PUEBLO, CO — First lady Michelle Obama is used to drawing cheers in with almost every sentence in crowds like these, full of supporters of President Obama exclusively. 

But it's likes like this one today in southern Colorado that bring the house down"

"Like so many, like me, like so many of you , Barack knows the American Dream because he's lived it," Michelle Obama told a crowd of over a thousand at the Colorado State Fairgrounds in Pueblo. "It is his life. And he wants everyone who's willing to work hard to have that same opportunity."

In a city like Pueblo, where minorities make up more than 50 percent of the population and the median household income is well below the state's figure, the story of her and her husband's humble beginnings is sure to prompt a flurry of sign-waving and applause.

Mrs. Obama never mentions Mitt Romney's name on the stump, nor does she even use the euphemistic "the other guys" label beloved by Vice President Joe Biden.  But her campaign pitch — on full display during a busy Western swing — relies heavily on the narrative of the first family's unlikely rise to the presidency, drawing a clear contrast to Romney as a wealthy political scion.

"I'm proud of my background," she starts out before launching into her usual telling of her father's work at a water plant on the south side of Chicago.

Weaving the tale of her dad's stoic pride in saving for his children's education and paying bills with meticulous punctuality, she appeared to fight a lump in her throat during a stop outside of Denver.

"That's what I think about every night when I tuck my girls in," she told over 2,500 backers in a high school gymnasium in Centennial. "I think about how I want to do for them what my dad did for me."

And the first lady, wrapping up a two-day campaign swing in battlegrounds Nevada and Colorado, reminded supporters that she and her husband were mired in student debt after college.

"When we first started out, our combined student loan bill was actually higher than our mortgage. How many people can relate to that?" she said in Pueblo as many nodded and clapped their assent.

Unlike campaign stops for both nominees and for Biden, Mrs. Obama's campaign events to date have been free of heckling; tickets are typically only distributed through Obama for America field offices and usually require volunteer service for the campaign or at least a lengthy wait in line.

Despite gentle references to controversial topics — like the Obama administration's repeal of the 

"Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, push for the DREAM Act, and the White House's overhaul of health care — she pushed a message of inclusiveness in Denver, saying that the goals of equality and opportunity can be embraced by anyone regardless of political party.

"I don't care who we are," she said, in the only oblique reference to Republican opponents during the day. "The things I just talked about, every American in this country wants the same things." 

Cliff Owen / AP

First lady Michelle Obama has her photograph made with patrons at Mom's Apple Pie Bakery in Occoquan, Va., Thursday, June 7, 2012.

DALE CITY, VA --- Campaigning for her husband in Virginia's vote-rich Prince William County on Thursday, first lady Michelle Obama focused on women's economic and physical well-being, telling a largely female crowd of supporters that the administration's efforts to offer preventative health services like contraception isn't an election year ploy.

"Protecting women’s health is a mission that has nothing to do with politics,” she told an audience of about 700 volunteers and Obama backers.  “It’s about ensuring that women have the screenings we need to stay healthy and the health care we need when we are sick and it’s about ensuring that women can make basic health decisions for ourselves."

The first lady, in one of her first solo appearances open to reporters, emphasized the president's push for equal pay for women, whom she said often serve as "the breadwinners" in American families.

"It is now easier for women to get equal pay for equal work," she said to applause.

Mrs. Obama urged supporters to keep those accomplishments in mind when they boost the president in conversations with people in their communities.

And that includes "the yoga people."

"Reach out to your friends and your neighbors and your colleagues and your congregation and your social club members," she said. "And the other ladies you have tea with, and the people you walk with in the morning, and the yoga people," she said.

The first lady appeared in Virginia's Prince William County, an area that George W. Bush won handily in 2000 and 2004 but that swung in Obama's favor by a 58 percent to 42 percent margin in 2008.  The diverse audience at the event appeared to reflect the area's cultural melting-pot; per the Census Bureau, African-American and Latino residents make up more than half of Dale City's population.

Minority populations -- as well as female voters -- will be key to Obama's efforts to beat Mitt Romney in battleground Virginia in the fall.

That's a fight that will not be easy, she added.

"This election will be closer than the last one," she said. "That we can count on."

Five years after the campus shootings that killed 32 and wounded 17, First Lady Michelle Obama urged graduating students at Virginia Tech not to let the 2007 violence define their school.

"There will always be folks who judge you based on things that you say or do; folks who define you based on one isolated incident," she told tens of thousands of Hokie graduates at Lane Stadium. "And here at Virginia Tech, I know you all know a thing or two about what that's like. But you also know that, in the end, people can only define you if you let them."

She urged them to stand up for the school's academic and community successes when outsiders focus only on recollections of the tragedy. The graduates in the four-year bachelor's degree program were in the first freshman class to attend the school after the shootings.

The massacre by 23-year-old student Seung-Hui Cho -- who committed suicide after the rampage -- prompted a national conversation about gun laws and mental health.

The first lady said that students should "tune out" those who judge them or their school based on others' perceptions or "superficial things," a struggle that she acknowledged experiencing when she was a high-school student dreaming of an Ivy League education.

"Some of you may have grown up like I did, in neighborhoods where kids, very few of them, had their chance to go to college," she recalled, "where being teased for doing well in school was just a fact of life, where well-meaning but misguided folks questioned whether a girl with my background could get into the kids of colleges I dreamed of attending."

"But I worked hard, and I did my best to tune out those voices of doubt, including those in my own head," she said.

In swing-state Virginia, Mrs. Obama was received warmly by students and their parents, with no notable outbursts or protests. (A smattering of students, however, did not participate in a standing ovation for her before and after her remarks.)

Amid ongoing congressional debate about student-interest loan rates, Mrs. Obama noted that her ailing father proudly paid a "small portion" of her Princeton University tuition, which was otherwise covered by "loans and grants."

"He was so proud to be sending his kids to college," she said. "And he couldn't bear the thought of me or my brother missing that registration deadline because his check was late."

Her main message, in keeping with her various volunteer and community building-oriented projects as First Lady, was one of healing through service.

After her father died, she said, she struggled with "emptiness" until she left her prestigious job at a law firm in favor of a more service-oriented job assisting students.

"Yeah, I took a pay cut, that made my mother cringe," she said. "And my new office wans't nearly as nice as the old one, but with every student I mentored, with every service project I organized, I felt my grief recede just a little bit."

Mrs. Obama was introduced by Virginia Democrat Sen. Mark Warner, who joked that he would take on the First Lady in a sack race - a reference to her "Let's Move" fitness initiative.

"Senator, I accept your challenge," she said to laughter from the audience as she began her remarks. "But you just gotta know, I play to win

Brendan Smialowski / AFP - Getty Images

President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama greet suporters after a campaign event Saturday at the Schottenstein Center in Columbus, Ohio.

RICHMOND, Virginia -- In back-to-back speeches in two key swing states, the Obama campaign indicated how it wants to define the general election: as a choice between a tool of congressional Republicans who wants to undo the president’s first-term agenda and an incumbent looking to spend the next four years building on his achievements.

The president seemed to tie his presumptive Republican challenger Mitt Romney to Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan, which Democrats use to represent congressional Republicans’ entire agenda. Obama warned that in Romney, the House GOP had a candidate who would be willing to gut Medicare and end regulations on insurance companies and banks – policies “that created this mess,” the president said.

“After a long and spirited primary, Republicans in Congress have found a nominee for president who has promised to rubber-stamp this agenda if he gets the chance,” Obama said at Ohio State University, his first stop of the day, later adhering to the same script at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.

“We cannot give him that chance,” Obama continued.

The president also sought to define himself in his two speeches Saturday, employing populist themes that touch on those of several past presidential campaigns while remaining entirely unique to the Obama campaign. Using a sort of “values play” evocative of the pitches used by the Clinton campaign, the president’s wife, Michelle, underscored that he grew up in an environment where everybody played by the rules, sometimes struggling to get by.

“He is the son of a single mother who struggled to put herself through school and pay the bills.  That’s who he is.  He’s the grandson of a woman who woke up before dawn every day to catch a bus to her job at the bank,” the first lady said of her husband in Columbus.

“So believe me, Barack knows what it means when a family struggles,” she continued.

Michelle Obama’s speech also employed a tactic from George W. Bush’s re-election campaign, in which the incumbent is portrayed as the familiar choice against an unknown risk.

“We all know what Barack Obama is -- who he is,” she said. “We all know what our president stands for, right?” she implored the audience.

There’s also a little bit of Harry Truman’s campaign evident in Obama’s pitch, as he warns supporters that they need to re-elect him in order to stop “those guys” in Congress who are threatening to pass items like the Ryan budget.

“As long as I’m president of the United States, I will never allow Medicare to be turned into a voucher that would end the program as we know it,” Obama said. “That’s what’s at stake in this election.”

And in preventing Republicans from accomplishing their agenda, Obama is arguing, the lives of average Americans will continue to improve – even as he acknowledges they are not where they need to be currently.

So in a twist of Ronald Reagan’s “are you better off than you were four years ago” trope, which Romney is using, the president is asking his supporters if they think they are on the right direction to being better off, say, four years from now.

The real question, he said, “is not just about how we’re doing today. It’s about how we’ll be doing tomorrow.”

Obama drops gloves vs Romney in campaign launch

“Will we better off if more Americans get a better education? That’s the question. Will we better off if we depend less on foreign oil and more on our own ingenuity? That's the question.”

The decision to re-ask a different question to the "are you better off" refrain is a tacit acknowledgment by the campaign that the "are you better off" question isn't an easy one for voters to answer in the affirmative for Obama.

While his stump speech did copy some pages from past playbooks, one aspect of most presidential re-election pitches was absent from the president’s opening salvo: the introduction of a clear second-term agenda.

Instead, the president’s stump speech was all about protecting his first-term achievements like the health care reform law and developing alternative energy sources. And while, historically, second terms are mostly about preserving such accomplishments, there is usually at least a vague nod to what the president wants to get done in a second term.

But that was missing in Saturday’s speeches. Perhaps by the convention, the president will have a more direct pitch about what another four years will look like.

All about field operations
This election will likely be decided on the two groups of swing voters in American politics: that tiny slice of independents who actually do vacillate between the two parties, making up maybe 8 to 10 percent of the entire electorate, and those swing voters who “swing” between voting and not voting.

And while the Obama campaign will hold rallies like the two Saturday to generate media buzz, their more immediate concern is that they connect with exactly these swing voters – especially the second subset – which both the president and first lady seemed to make clear.

“We are going to win this thing the old-fashioned way,” the president said, emphasizing the need to go door to door and establish neighborhood-by-neighborhood teams of volunteers.

The first lady made a pitch directly to college students who, along with African-Americans, are the two groups who came out in the strongest numbers for the president but also run high risk of staying home in 2012.

“To all of the college students out there, all of you -- if you're going to be moving over the summer, remember to register at your new address in the fall. You got that? Get that done,” she urged.

Lost energy?
The crowds at Ohio State University’s Schottenstein Center were screaming enthusiastically, waving signs and chanting “Four more years! Four more years!”

But the arena did not reach its full capacity of 18,300, with about 4,000 of those seats remaining unfilled. Observers of the 2008 race know that the first Obama campaign would have been able to fill every seat.

But the crowds at both OSU and VCU were more enthusiastic than any so far at a Romney rally. And while the Republican Party has joyfully pointed out that the Obama campaign isn’t generating the same excitement that it did in 2008, the only campaign that has gotten more than 5,000 folks to show up is Ron Paul's, not Romney's.

And while the GOP has fun pointing out that Obama 12 isn't inspiring the response that Obama 08 is, it's worse for the party out of power. The real reason? This is going to be a negative campaign. And negative campaigns involving incumbents are simply different beasts.

It's a campaign in which both sides are painting a pessimistic view of life if the other side wins.

The Obama campaign did flex muscle the Romney campaign has yet to show: It can throw a big rally with supporters who are still gaga for their candidate. The little things that win close elections are something Team Obama is proving fairly adept at. Can Team Romney keep up on this front? It's an open question.

SHREVEPORT, La. -- Newt Gingrich slammed Robert De Niro’s comments last night at a fundraiser for President Obama, demanding that the president apologize for the actor's joke that America isn't yet again ready for a white first lady.

“I do want to say one thing on behalf of both my wife, and on behalf of Karen Santorum and on behalf of Ann Romney, and that is I think Robert De Niro is wrong,” Gingrich said as he began his speech at Strawn's Eat Shop Too. “I think the country is ready for a new first lady, and he doesn’t have to describe it in racial terms.”

At an Obama for America fundraiser in New York City Monday night, attended by Michelle Obama, De Niro joked about a possible GOP first lady.

"Callista Gingrich. Karen Santorum. Ann Romney. Now do you really think our country is ready for a white first lady?" De Niro asked at the top of his remarks at Locanda Verde restaurant as the crowd yelled “no.” “Too soon, right?," he said.

A spokeswoman for the first lady issued a statement shortly after Gingrich concluded his remarks, calling De Niro’s comments “inappropriate.”

"We believe the joke was inappropriate," Olivia Alair, campaign press secretary to the first lady, said in a statement.

Gingrich criticized the remarks as “inexcusable” and called on President Obama to personally apologize.

“It is exactly wrong, it divides the country,” the former House speaker said. “If people on the left want to talk about radio talk show hosts, then everybody in the country ought to hold the president accountable when somebody at his event says something as utterly, totally unacceptable as Robert De Niro said last night, and I call on the president to apologize for him.”

While Gingrich stood up for all three women involved in the actor’s joke, he of course has his favorite.

“I have a personal preference, obviously, for Callista to be the first lady,” the speaker said to cheers in the room. “But, I tell you, I would be very proud and very honored to have Ann Romney as the first lady or Karen Santorum as the first lady. I think that just what De Niro said is just beyond the pale and he should be ashamed of himself.”

NBC's Carrie Dann contributed to this report.

In a sign that campaign season must fully be underway, first lady Michelle Obama has joined Twitter, launching her own verified account.

The first lady -- under the handle @MichelleObama -- made her first tweet at about 8 a.m. ET, and by late morning had accumulated over 58,000 followers.

The first tweet on the account, read:

We're excited today to launch @michelleobama as a new way for you to connect with First Lady Michelle Obama and the President's campaign.

The account, though, won't be managed by Obama herself; rather, staff members at the president's re-election campaign will manage the account. Staff clarified in a second tweet that the account would be “managed by campaign staff, with any tweets from the First Lady herself signed ‘-mo.’” The account follows five campaign and White House-related accounts.

“This is just another way the first lady is reaching out to connect with people directly,” said a senior campaign staffer.

The campaign also points out that the first lady has over 6 million Facebook followers, and Twitter is just another way to communicate with people.

When a tweet from Obama appears -- there is a good chance the first lady will send out a signed tweet on Thursday -- it won't be her first ever, just the first on this account. 

Last October, Obama sent her first tweet from the @JoiningForces account to support that initiative, which is meant to support military members and their families.