He took her for lunch by a fountain, then for a walk and a Spike Lee movie. He was, she insists, "showing me all facets of his character": hip, cultural, sensitive, patient. The sort of guy, in short, who two decades later can get you to recount the intimate story of your date for just a few hundred million close friends on YouTube to boost his chances of being re-elected president.
Michelle and Barack Obama's new campaign film is sugary enough to have Brits reaching for the insulin, but it would be a mistake to think ourselves immune to the new romcom politics. After all, our own leaders are increasingly desperate to show us their "facets" too.
David Cameron has claimed to recall his wedding and honeymoon night "pretty much minute by minute", in what was clearly meant to be a more romantic and less graphic statement than it sounds: the couple, we're told, still regularly share "date nights" over a boxset. Not to be outdone, Nick Clegg's wife Miriam has just revealed that she knew he was the one when he joined her Sevillan dancing classes.
And, as ever, it's the Blairs who originally set the pace, telling a tabloid in 2005 that the prime minister could do it "at least" five times a night. As humiliating attempts to woo Sun readers go, it almost makes you long for the old-fashioned days of letting Rupert Murdoch take over TV stations.
This compulsive oversharing seems designed to make politicians sound more human. But, in fact, it does the opposite, painting our leaders not as ordinary but extraordinary: capable of running the world, yet still finding time to play dewy-eyed newlyweds.
Normal couples can barely remember what happened on their first date, unless it went so disastrously that it has since become a dinner-party anecdote. Normal couples with four children and two exhausting jobs have sex more like five times a year than five times a night: and even the happiest of normal couples rarely invite the nation to join them on a "date" (the Obama video is plugging a fundraising dinner with them). Which may be why normal women sneakily yearn for the return of the Michelle Obama who once affectionately described her husband as "snore-y and stinky" in the mornings. It seems they're in for a long wait.
