Michelle Obama delivered an intensely personal plea for the man she met when they were ‘so young, so in love, and so in debt’ to be re-elected because ‘change is hard, and change is slow, and it never happens all at once’. The First Lady, whose eyes welled with tears by the end of her speech, steered clear of party politics but spoke at length about her and her husband’s humble origins to make an implicit contrast with Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, who was born into wealth and is portrayed by Democrats as an unfeeling plutocrat. Her high-stakes speech came as the latest CNN/ORC poll showed that Obama and Romney were deadlocked at 48 percentage points each as the 2012 election campaign entered the two-month long home straight.