My husband was a senator, but somehow people seemed to want to vault right over that. Instead, everyone was keen to know whether he would make a run for president in 2008. There was no shaking the question. Every reporter asked it. Nearly every person who approached him on the street asked it. My colleagues at the hospital would stand in my doorway and casually drop the question, probing for some bit of early news. Even Malia, who was six and a half on the day she put on a pink velvet dress and stood next to Barack as he was sworn in to the Senate by Dick Cheney, wanted to know. Unlike many of the others, though, our first grader was wise enough to sense how premature it all seemed.
“Daddy, are you gonna try to be president?” she’d asked. “Don’t you think maybe you should be vice president or something first?”
I was with Malia on this matter. As a lifelong pragmatist, I would always counsel a slow approach, the methodical checking of boxes. I was a natural-born fan of the long and judicious wait. In this regard, I felt better anytime I heard Barack pushing back at his inquisitors with an aw-shucks kind of modesty, batting away questions about the presidency, saying that the only thing he was planning was to put his head down and work hard in the Senate. He often reminded people that he was just a low-ranking member of the minority party, a backbench player if there ever was one. And, he would sometimes add, he had two kids he needed to raise.
But the drum was already beating. It was hard to make it stop. Barack was writing what would become The Audacity of Hope—thinking through his beliefs and his vision for the country, threshing them into words on his legal pads late at night. He really was content, he told me, to stay where he was, building his influence over time, awaiting his turn to speak inside the deliberative cacophony of the Senate, but then a storm arrived.
Hurricane Katrina blasted the Gulf Coast of the United States late in August 2005, overwhelming the levees in New Orleans, swamping lowlying regions, stranding people—black people, mostly—on the rooftops of their destroyed homes. The aftermath was horrific, with media reports showing hospitals without backup power, distraught families herded into the Superdome, emergency workers hamstrung by a lack of supplies. In the end, some eighteen hundred people died, and more than half a million others were displaced, a tragedy exacerbated by the ineptitude of the federal government’s response. It was a wrenching exposure of our country’s structural divides, most especially the intense, lopsided vulnerability of African Americans and poor people of all races when things got rough.
Where was hope now?
I watched the Katrina coverage with a knot in my stomach, knowing that if a disaster hit Chicago, many of my aunts and uncles, cousins and neighbors, would have suffered a similar fate. Barack’s reaction was no less emotional. A week after the hurricane, he flew to Houston to join former president George H. W. Bush, along with Bill and Hillary Clinton, who was then a colleague of his in the Senate, spending time with the tens of thousands of New Orleans evacuees who’d sought shelter in the Astrodome there. The experience kindled something in him, that nagging sense he wasn’t yet doing enough.
* * *
This was the thought I returned to a year or so later, when the drumbeat truly got loud, when the pressure on both of us felt immense. We went about our regular business, but the question of whether Barack would run for president unsettled the air around us. Could he? Will he? Should he? In the summer of 2006, poll respondents filling out open-ended questionnaires were naming him as a presidential possibility, though Hillary Clinton was decidedly the number one pick. By fall, though, Barack’s stock had begun to rise in part thanks to the publication of The Audacity of Hope and a slew of media opportunities afforded by the book tour. His poll numbers were suddenly even with or ahead of those of Al Gore and John Kerry, the Democrats’ previous two nominees—evidence of his potential. I was aware that he’d been having private conversations with friends, advisers, and prospective donors, signaling to everyone that he was mulling over the idea. But there was one conversation he avoided having, and that was with me.
He knew, of course, how I felt. We’d discussed it obliquely, around the edges of other topics. We’d lived with other people’s expectations so long that they were almost embedded in every conversation we had. Barack’s potential sat with our family at the dinner table. Barack’s potential rode along to school with the girls and to work with me. It was there even when we didn’t want it to be there, adding a strange energy to everything. From my point of view, my husband was doing plenty already. If he was going to even think about running for president, I hoped he’d take the prudent path, preparing slowly, biding his time in the Senate, and waiting until the girls were older—until 2016, maybe.
Since I’d known him, it seemed to me that Barack had always had his eyes on some far-off horizon, on his notion of the world as it should be. Just for once, I wanted him to be content with life as it was. I didn’t understand how he could look at Sasha and Malia, now five and eight, with their pigtailed hair and giggly exuberance, and feel any other way. It hurt me sometimes to think that he did.
We were riding a seesaw, the two of us, the mister on one side and the missus on the other. We lived in a nice house now, a Georgian brick home on a quiet street in the Kenwood neighborhood, with a wide porch and tall trees in the yard—exactly the kind of place Craig and I used to gape at during Sunday drives in my dad’s Buick. I thought often of my father and all he’d invested in us. I wished desperately for him to be alive, to see how things were playing out. Craig was profoundly happy now, having finally made a swerve, leaving his career in investment banking and pivoting back to his first love—basketball. After a few years as an assistant at Northwestern, he was now head coach at Brown University in Rhode Island, and he was getting married again, to Kelly McCrum, a beautiful, down-to-earth college dean of admissions from the East Coast. His two children had grown tall and confident, vibrant advertisements for what the next generation could do.
I was a senator’s wife, but beyond that, and more important, I had a career that mattered to me. Back in the spring, I’d been promoted to become a vice president at the University of Chicago Medical Center. I’d spent the past couple of years leading the development of a program called the South Side Healthcare Collaborative, which had already connected more than fifteen hundred patients who’d turned up in our Emergency Department with care providers they could see regularly, regardless of whether they could pay or not. My work felt personal. I saw black folks streaming into the ER with issues that had long been neglected—diabetic patients whose circulation issues had gone untended and who now needed a leg amputated, for example—and couldn’t help but think of every medical appointment my own father had failed to make for himself, every symptom of his MS he’d downplayed in order not to make a fuss, or cost anyone money, or generate paperwork, or to spare himself the feeling of being belittled by a wealthy white doctor.
I liked my job, and while it wasn’t perfect, I also liked my life. With Sasha about to move into elementary school, I felt as though I was at the start of a new phase, on the brink of being able to fire up my ambition again and consider a new set of goals. What would a presidential campaign do? It would hijack all that. I knew enough to understand this ahead of time. Barack and I had been through five campaigns in eleven years already, and each one had forced me to fight a bit harder to hang on to my own priorities. Each one had put a little dent in my soul and also in our marriage. A presidential run, I feared, would really bang us up. Barack would be gone far more than he was while serving in Springfield or Washington—not for half weeks, but full weeks; not for four-to eight-week stretches with recesses in between, but for months at a time. What would that do to our family? What would the publicity do to our girls?