The crowd was looking good, I was told. People had started gathering before dawn. The plan was for Barack to walk out first, and then the girls and I would join him a few moments later on the platform, climbing a few stairs before turning to wave at the crowd. I’d made it clear already that we would not stay onstage for his twenty-minute address. It was too much to ask two little kids to sit still and pretend to be interested. If they looked at all bored, if either one sneezed or started fidgeting, it would do nothing for Barack’s cause. The same went for me. I knew the stereotype I was meant to inhabit, the immaculately groomed doll-wife with the painted-on smile, gazing bright-eyed at her husband, as if hanging on every word. This was not me and never would be. I could be supportive, but I couldn’t be a robot.
Following the briefing and a moment of prayer with Reverend Wright, Barack walked out to greet the audience, his appearance met with a roar I could hear from inside the capitol. I went back to find Sasha and Malia, beginning to feel truly nervous. “Are you girls ready?” I said.
“Mommy, I’m hot,” Sasha said, tearing off her pink hat.
“Oh, sweetie, you’ve got to keep that on. It’s freezing outside.” I grabbed the hat and fitted it back on her head.
“But we’re not outside, we’re inside,” she said.
This was Sasha, our round-faced little truth teller. I couldn’t argue with her logic. Instead, I glanced at one of the staffers nearby, trying to telegraph a message to a young person who almost certainly didn’t have kids of her own: Dear God, if we don’t get this thing started now, we’re going to lose these two.
In an act of mercy, she nodded and motioned us toward the entrance. It was time.
I’d been to a fair number of Barack’s political events by now and had seen him interact many times with big groups of constituents. I’d been at campaign kickoffs, fund-raisers, and election-night parties. I’d seen audiences filled with old friends and longtime supporters. But Springfield was something else entirely.
My nerves left me the moment we stepped onstage. I was focused completely on Sasha, making sure she was smiling and not about to trip over her own booted feet. “Look up, sweetie,” I said, holding her hand. “Smile!” Malia was out ahead of us already, her chin high and her smile giant as she caught up with her father and waved. It wasn’t until we ascended the stairs that I was finally able to take in the crowd, or at least try to. The rush was enormous. More than fifteen thousand people, it turned out, had come that day. They were spread out in a three-hundred-degree panorama, spilling out from the capitol, enveloping us with their enthusiasm.
I’d never been one who’d choose to spend a Saturday at a political rally. The appeal of standing in an open gym or high school auditorium to hear lofty promises and platitudes never made much sense to me. Why, I wondered, were all these people here? Why would they layer on extra socks and stand for hours in the cold? I could imagine people bundling up and waiting to hear a band whose every lyric they could sing or enduring a snowy Super Bowl for a team they’d followed since childhood. But politics? This was unlike anything I’d experienced before.
It began dawning on me that we were the band. We were the team about to take the field. What I felt more than anything was a sudden sense of responsibility. We owed something to each one of these people. We were asking for an investment of their faith, and now we had to deliver on what they’d brought us, carrying that enthusiasm through twenty months and fifty states and right into the White House. I hadn’t believed it was possible, but maybe now I did. This was the call-and-response of democracy, I realized, a contract forged person by person. You show up for us, and we’ll show up for you. I had fifteen thousand more reasons to want Barack to win.
I was fully committed now. Our whole family was committed, even if it felt a little scary. I couldn’t yet begin to imagine what lay ahead. But there we were—out there—the four of us standing before the crowd and the cameras, naked but for the coats on our backs and a slightly too big pink hat on a tiny head.
* * *
Hillary Clinton was a serious and formidable opponent. In poll after poll, she held a commanding lead among the country’s potential Democratic primary voters, with Barack lagging ten or twenty points behind, and Edwards sitting a few points behind Barack. Democratic voters knew the Clintons, and they were hungry for a win. Far fewer people could even pronounce my husband’s name. All of us—Barack and I as well as the campaign team—understood long before his announcement that regardless of his political gifts a black man named Barack Hussein Obama would always be a long shot.
It was a hurdle we faced within the black community, too. Similar to how I’d initially felt about Barack’s candidacy, plenty of black folks couldn’t bring themselves to believe that my husband had a real chance of winning. Many had yet to believe that a black man could win in predominantly white areas, which meant they’d often go for the safer bet, the next-best thing. One facet of the challenge for Barack was to shift black voters away from their long-standing allegiance to Bill Clinton, who’d shown unusual ease with the African American community and formed many connections there as a result. Barack had already built goodwill with a diverse range of constituents throughout Illinois, including in the rural white farm areas in the southern part of the state. He’d already proven that he could reach all demographics, but many people didn’t yet understand this about him.
The scrutiny of Barack would be extra intense, the lens always magnified. We knew that as a black candidate he couldn’t afford any sort of stumble. He’d have to do everything twice as well. For Barack, and for every candidate not named Clinton, the only hope for winning the nomination was to raise a lot of money and start spending it fast, hoping that a strong performance in the earliest primaries would give the campaign enough momentum to slingshot past the Clinton machine.
Our hopes were pinned on Iowa. We had to win it or otherwise stand down. Mostly rural and more than 90 percent white, it was a curious state to serve as the nation’s political bellwether and was maybe not the most obvious place for a black guy based in Chicago to try to define himself, but this was the reality. Iowa went first in presidential primaries and had since 1972. Members of both parties cast their votes at precinct-level meetings—caucuses—in the middle of winter, and the whole nation paid attention. If you got yourself noticed in Des Moines and Dubuque, your candidacy automatically mattered in Orlando and L.A. We knew, too, that if we made a good showing in Iowa, it would send the message to black voters nationally that it was okay to start believing. The fact that Barack was a senator in neighboring Illinois, giving him some name recognition and a familiarity with the area’s broader issues, had convinced David Plouffe that we had at least a small advantage in Iowa—one upon which we would now try to capitalize.
This meant that I would be going to Iowa almost weekly, catching early-morning United Airlines flights out of O’Hare, making three or four campaign stops in a day. I told Plouffe early on that while I was happy to campaign, part of the deal had to be that they’d get me back to Chicago in time to put the girls to bed at night. My mother had agreed to cut down her hours at work so that she could be around for the kids more when I was traveling. Barack, too, would be logging many hours in Iowa, though we’d rarely show up there—or anywhere—together. I was now what they call a surrogate for the candidate, a standin who could meet with voters at a community center in Iowa City while he campaigned in Cedar Falls or raised money in New York. Only when it really seemed important would the campaign staff put the two of us in the same room.