Michelle Still Wowing 'Em In Europe

"Chic to Chic" is how one newspaper in London headlined the meeting between Michelle Obama and France's first lady, former model and occasional pop star Carla Bruni Sarkozy, after they greeted each toher with the traditional pecks on the other's cheeks.

Indeed, reports CBS News correspondent Richard Roth, the tabloids are buzzing non-stop about Mrs. Obama.

But, he says, the notion of a style competition between the two presidential spouses has given way, in much of Europe's press, to a tacit admission that it was a manufactured contest: both women are being described as winners.

For Mrs. Obama, Roth adds, it amounts to being on a roll: After winning hearts in Britain, where the protocol breach of an arm around the queen was forgiven, maybe even welcomed, by Buckingham Palace, and where the emotion in her words is still winning praise, days after she told a group of schoolgirls, "All of you are jewels, and you touch my heart."

"She was like. 'Go. girl," ' one of the youngsters said, "and I was like. 'Yeay!" '

Almost 50 fifty years ago, after his wife's reception in Europe, President Kennedy described himself as the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.

A first lady, said one British writer this week, "communicates on the world stage by semaphore: a powerful, but mostly silent, symbol of her nation." Michelle Obama is a natural, he said; she "charmed us all."