I was enough of a veteran now to try to keep myself largely disengaged from the daily ups and downs of the race. I’d given Barack’s decision to run a wan blessing, adopting a let’s-just-get-this-out-of-the-way attitude about the whole thing. I thought maybe he’d try and fail to get into national politics and that this would then motivate him to want to try something entirely different. In an ideal world （my ideal world, anyway）， Barack would do something like become the head of a foundation, where he could have an impact on issues that mattered and also make it home for dinner at night.
We flew to Hawaii on December 23, after the legislature finally hit pause for the holiday, though it still hadn’t managed to find a resolution. But to my relief, we’d made it. Waikiki Beach was a revelation for young Malia. She tootled up and down the shoreline, kicking at the waves and exhausting herself with joy. We spent a merry, uneventful Christmas with Toot in her apartment, opening gifts and marveling at her devotion to the five-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle she had going on a card table. As it always had, Oahu’s languid green waters and cheery populace helped unhitch us from our everyday concerns, leaving us blissful and caught up in little more than the feeling of warm air on our skin and our daughter’s delight at absolutely everything. As the headlines kept reminding us, we were fast approaching the dawn of a new millennium. And we were in a lovely place to spend the final days of 1999.
All was going fine until Barack got a call from someone back in Illinois, letting him know that the senate was somewhat abruptly going back into session to finish work on the crime bill. If he intended to vote, he had something like forty-eight hours to get back to Springfield. Another clock was now ticking. With a sinking heart, I watched as Barack jumped into action, rebooking our flights to leave the following day, pulling the plug on our vacation. We had to go. We had no choice. I suppose I could’ve stayed on alone with Malia, but what would be the fun in that? I wasn’t happy with the idea of leaving, but I understood, again, this was the way of politics. The vote was an important one—the bill included new gun-control measures, which Barack had fervently supported—and it had also proven divisive enough that a single absent senator could potentially prevent the bill from passing. We were going home.
But then something unexpected happened. Overnight, Malia spiked a high fever. She’d ended the day as an exuberant surf kicker but was now, not even twelve hours later, a hot and listless heap of toddler-shaped misery, glassy-eyed and wailing in pain, but still too young to tell us anything specific about it. We gave her Tylenol, but it didn’t help much. She was tugging at one ear, which made me suspect it was infected. The reality of what this meant started to set in. We sat on the bed, watching Malia drift into a restless, uncomfortable sleep. We were only a matter of hours now from our flight home. I saw the worry deepening on Barack’s face, caught as he was in the crosscurrents of his opposing obligations. What we were about to decide went far beyond the moment at hand.
“She can’t fly,” I said, “obviously.”
“I know.”
“We have to switch the flights again.”
“I know.”
Unspoken was the fact that he could just go. He could walk out the door and catch a cab to the airport and still make it to Springfield in time to vote. He could leave his sick daughter and fretting wife halfway across the Pacific and go join his colleagues. It was an option. But I wasn’t going to martyr myself by suggesting it. I was vulnerable, I’ll admit, swimming in the uncertainty of what was going on with Malia. What if the fever got worse? What if she needed a hospital? Meanwhile, around the world, there were more paranoid people than us readying fallout shelters, hoarding cash and jugs of water just in case the worst of the Y2K predictions came true and the power and communication grids went on the fritz due to buggy computer networks unable to register the new millennium. It wasn’t going to happen, but still. Was he really thinking about leaving?
It turns out he wasn’t. He didn’t. He would never.
I didn’t listen to the call he made to his legislative aide that day, explaining that he’d miss the crime-bill vote. I didn’t care. I was just focused on our girl. And as soon as Barack got off that call, he was, too. She was our little human. We owed everything to her first.
In the end, the year 2000 arrived without incident. After a couple of days of rest and some antibiotics, what indeed had turned out to be a nasty ear infection for Malia cleared up, returning our toddler to her normal bouncy state. Life would go on. It always did. On another perfect blue-sky day in Honolulu, we boarded a plane and flew home to Chicago, back into the chill of winter and into what for Barack was shaping up to be a political disaster.
* * *
The crime bill had failed to pass the state legislature, losing by five votes. For me, there was no math to do: Even if Barack had made it back from Hawaii in time, his vote almost certainly wouldn’t have changed the outcome. Still, he took a beating for his absence. His opponents in the congressional primary pounced on the opportunity to depict Barack as some kind of bon vivant lawmaker who’d been on vacation—in Hawaii, no less—and hadn’t deigned to come back to vote on something as significant as gun control.
Bobby Rush, the incumbent congressman, had tragically lost a family member to gun violence in Chicago only a few months earlier, which cast Barack in an even poorer light. Nobody seemed to register that he was from Hawaii, that he’d been visiting his widowed grandmother, or that his daughter had fallen ill. All that mattered was the vote. The press hammered on it for weeks. The Chicago Tribune’s editorial page criticized the group of senators who hadn’t managed to vote that day, calling them “a bunch of gutless sheep.” Barack’s other opponent, a fellow state senator named Donne Trotter, took his own shots, telling a reporter that “to use your child as an excuse for not going to work also shows poorly on the individual’s character.”
I wasn’t accustomed to any of this. I wasn’t used to having opponents or seeing my family life scrutinized in the news. Never before had I heard my husband’s character questioned like that. It hurt to think that a good decision—the right decision, as far as I was concerned—seemed to be costing him so much. In a column he wrote for our neighborhood’s weekly newspaper, Barack calmly defended his choice to stay with me and Malia in Hawaii. “We hear a lot of talk from politicians about the importance of family values,” he wrote. “Hopefully, you will understand when your state senator tries to live up to those values as best he can.”
It seemed that with the fickleness of a child’s earache, Barack’s three years of work in the state senate had been all but wiped away. He’d led an overhaul of state campaign finance laws that ushered in stricter ethics rules for elected officials. He’d fought for tax cuts and credits for the working poor and was focused on cutting prescription drug costs for senior citizens. He’d earned the trust of legislators from all parts of the state, Republican and Democrat alike. But none of the real stuff seemed to matter now. The race had devolved into a series of low blows.
From the start of the campaign, Barack’s opponents and their supporters had been propagating unseemly ideas meant to gin up fear and mistrust among African American voters, suggesting that Barack was part of an agenda cooked up by the white residents of Hyde Park—read, white Jews—to foist their preferred candidate on the South Side. “Barack is viewed in part to be the white man in blackface in our community,” Donne Trotter told the Chicago Reader. Speaking to the same publication, Bobby Rush said, “He went to Harvard and became an educated fool. We’re not impressed with these folks with these eastern elite degrees.” He’s not one of us, in other words. Barack wasn’t a real black man, like them—someone who spoke like that, looked like that, and read that many books could never be.