First Read: "Michelle Obama, All Fired Up"

From NBC’s Carrie Dann:

And you thought Elizabeth Edwards was all fired up.

At a rally in Council Bluffs, Iowa, Michelle Obama showed just how fiery we can expect her to be as her husband's battle for the Democratic nomination heats up.

"Think! Listen!" she implored during an impassioned introduction of her husband today, "The game of politics is to make you afraid, so that you don't think!"

Her introduction was a super-charged version of Barack Obama’s stump speech, which has increasingly vilified the bleak status quo of a rigid Washington establishment. But where he, highlights hope, his wife warned today of the consequences of fear. Jabbing a pointed finger in the air, she derided a political system in which "every decision that we've made over the past 10 years wasn't FOR something, but was because people told us we had to fear something."

She put a hard edge on her husband’s "war that never should have been waged" applause line, too, exclaiming, "We are in this war because for eight years; we were told to be afraid!"

In recent weeks, Elizabeth Edwards -- who's taken potshots at both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama -- has been the political spouse perceived as the one doing the dirty work for her candidate. But today, there was no mistaking Michelle Obama's subtle jabs at her husband's opponents, as she compared his U.S. Senate run to the current race for the White House. At the beginning of his Illinois run, she said, he ran against a "billionaire" and a "strong political family" believed to be unbeatable. She was referring to businessman Blair Hull and pedigreed Illinois politician Daniel Hynes, whom Obama defeated in the Democratic primary, but the parallels to the Clintons are clear.

As she completed her introduction of Barack Obama, she called him "the man I love, who I would rather have home with me ... but who I am willing to sacrifice, because we have this window of opportunity, a chance to make something real happen."

Howie P.S.: Here's some recent video (05:06) of Michelle Obama in Chicago.