What did I see? I saw myself speaking with intensity and conviction and never letting up. I always addressed the tough times many Americans were facing, as well as the inequities within our schools and our health-care system. My face reflected the seriousness of what I believed was at stake, how important the choice that lay before our nation really was.
But it was too serious, too severe—at least given what people were conditioned to expect from a woman. I saw my expression as a stranger might perceive it, especially if it was framed with an unflattering message. I could see how the opposition had managed to dice up these images and feed me to the public as some sort of pissed-off harpy. It was, of course, another stereotype, another trap. The easiest way to disregard a woman’s voice is to package her as a scold.
No one seemed to criticize Barack for appearing too serious or not smiling enough. I was a wife and not a candidate, obviously, so perhaps the expectation was for me to provide more lightness, more fluff. And yet, if there was any question about how women in general fared on Planet Politics, one needed only to look at how Nancy Pelosi, the smart and hard-driving Speaker of the House of Representatives, was often depicted as a shrew or what Hillary Clinton was enduring as cable pundits and opinion writers hashed and rehashed each development in the campaign. Hillary’s gender was used against her relentlessly, drawing from all the worst stereotypes. She was called domineering, a nag, a bitch. Her voice was interpreted as screechy; her laugh was a cackle. Hillary was Barack’s opponent, which meant that I wasn’t inclined to feel especially warmly toward her just then, but I couldn’t help but admire her ability to stand up and keep fighting amid the misogyny.
Reviewing videotape with Axe and Valerie that day, I felt tears pricking at my eyes. I was upset. I could see now that there was a performative piece to politics that I hadn’t yet fully mastered. And I’d been out there giving speeches already for more than a year. I’d communicated best, I realized now, in smaller venues like the ones I’d done in Iowa. It was harder to convey warmth in larger auditoriums. Bigger crowds required clearer facial cues, which was something I needed to work on. I was worried now that it was almost too late.
Valerie, my dear friend of more than fifteen years, reached out to squeeze my hand.
“Why didn’t you guys talk to me about this sooner?” I asked. “Why didn’t anyone try to help?”
The answer was that no one had been paying all that much attention. The perception inside Barack’s campaign seemed to be that I was doing fine until I wasn’t. Only now, when I was a problem, was I summoned to Axe’s office.
For me, this was a turnaround point. The campaign apparatus existed exclusively to serve the candidate, not the spouse or the family. And as much as Barack’s staffers respected me and valued my contribution, they’d never given me much in the way of guidance. Until that point, no one from the campaign had bothered to travel with me or show up for my events. I’d never received media training or speech prep. No one, I realized, was going to look out for me unless I pushed for it.
Knowing that the gaze was only going to intensify as we moved into the last six or so months of the campaign, we agreed, finally, that I needed real help. If I was going to continue to campaign like a candidate, I needed to be supported like a candidate. I’d protect myself by being better organized, by insisting on having the resources I needed to do the job well. In the final weeks of the primaries, Barack’s campaign began expanding my team to include a scheduler and a personal aide—Kristen Jarvis, a warmhearted former staffer from Barack’s U.S. Senate office whose steady demeanor would keep me grounded in high-stress moments—plus a no-nonsense, politically savvy communications specialist named Stephanie Cutter. Working with Katie and Melissa, Stephanie helped me sharpen my message and my presentation, building toward a major speech I’d deliver late that summer at the Democratic National Convention. We were also finally granted access to a campaign plane, which allowed me to move more efficiently. I could now give media interviews during flights, get my hair and makeup done en route to an event, or bring Sasha and Malia along with me at no extra cost.
It was a relief. All of it was a relief. And I do think that it allowed me to smile more, to feel less on guard.
As we planned my public appearances, Stephanie counseled me to play to my strengths and to remember the things I most enjoyed talking about, which was my love for my husband and kids, my connection with working mothers, and my proud Chicago roots. She recognized that I liked to joke around and told me not to hold back with my humor. It was okay, in other words, to be myself. Shortly after the primaries wrapped up, I signed on to co-host The View, spending a happy and spirited hour with Whoopi Goldberg, Barbara Walters, and the other hosts in front of a live audience, talking about the attacks against me, but also laughing about the girls and the fist bumps and the nuisance of panty hose. I felt a new ease, a new ownership of my voice. The show aired to generally positive commentary. I’d worn a $148 black-and-white dress that women were suddenly scrambling to buy.
I was having an impact and beginning to enjoy myself at the same time, feeling more and more open and optimistic. I also was trying to learn from the Americans I was meeting around the country, holding roundtables designed to focus on work-family balance, an issue in which I had a keen interest. For me, the most humbling lessons came when I visited military communities and met with soldiers’ spouses—groups of mostly women, though sometimes with a few men mixed in.
“Tell me about your lives,” I’d say. And then I’d listen as women with babies on their laps, some of them still teenagers themselves, told me stories. Some described being transferred between bases eight or more times in as many years, in each instance needing to start over in settling their children into things like music lessons or enrichment programs. They explained, too, how difficult it could be to maintain a career over the course of all those moves: A teacher, for instance, wasn’t able to find a job because her new state didn’t recognize the old state’s teaching certificate; nail technicians and physical therapists faced similar problems with licensing. Many young parents had trouble finding affordable child care. All of it, of course, was shaded by the logistical and emotional burdens of having a loved one deployed for twelve months or more at a time to a place like Kabul or Mosul or on an aircraft carrier in the South China Sea. Meeting these spouses instantly put whatever hurt I was feeling into perspective. Their sacrifices were far greater than mine. I sat in these meetings, engrossed and somewhat taken aback by the fact that I knew so little about military life. I vowed to myself that if Barack was fortunate enough to be elected, I’d find some way to better support these families.
All this left me more energized to help make the final push for Barack and Joe Biden, the affable senator from Delaware who’d soon be announced as his running mate. I felt emboldened to follow my instincts again, surrounded by people who had my back. At public events, I focused on making personal connections with the people I met, in small groups and in crowds of thousands, in backstage chats and harried rope lines. When voters got to see me as a person, they understood that the caricatures were untrue. I’ve learned that it’s harder to hate up close.
I would go on to spend the summer of 2008 moving faster and working harder, convinced that I could make a positive difference for Barack. With the convention drawing close, I worked with a speechwriter for the first time, a gifted young woman named Sarah Hurwitz who helped shape my ideas into a tight seventeen-minute speech. After weeks of careful preparation, I walked onstage at the Pepsi Center in Denver in late August and stood before an audience of some twenty thousand people and a TV audience of millions more, ready to articulate to the world who I really was.
That night, my brother, Craig, introduced me. My mother sat in the front row of a skybox, looking a little stunned by how giant the platform for our lives had become. I spoke of my father—his humility, his resilience, and how all that had shaped me and C
raig. I tried to give Americans the most intimate view possible of Barack and his noble heart. When I finished, people applauded and applauded, and I felt a powerful blast of relief, knowing that maybe I’d done something, finally, to change people’s perception of me.
It was a big moment, for sure—grand and public and to this day readily findable on YouTube. But the truth is, for those exact reasons, it was also strangely kind of a small moment. My view of things was starting to reverse itself, like a sweater slowly being turned inside out. Stages, audiences, lights, applause. These were becoming more normal than I’d ever thought they could be. What I lived for now were the unrehearsed, unphotographed, in-between moments where nobody was performing and no one was judging and real surprise was still possible—where sometimes without warning you might feel a tiny latch spring open on your heart.
For this, we need to go back to Butte, Montana, on the Fourth of July. It was the end of our day there, the summer sun finally dropping behind the western mountains, the sound of firecrackers beginning to pop in the distance. We were holing up for the night at a Holiday Inn Express next to the interstate, with Barack leaving for Missouri the next day and the girls and I headed home to Chicago. We were tired, all of us. We’d done the parade and the picnic. We’d engaged with what felt like every last resident in the town of Butte. And now, finally, we were going to have a little gathering just for Malia.
If you asked me at the time, I’d have said that we came up short for her in the end—that her birthday felt like an afterthought in the maelstrom of the campaign. We got together in a fluorescent-lit, low-ceilinged conference room in the basement of the hotel, with Konrad, Maya, and Suhaila, plus a handful of staffers who were close with Malia, and of course the Secret Service agents, who were always close no matter what. We had some balloons, a grocery-store cake, ten candles, and a tub of ice cream. There were a few gifts bought and wrapped on the fly by someone who was not me. The mood was not exactly desultory, but it wasn’t festive, either. It had simply been too long of a day. Barack and I shared a dark look, knowing we’d failed.
Ultimately, though, like so many things, it was a matter of perception—how we decided to look at what was in front of us. Barack and I were focused on only our faults and insufficiencies, seeing them reflected in that drab room and thrown-together party. But Malia was looking for something different. And she saw it. She saw kind faces, people who loved her, a thickly frosted cake, a little sister and cousin by her side, a new year ahead. She’d spent the day outdoors. She’d seen a parade. Tomorrow there would be an airplane ride.
She marched over to where Barack sat and threw herself into his lap. “This,” she declared, “is the best birthday ever!”
She didn’t notice that both her mom and her dad got teary or that half the people in the room were now choked up as well. Because she was right. And suddenly we all saw it. She was ten years old that day, and everything was the best.
18
Four months later, on November 4, 2008, I cast my vote for Barack. The two of us went early that morning to our polling place, which was in the gym at Beulah Shoesmith Elementary School, just a few blocks away from our house in Chicago. We brought Sasha and Malia along, both of them dressed and ready for school. Even on Election Day—maybe especially on Election Day—I thought school would be a good idea. School was routine. School was comfort. As we walked past banks of photographers and TV cameras to get into the gym, as people around us talked about the historic nature of everything, I was happy to have the lunch boxes packed.
What kind of day would this be? It would be a long day. Beyond that, none of us knew.
Barack, as he always is on high-pressure days, was more easygoing than ever. He greeted the poll workers, picked up his ballot, and shook hands with anyone he encountered, appearing relaxed. It made sense, I guess. This whole endeavor was about to be out of his hands.
We stood shoulder to shoulder at our voting stations while the girls leaned in closely to watch what each of us was doing.
I’d voted for Barack many times before, in primaries and general elections, in state-level and national races, and this trip to the polls felt no different. Voting, for me, was a habit, a healthy ritual to be done conscientiously and at every opportunity. My parents had taken me to the polls as a kid, and I’d made a practice of bringing Sasha and Malia with me anytime I could, hoping to reinforce both the ease and the importance of the act.
My husband’s career had allowed me to witness the machinations of politics and power up close. I’d seen how just a handful of votes in every precinct could mean the difference not just between one candidate and another but between one value system and the next. If a few people stayed home in each neighborhood, it could determine what our kids learned in schools, which health-care options we had available, or whether or not we sent our troops to war. Voting was both simple and incredibly effective.
That day, I stared for a few extra seconds at the little oblong bubble next to my husband’s name for president of the United States. After almost twenty-one months of campaigning, attacks, and exhaustion, this was it—the last thing I needed to do.
Barack glanced my way and laughed. “You still trying to make up your mind?” he said. “Need a little more time?”
Were it not for the anxiety, an Election Day might qualify as a kind of mini-vacation, a surreal pause between everything that’s happened and whatever lies ahead. You’ve leaped but you haven’t landed. You can’t know yet how the future’s going to feel. After months of everything going too fast, time slows to an agonizing crawl. Back at home, I played hostess to family and friends who stopped by our house to make small talk and help pass the hours.
At some point that morning, Barack went off to play basketball with Craig and some friends at a nearby gym, which had become a kind of Election Day custom. Barack loved nothing more than a strenuous thrash-or-be-thrashed game of basketball to settle his nerves.
“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.
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