Michelle Obama Visits Winston-Salem State University

As Michelle Obama walked onto the floor of the C.E. Gaines Center, the crowd stood with signs waving, voices cheering and cell phones recording.

"Fire it up, ready to go," chanted the crowd.

Nearly 2,000 people packed in to the Gaines Center at Winston-Salem State to hear the wife of Democratic Presidential hopeful Barack Obama speak at Winston-Salem State on April 8.

Obama spoke to the audience about a wide-range of issues, including healthcare, war, and education during her hour-long speech. Much of her speech was spent connecting the figurative 'rising bar' that her husband has experienced during his campaign to the rising bar for what she called "regular folk."

"We were told to settle down because Barack was supposed to win in South Carolina. We won every county in the state but two," she said. "We've moved into Super Tuesday and we were supposed to be done.

"Regular folks are finding they are struggling to reach an ever-moving bar," she said."Folks don't mind getting up early to go to work. "They just want to know if the bar will be still. They want to know if they get sick they won't go bankrupt."

Obama said that the American people were ready for a change Obama said that she and her husband could identify with the concerns of college students because they just recently paid off their student loans.

"Imagine a president just a few years out of paying off (college) debt," Obama said."I heard about that Dick Cheyney relationship and I was like,'Maybe he can help," she joked, "But then he was broke."

Obama also talked about bringing people together instead of dividing them.

"We need a fundamentally different type of leadership than I've seen in my lifetime," Obama said. "And the only person in this race that has a chance of putting this country together is is Barack Obama.

The speech was attended by community members and politicians, as well as students. Lines began forming around noon, two and a half hours before the speech was to begin, and several hundred people were turned away. Officials estimate that 2,000 were in attendance.

Nearly 20 students volunteered and helped transform the Gaines center from a gym to a political arena.

Valencia Thomas, a junior, was one of those volunteer. She said that she wished more people could have been able to get in.

"I thought it was great, I'd rather have too many people than not enough.

Junior Stanley Johnson also volunteered and he encouraged others to be involved with Obama's campaign.

"This is our movement," he said. "This is young students our age, and we have to be the ones leading it.