montana. With race the subtext, conservative radio jocks and bloggers have been growing more strident, depicting her, as one US commentator did, as ‘the bitter, anti-American, ungrateful, rude, crude, ghetto, angry Michelle Obama’. This vehemence has provoked Barack Obama to call the attacks on his wife, from people purportedly promoting family values, ‘detestable’.
Cindy has already been here. The only child of a wealthy Arizona beer distributor, she was targeted by proxies for George W Bush, then Texas governor, during her husband’s first presidential campaign in 2000 who leaked news of her past addiction to painkillers and, inaccurately, of her husband’s alleged black love child (the couple have a daughter adopted from Bangladesh).

guardian.co.uk