Barack was no longer just trying to win the support of Democratic voters; he was now courting all of America. Following the Iowa caucuses, in a process that was at times as punishing and ugly as it was heartening and defining, Barack and Hillary Clinton had spent the winter and spring of 2008 slogging it out in every state and territory, battling vote by hard-earned vote for the privilege of becoming a boundary-breaking candidate. （John Edwards, Joe Biden, and the other contenders had all dropped out by the end of January.） The two candidates had tested each other mightily, with Barack opening up a small but ultimately decisive lead midway through February. “Is he president now?” Malia would ask me sometimes over the months that followed as we stood on one stage or another, with celebratory music blasting around us, her young mind unable to grasp anything but the larger purpose.
“Okay, now is he president?”
“No, honey, not yet.”
It wasn’t until June that Hillary acknowledged that she lacked the delegate count to win. Her delay in conceding had wasted precious campaign resources, preventing Barack from being able to reorient the battle toward his Republican opponent, John McCain. The longtime Arizona senator had become the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee all the way back in March and was running as a maverick war hero with a history of bipartisanship and deep experience in national security, the implication being that he’d lead differently than George W. Bush.
We were in Butte on the Fourth of July with twin purposes, because nearly everything had a twin purpose now. Barack had spent the previous four days campaigning in Missouri, Ohio, Colorado, and North Dakota. There was little time to waste by having him come off the campaign trail to celebrate Malia’s birthday, and he couldn’t slip out of voters’ view on what was the country’s most symbolic holiday. So instead we flew to him, for what would be a sort of attempt to have it both ways—a family day spent mostly in full view of the public. Barack’s half sister Maya and her husband, Konrad, came with us, along with their daughter Suhaila, a cute little four-year-old.
Any parent of a child born on a major holiday knows that there’s already a certain line to be walked between an individual celebration and more universal festivities. The good people of Butte seemed to get it. There were “Happy Birthday Malia!” signs taped inside the windows of storefronts along Main Street. Bystanders shouted out their good wishes to her over the pounding of bass drums and flutes piping “Yankee Doodle” as our family watched the town’s Fourth of July parade from a set of bleachers. The people we met were kind to the girls and respectful to us, even when confessing that voting for any Democrat would be a half-crazy departure from tradition.
Later that day, the campaign hosted a picnic in an open field with views of the spiny mountains marking the Continental Divide. The gathering was meant to be a rally for several hundred of our local supporters as well as a kind of casual birthday celebration for Malia. I was moved by all the people who’d turned out to meet us, but at the same time I was feeling something more intimate and urgent that had nothing to do with where we were. I was struck that day by the gobsmacked tenderness that comes with being a parent, the weird telescoping of time that happens when you notice suddenly that your babies are half-grown, their limbs going from pudgy to lean, their eyes getting wise.
For me, the Fourth of July 2008 was the most significant threshold we’d crossed: Ten years ago, Barack and I had shown up on the labor and delivery floor believing that we knew a lot about the world when, truly, we hadn’t yet known a thing.
So much of the last decade had been about trying to strike a balance between my family and my work, figuring out how to be loving and present for Malia and Sasha while also trying to be decent at my job. But the axis had shifted: I was now trying to balance parenting with something altogether different and more confusing—politics, America, Barack’s quest to do something important. The magnitude of what was happening in Barack’s life, the demands of the campaign, the spotlight on our family, all seemed to be growing quickly. After the Iowa caucuses, I’d decided to take a leave of absence from my position at the hospital, knowing that it would be impossible, really, to stay on and be effective. The campaign was slowly consuming everything. I’d been too busy after Iowa to even go over and box up the things in my office or say any sort of proper good-bye. I was a full-time mother and wife now, albeit a wife with a cause and a mother who wanted to guard her kids against getting swallowed by that cause. It had been painful to step away from my work, but there was no choice: My family needed me, and that mattered more.
And so here I was at a campaign picnic in Montana, leading a group of mostly strangers in singing “Happy Birthday” to Malia, who sat smiling on the grass with a hamburger on her plate. Voters saw our daughters as sweet, I knew, and our family’s closeness as endearing. But I did think often of how all this appeared to our daughters, what their view was looking outward. I tried to tamp down any guilt. We had a real birthday party planned for the following weekend, one involving a heap of Malia’s friends sleeping over at our house in Chicago and no politics whatsoever. And that evening, we’d hold a more private gathering back at our hotel. Still, as the afternoon went on and our girls ran around the picnic grounds while Barack and I shook hands and hugged potential voters, I found myself wondering if the two of them would remember this outing as fun.
I watched Sasha and Malia these days with a new fierceness in my heart. Like me, they now had strangers calling their names, people wanting to touch them and take their pictures. Over the winter, the government had deemed me and the girls exposed enough to assign us Secret Service protection, which meant that when Sasha and Malia went to school or their summer day camp, usually driven by my mother, it was with the Secret Service tailing them in a second car.
At the picnic, each one of us had our own agent flanking us, canvassing the gathering for any sign of threat, subtly intervening if a well-wisher got overenthused and grabby. Thankfully, the girls seemed to see the agents less as guards and more as grown-up friends, new additions to the growing knot of friendly people with whom we traveled, distinguishable only by their earpieces and quiet vigilance. Sasha generally referred to them as “the secret people.”
The girls made campaigning more relaxing, if only because they weren’t much invested in the outcome. For both me and Barack, they were a relief to be around—a reminder that in the end our family meant more than any tallying of supporters or bump in the polls. Neither daughter cared much about the hubbub surrounding their dad. They weren’t focused on building a better democracy or getting to the White House. All they really wanted （really, really wanted） was a puppy. They loved playing tag or card games with campaign staff during the quieter moments and made a point of finding an ice cream shop in every new place they went. Everything else was just noise.
To this day, Malia and I still crack up about the fact that she’d been eight years old when Barack, clearly feeling some sense of responsibility, posed the question one night while he was tucking her into bed. “How would you feel if Daddy ran for president?” he’d asked. “Do you think that’s a good idea?”