On all other fronts, Barack’s logic was dismayingly solid. I watched Valerie’s face as he spoke, realizing that he was quickly racking up points with her, that he had an answer for every “but what about?” question we could throw his way. I knew he was making sense, even as I fought off the urge to tally up all the additional hours he’d spend away from us now, not to mention the specter of a move to D.C. Though we’d argued over the drain of his political career on our family for years now, I did love and trust Barack. He was already a man with two families, his attention divided between me and the girls and his 200,000 or so South Side constituents. Would sharing him with the state of Illinois really be all that different? I couldn’t know one way or another, but I also couldn’t bring myself to stand in the way of his aspiration, that thing always tugging at him to try for more.
And so that day, we’d made a deal. Valerie agreed to be the finance chair for Barack’s Senate campaign. A number of our friends agreed to donate time and money to the effort. I signed off on all of it, with one important caveat, repeated out loud so that everyone could hear it: If he lost, he’d move on from politics altogether and find a different sort of job. If it didn’t work out on Election Day, this would be the end.
Really and for real, this would be the end.
What came next for Barack, though, was a series of lucky twists. First, Peter Fitzgerald decided not to run for reelection, clearing the field for challengers and relative newcomers like my husband. Then, somewhat oddly, both the Democratic front-runner in the primary and the ensuing Republican nominee became embroiled in scandals involving their ex-wives. With just a few months remaining before the election, Barack didn’t even have a Republican opponent.
To be sure, he’d been running an excellent campaign, having learned plenty from his failed congressional run. He’d beaten out seven primary opponents and earned more than half the vote to win the nomination. Traveling the state and interacting with potential constituents, he was the same man I knew at home—funny and charming, smart and prepared. His overly verbose answers to questions at town-hall forums and campaign debates seemed only to drive home the point that he belonged on the Senate floor. But still, effort notwithstanding, Barack’s path to the Senate seemed paved in four-leaf clover.
All this, too, was before John Kerry invited him to give the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention being held in Boston. Kerry, then a senator from Massachusetts, was locked in a back-and-forth fight for the presidency with George W. Bush.
My husband was, in all of this, a complete nobody—a humble state legislator who’d never stood before a crowd like the one of fifteen thousand or more that would be gathered in Boston. He’d never used a teleprompter, never been live on prime-time television. He was a newcomer, a black man in what was historically a white man’s business, surfacing from obscurity with a weird name and odd backstory, hoping to strike a chord with the common Democrat. As the network pundits would later acknowledge, choosing Barack Obama to speak to an audience of millions had been a mighty gamble.
And yet, in his curious and roundabout way, he seemed destined for exactly this moment. I knew because I’d seen up close how his mind churned nonstop. Over years, I’d watched him inhale books, newspapers, and ideas, sparking to life anytime he spoke with someone who offered a shard of new experience or knowledge. He’d stowed every piece of it. What he was building, I see now, was a vision—and not a small one, either. It was the very thing I’d had to create room for in our shared life, to coexist with, even if reluctantly. It aggravated me sometimes no end, but it was also what I could never disavow in Barack. He’d been working at this thing, quietly and meticulously, as long as I’d known him. And now maybe the size of the audience would finally match the scope of what he believed to be possible. He’d been ready for that call. All he had to do was speak.
* * *
“Must’ve been a good speech” became my refrain afterward. It was a joke between me and Barack, one I repeated often and with irony following that night—July 27, 2004.
I’d left the girls at home with my mother and flown to be with him in Boston for the speech, standing in the wings at the convention center as Barack stepped into the hot glare of the stage lights and into view of all those millions of people. He was a little nervous and so was I, though we were both determined not to show it. This was how Barack operated anyway. The more pressure he was under, the calmer he seemed to get. He’d written his remarks over the course of a couple of weeks, working on them in between Illinois senate votes. He memorized his words and rehearsed them carefully, to the point where he wouldn’t actually need the teleprompter unless his nerves got triggered and his mind went blank. But that wasn’t at all what happened. Barack looked out at the audience and into the TV cameras, and as if kick-starting some internal engine, he just smiled and began to roll.
He spoke for seventeen minutes that night, explaining who he was and where he came from—his grandfather a GI who’d joined Patton’s Army, his grandmother who’d worked on an assembly line during the war, his father who’d grown up herding goats in Kenya, his parents’ improbable love, their faith in what a good education could do for a son who wasn’t born rich or well connected. Earnestly and expertly, he cast himself not as an outsider but rather as a literal embodiment of the American story. He reminded the audience that a country couldn’t be carved up simply into red and blue, that we were united by a common humanity, compelled to care for the whole of society. He called for hope over cynicism. He spoke with hope, projected hope, almost sang with it, really.
It was seventeen minutes of Barack’s deft and easy way with words, seventeen minutes of his deep, dazzling optimism on display. By the time he finished, with a last plug for John Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards, the crowd was on its feet and roaring, the applause booming in the rafters. I walked out onto the stage, stepping into the blinding lights wearing high heels and a white suit, to give Barack a congratulatory hug before turning to wave with him at the whipped-up audience.
The energy was electric, the sound absolutely deafening. That Barack was a good person with a big mind and serious faith in democracy was no longer any sort of secret. I was proud of what he’d done, though it didn’t surprise me. This was the guy I’d married. I’d known his capabilities all along. Looking back, I think it was then that I quietly began to let go of the idea that there was any reversing his course, that he’d ever belong solely to me and the girls. I could hear it almost in the pulse of the applause. More of this, more of this, more of this.
The media response to Barack’s speech was hyperbolic. “I’ve just seen the first black president,” Chris Matthews declared to his fellow commentators on NBC. A front-page headline in the Chicago Tribune the next day read simply, “The Phenom.” Barack’s cell phone began to ring nonstop. Cable pundits were dubbing him a “rock star” and an “overnight success,” as if he hadn’t spent years working up to that moment onstage, as if the speech had created him instead of the other way around. Still, the speech was the beginning of something new, not just for him, but for us, our whole family. We were swept into another level of exposure and into the swift current of other people’s expectations.