to depict Barack as some kind of bon vivant lawmaker who’d been on vacation—in Hawaii, no less—and hadn’t deigned to come back to vote on something as significant as gun control.
Bobby Rush, the incumbent congressman, had tragically lost a family member to gun violence in Chicago only a few months earlier, which cast Barack in an even poorer light. Nobody seemed to register that he was from Hawaii, that he’d been visiting his widowed grandmother, or that his daughter had fallen ill. All that mattered was the vote. The press hammered on it for weeks. The Chicago Tribune’s editorial page criticized the group of senators who hadn’t managed to vote that day, calling them “a bunch of gutless sheep.” Barack’s other opponent, a fellow state senator named Donne Trotter, took his own shots, telling a reporter that “to use your child as an excuse for not going to work also shows poorly on the individual’s character.”
I wasn’t accustomed to any of this. I wasn’t used to having opponents or seeing my family life scrutinized in the news. Never before had I heard my husband’s character questioned like that. It hurt to think that a good decision—the right decision, as far as I was concerned—seemed to be costing him so much. In a column he wrote for our neighborhood’s weekly newspaper, Barack calmly defended his choice to stay with me and Malia in Hawaii. “We hear a lot of talk from politicians about the importance of family values,” he wrote. “Hopefully, you will understand when your state senator tries to live up to those values as best he can.”
It seemed that with the fickleness of a child’s earache, Barack’s three years of work in the state senate had been all but wiped away. He’d led an overhaul of state campaign finance laws that ushered in stricter ethics rules for elected officials. He’d fought for tax cuts and credits for the working poor and was focused on cutting prescription drug costs for senior citizens. He’d earned the trust of legislators from all parts of the state, Republican and Democrat alike. But none of the real stuff seemed to matter now. The race had devolved into a series of low blows.
From the start of the campaign, Barack’s opponents and their supporters had been propagating unseemly ideas meant to gin up fear and mistrust among African American voters, suggesting that Barack was part of an agenda cooked up by the white residents of Hyde Park—read, white Jews—to foist their preferred candidate on the South Side. “Barack is viewed in part to be the white man in blackface in our community,” Donne Trotter told the Chicago Reader. Speaking to the same publication, Bobby Rush said, “He went to Harvard and became an educated fool. We’re not impressed with these folks with these eastern elite degrees.” He’s not one of us, in other words. Barack wasn’t a real black man, like them—someone who spoke like that, looked like that, and read that many books could never be.
What bothered me most was that Barack exemplified everything parents on the South Side often said they wanted for their kids. He was everything people like Bobby Rush and Jesse Jackson and so many black leaders had talked about for years: He’d gotten an education, and rather than abandoning the African American community, he was now trying to serve it. This was a heated election, sure, but Barack was being attacked for all the wrong things. I was astonished to see how our leaders treated him only as a threat to their power, inciting mistrust by playing on backward, anti-intellectual ideas about race and class.
It made me sick.
Barack, for his part, took it more in stride than I did, having already seen in Springfield how nasty politics could get and how the truth was so often distorted to serve people’s political aims. Bruised but unwilling to give up, he continued to campaign through the winter, making his weekly trips back and forth to Springfield while trying earnestly to beat back the storm, even as donations began to dwindle and more and more endorsements went to Bobby Rush. With the clock ticking down to the primary, Malia and I hardly saw him at all, though he called us every evening to say good night.
I was more grateful than ever for those few stolen days we’d had on the beach. I knew that in his heart Barack was, too. What never got