WASHINGTON — Michelle is the Obama who fits in a small room. She does the coffeeklatch to Barack’s coliseum.

For months now, she’s lifted her husband up by downsizing him gently, while grappling with her own critics. Sure, he’s the orator who electrifies the faithful by the tens of thousands. But he snores and smells not so good in the morning.

Sure, he’s got what it takes to be president, she offers.

But he’s “just a man.”

A tall woman with an outsized personality of her own, Michelle Obama has toured the community centers, church basements and ballrooms of the land, pulling in a crowd of 50 here, 2,500 there, and mixing it up with cozy TV chats and glossy magazine features.

Monday night in Denver, the stage is hers at the Democratic National Convention for a prime-time speech introducing the potential first lady to her largest TV audience.

If part of her function has been to reveal the husband and dad side of the man addressing the masses, she also needs to show she’s just a woman, just an American, just a patriot.

She’ll be joined by her daughters, Malia and Sasha, her mother Marian Robinson, and her brother Craig Robinson, who will introduce her.

In the primaries, she was dubbed “the Closer” for her ability to persuade the undecided voters. Now she’s the opener, the first-night star called upon to testify about her husband’s vision and values, and perhaps settle some doubts about herself.

The critics have come out early, to a point where Barack Obama told people to “lay off my wife.” The Obama campaign created a Web site solely to counter innuendo about both of them, and first lady Laura Bush came unexpectedly to her defense.

A summer AP-Yahoo News poll found the public hasn’t taken to her yet. Respondents were more apt to dislike her than Republican candidate John McCain’s wife, Cindy. But mainly, Americans don’t know either woman well.

Republicans in Tennessee and Washington state circulated video making hay with her statement that the campaign made her proud of America for the first time in her adult life. She said she meant pride in the political process.

Barack Obama called such attacks “low rent.” But that video won’t be going away.

“People aren’t used to strong women,” Michelle Obama remarked on ABC’s “The View.” That proposition is arguable, given the country’s history with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, her activist years as first lady and her hard-charging, last-voter-standing primary campaign.

But, like Clinton, Obama can incite strong feelings for and against.

Her lack of pretense comes with a certain resistance to political packaging and she’s expressed the surprise of the newly famous that a comment here or a gesture there can create such a fuss.

The even-keeled Laura Bush told her through the media that “everything you say is looked at and in many cases misconstrued.” The first lady also said Michelle Obama must have meant she was “more proud” of her country than before, not proud for the first time.

“That’s what I like about Laura Bush,” Michelle Obama said in response. “There’s a reason why people like her. It’s because she doesn’t, sort of, you know, fuel the fire.”

She wrote a thank you note to “Dear madam first lady” and made clear she’d learned a thing or two from Laura Bush. “I’m taking some cues.”

Michelle LaVaughn Robinson grew up on the South Side of Chicago in a family of modest means.

Fraser Robinson was a Democratic precinct captain who worked swing shifts at the water plant. His wife Marian raised the kids in a one-bedroom apartment on the top floor of her aunt’s house, where Michelle and Craig slept in the living room, converted into two tiny bedrooms and a study area.

She fought her way into Princeton, and later to Harvard Law School, and began dating Obama while working at a Chicago corporate law firm. They’ve been married for 15 years.

She left corporate law for community service positions and later became an administrator of the University of Chicago hospitals. Daughters Malia and Sasha are 10 and 7. The couple reported making $4.2 million last year, their days of financial struggles well behind them.

Even so, she’s proved an adept solo campaigner with blue-collar audiences and with women, able to make a connection with voters whose lives are an economic struggle. She laughs easily, hugs a lot, hangs tight after the speech and watches her sarcastic streak.

“I wake up every morning, wondering how on the Earth I’m going to pull off that next minor miracle to get through the day,” she told a Chicago crowd.

She talks about work, workouts, parent-teacher conferences, hair appointments, the burdens of campaign travel, the plugged toilet that her husband left her to deal with one day.

“With the exception of the campaign trail and life in the public eye, I have to say that my life now is really not that much different from many of yours,” she said.

Those are, of course, huge exceptions. But for the opener, the closer and everything in between, expect to see much more of Michelle the American everywoman. The one who, it turns out, has a daughter born on the Fourth of July.