“Just don’t let anyone break his nose,” I said to Craig as the two of them walked out the door. “He’s gotta be on TV later, you know.”
“Way to make me responsible for everything,” Craig said back, as only a brother can. And then they were gone.
If you believed the polls, it appeared that Barack was poised to win, but I also knew he’d been working on two possible speeches for the night ahead—one for a victory, another for a concession. By now we understood enough about politics and polling to take nothing for granted. We knew of the phenomenon called the Bradley effect, named for an African American candidate, Tom Bradley, who’d run for governor in California in the early 1980s. While the polls had consistently shown Bradley leading, he’d lost on Election Day, surprising everyone and supplying the world with a bigger lesson about bigotry, as the pattern repeated itself for years to come in different high-profile races involving black candidates around the country. The theory was that when it came to minority candidates, voters often hid their prejudice from pollsters, expressing it only from the privacy of the voting booth.
Throughout the campaign, I’d asked myself over and over whether America was really ready to elect a black president, whether the country was in a strong enough place to see beyond race and move past prejudice. Finally, we were about to find out.
As a whole, the general election had been less grueling than the pitched battle of the primaries. John McCain had done himself no favors by choosing Alaska’s governor, Sarah Palin, as his running mate. Inexperienced and unprepared, she’d quickly become a national punch line. And then, in mid-September, the news had turned disastrous. The U.S. economy began to spiral out of control when Lehman Brothers, one of the country’s largest investment banks, abruptly went belly-up. The titans of Wall Street, the world now realized, had spent years racking up profits on the backs of junk home loans. Stocks plummeted. Credit markets froze. Retirement funds vanished.
Barack was the right person for this moment in history, for a job that was never going to be easy but that had grown, thanks to the financial crisis, exponentially more difficult. I’d been trumpeting it for more than a year and a half now, all over America: My husband was calm and prepared. Complexity didn’t scare him. He had a brain capable of sorting through every intricacy. I was biased, of course, and personally I still would’ve been content to lose the election and reclaim some version of our old lives, but I also was feeling that as a country we truly needed his help. It was time to stop thinking about something as arbitrary as skin color. We’d be foolish at this point not to put him in office. Still, he would inherit a mess.
As evening drew closer, I felt my fingers getting numb, a nervous tingle running through my body. I couldn’t really eat. I lost interest in making small talk with my mom or the friends who’d stopped in. At some point, I went upstairs just to catch a moment to myself.
Barack, it turned out, had retreated up there as well, clearly needing a moment of his own.
I found him sitting at his desk, looking over the text of his victory speech in the little book-strewn office adjacent to our bedroom—his Hole. I walked over and began rubbing his shoulders.
“You doing okay?” I said.
“Yep.”
“Tired?”
“Nope.” He smiled up at me, as if trying to prove it was true. Only a day earlier, we’d received news that Toot, Barack’s eighty-six-year-old grandmother, had passed away in Hawaii after being sick for months with cancer. Knowing he’d missed saying good-bye to his mother, Barack had made a point of seeing Toot. We’d taken the kids to visit her late that summer, and he’d gone again on his own ten days earlier, stepping off the campaign trail for a day to sit and hold her hand. It occurred to me what a sad thing this was. Barack had lost his mother at the very genesis of his political career, two months after announcing his run for state senate. Now, as he reached its apex, his grandmother wouldn’t be around to witness it. The people who’d raised him were gone.
“I’m proud of you, no matter what happens,” I said. “You’ve done so much good.”
He lifted himself out of his seat and put his arms around me. “So have you,” he said, pulling me close. “We’ve both done all right.”
All I could think about was everything he still had to carry.
* * *
After a family dinner at home, we got dressed up and rode downtown to watch election returns with a small group of friends and family in a suite the campaign had rented for us at the Hyatt Regency. The campaign staff had cloistered itself in a different area of the hotel, trying to give us some privacy. Joe and Jill Biden had their own suite for friends and family across the hall.
The first results came in around 6:00 p.m. central time, with Kentucky going for McCain and Vermont for Barack. Then West Virginia went for McCain, and after that so did South Carolina. My confidence lurched a little, though none of this was a surprise. According to Axe and Plouffe, who were buzzing in and out of the room, announcing what felt like every sliver of information they received, everything was unfolding as predicted. Though the updates were generally positive, the political chatter was the last thing I wanted to hear. We had no control over anything anyway, so what was the point? We’d leaped and now, one way or another, we’d land. We could see on TV that thousands of people were already amassing at Grant Park, a mile or so away on the lakefront, where election coverage was being broadcast on Jumbotron screens and where Barack would later show up to deliver one of his two speeches. There were police officers stationed on practically every corner, Coast Guard boats patrolling the lake, helicopters overhead. All of Chicago, it seemed, was holding its breath, waiting for news.
Connecticut went for Barack. Then New Hampshire went for Barack. So did Massachusetts, Maine, Delaware, and D.C. When Illinois was called for Barack, we could hear cars honking and shouts of excitement from the streets below. I found a chair near the door to the suite and sat alone, surveying the scene in front of me. The room had gone mostly quiet now, the political team’s nervous updates having given way to an expectant, almost sober kind of calm. To my right, the girls sat in their red and black dresses on a couch, and to my left, Barack, his suit coat draped elsewhere in the room, had taken a seat on another couch next to my mother, who was dressed that evening in an elegant black suit and silver earrings.
“Are you ready for this, Grandma?” I heard Barack say to her.
Never one to overemote, my mom just gave him a sideways look and shrugged, causing them both to smile. Later, though, she’d describe to me how overcome she’d felt right then, struck just as I’d been by his vulnerability. America had come to see Barack as self-assured and powerful, but my mother also recognized the gravity of the passage, the loneliness of the job ahead. Here was this man who no longer had a father or a mother, about to be elected the leader of the free world.
The next time I looked over, I saw that she and Barack were holding hands.
* * *
It was exactly ten o’clock when the networks began to flash pictures of my smiling husband, declaring that Barack Hussein Obama would become the forty-fourth president of the United States. We all leaped to our feet and started instinctively to yell. Our campaign staff streamed into the room, as did the Bidens, everyone hurling themselves from one hug to the next. It was surreal. I felt as if I’d been lifted out of my own body, only watching myself react.