Michelle Obama, 44, comes from Chicago, has two Ivy League degrees and may well be America’s next first lady.

Her husband, Barack, Democratic frontrunner, has a gift for inspiration, and I admire him. But he has sent people’s hopes soaring so high I wonder if he is bound to disappoint them.

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“You don’t get anywhere without big dreams,” Michelle Obama said in an interview yesterday after addressing a women’s audience at the Providence Biltmore. Without big dreams, she said, she’d never have found herself at Princeton and Harvard Law.

Still, she said of her husband, “He doesn’t enter into this naïvely. He’s worked in politics, in some of the toughest politics that you might see in Illinois … He knows that real change requires a lot of hard work and sometimes you don’t win them all. But what he also knows is that if you don’t come in with a unified base of support, and if you’re not willing to look beyond your own partisan situation and build new bridges, that you can’t get anything done.

“And that’s what the hope is about — it’s engaging enough people in the process to hold the system accountable in ways that we haven’t seen in a long time.”

She said it’s essential to trigger people’s imaginations and “push them out of their cynicism” so that they ask questions, demand action, and “rise up.”

The conversation turned to last February’s presidential candidacy kickoff in frigid Springfield, Ill. She told Senator Obama, “There’s no way anyone is going to come out and stand in the bitter cold to hear you.” She wanted the ceremony moved indoors. But 16,000 gathered in the open air. “That’s when I knew people want something different.”

Even then, she says, she didn’t get carried away. She thought, “OK, we did this today. Now what about tomorrow?”

She and her brother, Brown basketball coach Craig Robinson, came from a working-class background on Chicago’s South Side, blessed by loving, demanding parents who pounded away at the value of hard work and warned that even then you might miss out. (That was Craig’s daughter, Leslie, 11, sitting in on yesterday’s interview.)

Michelle Obama said the upbringing braced her for the campaign. “You don’t not do it because you might not win. You do your best all the time … You don’t think about what might go wrong.”

So now she’s on the cover of Newsweek, gives speeches and interviews, experiences the crush of the crowds, and knows she and her husband could be headed for the White House. Sometimes, she said, it’s like watching someone else’s movie. But she said her parents taught her to focus.

And so while there are elements to her current life that are “surreal,” the mother of two girls said she also remains grounded:

“When I go home and walk into my house to a 9-year-old and 6-year-old who are telling me about their Valentine’s Day cards and their lost tooth and worrying about making sure the tooth fairy visits in a timely way and they get to ballet on Saturday, and there’s a death in the family and I’ve got to go to a funeral, that is my life. This is sort of what I do when I’m not doing that.”

By the way, what does the tooth fairy pay in Chicago?

“I think the tooth fairy the other night paid about $3. Some of their friends have gotten $20 and I called their parents. I’m like, ‘You’re killing us. Don’t do it!’ ”

M. Charles Bakst is The Journal’s political columnist.

mbakst@projo.com