“Sure, Daddy!” she’d replied, pecking him on the cheek. His decision to run would alter nearly everything about her life after that, but how was she to know? She’d just rolled over then and drifted off to sleep.
That day in Butte, we visited the local mining museum, had a water-pistol battle, and kicked a soccer ball around in the grass. Barack gave his stump speech and shook the usual number of hands, but he also got to anchor himself back inside the unit of us. Sasha and Malia climbed all over him, giggling and regaling him with their thoughts. I saw the lightness in his smile, admiring him for his ability to block out the peripheral distractions and just be a dad when he had the chance. He chatted with Maya and Konrad and kept an arm hooked around my shoulder as we walked from place to place.
We were never alone. We had staff around us, agents guarding us, members of the press waiting for interviews, onlookers snapping pictures from a distance. But this was now our normal. Over the course of the campaign, our days had become so programmed that we’d watched our privacy and autonomy slowly slip away, both Barack and I handing nearly every aspect of our lives over to a bunch of twentysomethings who were highly intelligent and capable but still couldn’t know how painful it could feel to give up control over my own life. If I needed something at the store, I had to ask someone to get it for me. If I wanted to speak to Barack, I usually had to send a request through one of his young staffers. Events and activities I didn’t know about would sometimes show up on my calendar.
But slowly, as a matter of survival, we were learning to live our lives more publicly, accepting the reality for what it was.
Before the afternoon ended in Butte, we gave a TV interview, all four of us—me, Barack, and the girls—which was something we’d never done before. Usually, we insisted on keeping the press corps at a distance from our kids, limiting them to photos and then only at public campaign events. I’m not sure what prompted us to say yes this time. As I recall, the campaign staff thought it would be nice to give the public a closer glimpse of Barack as a parent, and in the moment I saw no harm in this. He loved our children, after all. He loved all children. It was precisely why he’d make a great president.
We sat down for about fifteen minutes with Maria Menounos of Access Hollywood, the four of us speaking to her while sitting together on a park bench that had been draped with some sort of cloth to make it look more festive. Malia had her hair braided and Sasha wore a red tank dress. As always, they were disarmingly cute. Menounos was gracious and kept the conversation light as Malia, the family’s junior professor, earnestly pondered every question. She said that her dad embarrassed her sometimes when he tried to shake hands with her friends and also that he bothered all of us when he left his campaign luggage blocking the door at home. Sasha did her best to sit still and stay focused, interrupting the interview only once, turning to me to ask, “Hey, when are we getting ice cream?” Otherwise, she listened to her sister, interjecting periodically with whatever semirelevant detail popped into her head. “Daddy had an Afro once!” she squealed at one point toward the end, and we all started to laugh.
Days later, the interview aired in four parts on ABC and was met with an enthused fervor, covered by other news outlets with cloying taglines like “Curtain Rises on Obama’s Girls in TV Interview” and “The Obamas’ Two Little Girls Tell All.” Suddenly Malia’s and Sasha’s little-kid comments were being picked up in newspapers around the world.
Immediately, Barack and I regretted what we’d done. There was nothing salacious about the interview. There was no exploitative question asked, no especially revealing detail offered. Still, we felt like we’d made a wrong choice, putting their voices into the public sphere long before they could really understand what any of it meant. Nothing in the video would hurt Sasha or Malia. But it was out in the world now and would live forever on the internet. We’d taken two young girls who hadn’t chosen this life, and without thinking it through, we’d fed them into the maw.
* * *
By now, I knew something about the maw. We lived with the gaze upon us. It added a strange energy to everything. I had Oprah Winfrey sending me encouraging texts. Stevie Wonder, my childhood idol, was showing up to play at campaign events, joking and calling me by my first name as if we’d known each other forever. The amount of attention was disorienting, especially because I felt as if we hadn’t really done much to deserve it. We were being lifted by the strength of the message Barack was putting forward, but also, I knew, by the promise and the symbolism of the moment. If America elected its first black president, it would say something not just about Barack but also about the country. For so many people, and for so many reasons, this mattered a lot.
Barack, of course, got the most of it—the public adulation as well as the scrutiny that rode inevitably on its back. The more popular you became, the more haters you acquired. It seemed almost like an unwritten rule, especially in politics, where adversaries put money into opposition research—hiring investigators to crawl through every piece of a candidate’s background, looking for anything resembling dirt.
We are built differently, my husband and I, which is why one of us chose politics and the other did not. He was aware of rumors and misperceptions that got pumped like toxic vapor into the campaign, but rarely did any of it bother him. Barack had lived through other campaigns. He’d studied political history and girded himself with the context it provided. And in general, he’s just not someone who’s easily rattled or thrown off course by anything as abstract as doubt or hurt.
I, on the other hand, was still learning about public life. I considered myself a confident, successful woman, but I was also the same kid who used to tell people she planned to be a pediatrician and devoted herself to setting perfect attendance records at school. In other words, I cared what people thought. I’d spent my young life seeking approval, dutifully collecting gold stars and avoiding messy social situations. Over time, I’d gotten better about not measuring my self-worth strictly in terms of standard, by-the-book achievement, but I did tend to believe that if I worked diligently and honestly, I’d avoid the bullies and always be seen as myself.
This belief, though, was about to come undone.
After Barack’s victory in Iowa, my message on the campaign trail grew only more impassioned, almost proportional to the size of the crowds that were turning out at rallies. I’d gone from meeting hundreds of people at a gathering to a thousand or more. I remember pulling up to an event in Delaware with Melissa and Katie and seeing a line of people five-deep and stretching around the block, waiting to get inside an already-jammed auditorium. It stunned me in the happiest of ways. I relayed this to every crowd: I was floored by what people were bringing to Barack’s campaign in terms of enthusiasm and involvement. I was humbled by their investment, the work I saw everyday people doing to help get him elected.
When it came to my stump speech, building on the theory of campaigning that had worked so well for me in Iowa, I’d developed a loose structure for it, though I didn’t use a teleprompter or worry if I went off on a slight tangent. My words weren’t polished, and I’d never be as eloquent as my husband, but I spoke from the heart. I described how my initial doubts about the political process had slowly diminished week by week, replaced by something more encouraging and hopeful. So many of us, I was realizing, had the same struggles, the same concerns for our kids and worries about the future. And so many believed as I did that Barack was the only candidate capable of delivering real change.