To me, the young people managing our field offices represented the promise of the coming generation of leaders. They weren’t jaded, and now they’d been galvanized and united. They were connecting voters more directly to their democracy, whether through the field office down the street or a website through which they could organize their own meetings and phone banks. As Barack often said, what we were doing wasn’t just about a single election. It was about making politics better for the future—less money-driven, more accessible, and ultimately more hopeful. Even if we didn’t end up winning, we were making progress that mattered. One way or another, their work would count.
* * *
As the weather began to turn cold again, Barack knew he had basically one last chance to change up the race in Iowa, and that was by making a strong showing at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner, an annual Democratic ritual in every state. In Iowa, during a presidential election, it was held in early November, about eight weeks ahead of the January caucuses, and covered by the national media. The premise was that every candidate gave a speech—with no notes and no teleprompter—and also tried to bring along as many supporters as possible. It was, in essence, a giant and competitive pep rally.
For months, the cable news commentators had doubted that Iowans would stand up for Barack at caucus time, insinuating that as dynamic and unusual a candidate as he was, he still wouldn’t manage to convert the enthusiasm into votes. The crowd at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner was our answer to this. About three thousand of our supporters had driven in from all over the state, showing that we were both organized and active—stronger than anyone thought.
Onstage that night, John Edwards took a shot at Clinton, speaking in veiled terms about sincerity and trustworthiness being important. Grinning, Joe Biden acknowledged the impressive and noisy turnout of Obama supporters with a sardonic “Hello, Chicago!” Hillary, who was fighting a cold, also used the opportunity to go after Barack. “？‘Change’ is just a word,” she said, “if you don’t have the strength and experience to make it happen.”
Barack was the last to speak that night, delivering a rousing defense of his central message—that our country had arrived at a defining moment, a chance to step beyond not just the fear and failures of the Bush administration but the polarized way politics had been waged long before, including, of course, during the Clinton administration. “I don’t want to spend the next year or the next four years refighting the same fights that we had in the 1990s,” he said. “I don’t want to pit Red America against Blue America, I want to be the president of the United States of America.”
The auditorium thundered. I watched from the floor with huge pride.
“America, our moment is now,” Barack said. “Our moment is now.”
His performance that night gave the campaign exactly what it needed, catapulting him forward in the race. He took the lead in about half the Iowa polls and was only gaining steam as the caucuses approached.
In the days after Christmas, with just a week or so left in the Iowa campaign, it seemed as if half of the South Side had migrated to the deep freeze of Des Moines. My mother and Mama Kaye showed up. My brother and Kelly came, bringing their kids. Sam Kass was there. Valerie, who’d joined the campaign earlier in the fall as one of Barack’s advisers, was there, along with Susan and my posse of girlfriends and their husbands and children. I was touched when colleagues from the hospital showed up, friends of ours from Sidley & Austin, law professors who’d taught with Barack. And, in step with the use-every-moment ethic of the campaign, they all signed on to help make the final push, reporting to a local field office, knocking on doors in zero-degree weather, talking up Barack, and reminding people to caucus. The campaign was further reinforced by hundreds of others who’d traveled to Iowa from around the country for the final week, staying in the spare bedrooms of local supporters, heading out each day into even the smallest towns and down the most tucked away of gravel roads.
I myself was barely present in Des Moines, doing five or six events a day that kept me moving back and forth across the state, traveling in a rented van with Melissa and Katie, driven by a rotating crew of volunteers. Barack was out doing the same, his voice beginning to grow hoarse.
Regardless of how many miles we had to cover, I made sure to be back at the Residence Inn in West Des Moines, our home-base hotel, each night in time for Malia and Sasha’s eight o’clock bedtime. They, of course, barely seemed to notice I wasn’t around, having been surrounded by cousins and friends and babysitters all day long, playing games in the hotel room and going on excursions around town. One night, I opened the door, hoping to flop on the bed for a few moments of silence, only to find our room strewn with kitchen utensils. There were rolling pins on the bedspread, dirty cutting boards on the small table, kitchen shears on the floor. The lamp shades and the television screen were covered with a light dusting of…was that flour?
“Sam taught us to make pasta!” Malia announced. “We got a little carried away.”
I laughed. I’d been worried about how the girls would handle their first Christmas break away from their great-grandmother in Hawaii. But blessedly, a bag of flour in Des Moines appeared to be a fine substitute for a beach towel in Waikiki.
Several days later, a Thursday, the caucuses arrived. Barack and I dropped into a downtown Des Moines food court over lunch and later made visits to various caucus sites to greet as many voters as we could. Late that evening, we joined a group of friends and family at dinner, thanking them for their support during what had been a nutty eleven months since the announcement in Springfield. I left the meal early to return to my hotel room in time to prepare, win or lose, for Barack’s speech later that night. Within moments, Katie and Melissa burst in with fresh news from the campaign’s war room: “We won!”
We were wild with joy, shouting so loudly that the Secret Service rapped on our door to make sure something wasn’t wrong.
On one of the coldest nights of the year, a record number of Iowans had fanned out to their local caucuses, almost double the turnout from four years earlier. Barack had won among whites, blacks, and young people. More than half of the attendees had never participated in a caucus before, and that group likely helped secure Barack’s victory. The cable news anchors had finally made their way to Iowa and were now singing the praises of this political wunderkind who’d comfortably bested the Clinton machine as well as a former vice presidential nominee.
That night at Barack’s victory speech, as the four of us—Barack, me, Malia, Sasha—stood onstage at Hy-Vee Hall, I felt great, even a little chastened. Maybe, I thought to myself, everything Barack had been talking about for all those years really was possible. All those drives to Springfield, all his frustrations about not making a big enough impact, all his idealism, his unusual and earnest belief that people were capable of moving past the things that divided them, that in the end politics could work—maybe he’d been right all along.
We’d accomplished something historic, something monumental—not just Barack, not just me, but Melissa and Katie, and Plouffe, Axelrod, and Valerie, and every young staffer, every volunteer, every teacher and farmer and retiree and high schooler who stood up that night for something new.