First lady Michelle Obama today spoke in very frank and personal terms to a Massachusetts audience as she described her conversion to a political wife, as well as the toll President Obama's job takes on him each day.

"I see the worry creasing his face. I hear the passion and determination in his voice. 'You won't believe what these folks are going through;' he told me that last night. 'Michelle, it is not right. We've got to fix this. We have to do more,'" she said during a visit to Boston for a fund-raiser on behalf of the Democratic National Committee.

"Barack always reminds me that we are playing a long game," she added, replicating her husband's call for patience amid the country's slow emergence from a recession. "He reminds me, as I said to you, too, that change is slow. He reminds me that change doesn't happen all at once, but that if we keep showing up, if we keep fighting the good fight, doing what we know is right, then eventually we will get there, because the truth is we always have in this country. We always have."

Like her husband did a day earlier during a White House news conference, the first lady evoked the image of their two daughters, Malia and Sasha, as she tried to stir Democratic supporters.