But this week’s coverage has an over-the-top feel. If we didn’t know Obama flew abroad on Air Force One, we might suspect she had walked across the Atlantic. The European trip has boosted her to an even more rarefied zone, with pundits debating whether she was wrong to have breached protocol by throwing an arm lightly around Queen Elizabeth II.

“I find it odd that President Obama goes to Europe and all the reporting I’m hearing is about how Michelle looks in J.Crew,” says Eric Deggans, media critic for the St. Petersburg Times. “I feel like I’m drowning in it.” For American reporters, he says, “if she’s wowing the British press, that’s the story. Don’t tell me how cool you think she is.”…

The delicious coverage continued yesterday when Obama spoke of her upbringing on Chicago’s South Side and CNN asked its hyperactive London correspondent, Richard Quest, for his reaction: “Michelle Obama is an absolutely extraordinary woman in an extraordinarily ordinary way. . . . She’s taken the city by storm.”