* * *
While I was focused on Public Allies, Barack had settled into what was—by his standard, anyway—a period of relative tameness and predictability. He was teaching a class on racism and the law at the University of Chicago Law School and working by day at his law firm, mostly on cases involving voting rights and employment discrimination. He still sometimes ran community-organizing workshops as well, leading a couple of Friday sessions with my cohort at Public Allies. Outwardly, it seemed like a perfect existence for an intellectual, civic-minded guy in his thirties who’d flatly turned down any number of more lucrative and prestigious options in favor of his principles. He’d done it, as far as I was concerned. He’d found a noble balance. He was a lawyer, a teacher, and also an organizer. And he was soon to be a published author, too.
After returning from Bali, Barack had spent more than a year writing a second draft of his book during the hours he wasn’t at one of his jobs. He worked late at night in a small room we’d converted to a study at the rear of our apartment—a crowded, book-strewn bunker I referred to lovingly as the Hole. I’d sometimes go in, stepping over his piles of paper to sit on the ottoman in front of his chair while he worked, trying to lasso him with a joke and a smile, to tease him back from whatever far-off fields he’d been galloping through. He was good-humored about my intrusions, but only if I didn’t stay too long.
Barack, I’ve come to understand, is the sort of person who needs a hole, a closed-off little warren where he can read and write undisturbed. It’s like a hatch that opens directly onto the spacious skies of his brain. Time spent there seems to fuel him. In deference to this, we’ve managed to create some version of a hole inside every home we’ve ever lived in—any quiet corner or alcove will do. To this day, when we arrive at a rental house in Hawaii or on Martha’s Vineyard, Barack goes off looking for an empty room that can serve as the vacation hole. There, he can flip between the six or seven books he’s reading simultaneously and toss his newspapers on the floor. For him, the Hole is a kind of sacred high place, where insights are birthed and clarity comes to visit. For me, it’s an off-putting and disorderly mess. One requirement has always been that the Hole, wherever it is, have a door so that I can shut it. For obvious reasons.
Dreams from My Father was published, finally, in the summer of 1995. It got good reviews yet sold only modestly, but that was okay. The important thing was that Barack had managed to process his life story, snapping together the disparate pieces of his Afro-Kansan-Indonesian-Hawaiian-Chicagoan identity, writing himself into a sort of wholeness this way. I was proud of him. Through the narrative, he’d made a kind of literary peace with his phantom father. The work to get there had been one-sided, of course, with Barack alone trying to fill every gap and understand every mystery the senior Obama had ever created. But this was also in keeping with how he’d always done it anyway. Since the time he was a boy, I realized, he’d tried to carry everything all on his own.
* * *
With the book finished, there was new space in his life, and—also in keeping with who he’d always been—Barack felt compelled to fill it immediately. On the personal side, he’d been coping with difficult news: His mother, Ann, had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer and had moved from Jakarta back to Honolulu for treatment. As far as we knew, she was getting good medical care, and the chemotherapy seemed to be working. Both Maya and Toot were helping look after her in Hawaii, and Barack checked in often. But her diagnosis had come late, after the cancer had advanced, and it was difficult to know what would happen. I knew this weighed heavily on Barack’s mind.
In Chicago, meanwhile, the political chatter was starting to kick up again. Mayor Daley had been elected to a third term in the spring of 1995, and now everyone was gearing up for the 1996 election, in which Illinois would select a new U.S. senator and President Clinton would make his bid for a second term. More scandalously, we had a sitting U.S. congressman under investigation for sex crimes, leaving an opening for a new Democratic contender in the state’s Second District, which included much of Chicago’s South Side. A popular state senator named Alice Palmer, who represented Hyde Park and South Shore and whom Barack had gotten to know while working on Project VOTE!, had begun saying privately that she intended to run for it. Which, in turn, would leave her state senate seat vacant, opening up the possibility that Barack could run for it.
Was he interested? Would he run?
I couldn’t have known it then, but these questions would come to dominate the next decade of our lives, pulsing like a drumbeat behind almost everything we did. Would he? Could he? Was he? Should he? But ahead of these always came another question, posed by Barack himself, preliminary and supposedly preemptive when it came to running for office of any sort. The first time he asked it was on the day he’d let me know about Alice Palmer and her open seat and this notion he had that maybe he could be not just a lawyer/professor/organizer/author but all those things plus a state legislator as well: “What do you think about it, Miche?”
For me, the answer was never actually all that tough to come up with. I didn’t think it was a great idea for Barack to run for office. My specific reasoning might have varied slightly each time the question came back around, but my larger stance would hold, like a sequoia rooted in the ground, though clearly you can see that it stopped absolutely nothing.
In the case of the Illinois senate in 1996, my reasoning went like this: I didn’t much appreciate politicians and therefore didn’t relish the idea of my husband becoming one. Most of what I knew about state politics came from what I read in the newspaper, and none of it seemed especially good or productive. My friendship with Santita Jackson had given me a sense that politicians were often required to be away from home. In general, I thought of lawmakers almost like armored tortoises, leather-skinned, slow moving, thick with self-interest. Barack was too earnest, too full of valiant plans, in my opinion, to abide by the hardscrabble, drag-it-out rancor that went on inside the domed capitol downstate in Springfield.
In my heart, I just believed there were better ways for a good person to have an impact. Quite honestly, I thought he’d get eaten alive.
Already, however, there was a counterargument brewing in the recesses of my own conscience. If Barack believed he could do something in politics, who was I to get in his way? Who was I to stomp on the idea before he’d even tried it? After all, he was the lone person who had waved me forward when I wanted to leave my law career, who’d had his concerns about my going to city hall but supported me nonetheless, and who right now was working multiple jobs, partly to compensate for the pay cut I’d taken to become a full-time do-gooder at Public Allies. In our six years together, he hadn’t once doubted my instincts or my capabilities. The refrain had always been the same: Don’t worry. You can do this. We’ll figure it out.
And so I gave my approval to his first run for office, larding it with a bit of wifely caution. “I think you’ll be frustrated,” I warned. “If you end up getting elected, you’re gonna go down there and nothing will get accomplished, no matter how hard you try. It’ll drive you crazy.”