was that Washington confused me, with its decorous traditions and sober self-regard, its whiteness and maleness, its ladies having lunch off to one side. At the heart of my confusion was a kind of fear, because as much as I hadn’t chosen to be involved, I was getting sucked in. I’d been Mrs. Obama for the last twelve years, but it was starting to mean something different. At least in some spheres, I was now Mrs. Obama in a way that could feel diminishing, a missus defined by her mister. I was the wife of Barack Obama, the political rock star, the only black person in the Senate—the man who’d spoken of hope and tolerance so poignantly and forcefully that he now had a hornet buzz of expectation following him.
My husband was a senator, but somehow people seemed to want to vault right over that. Instead, everyone was keen to know whether he would make a run for president in 2008. There was no shaking the question. Every reporter asked it. Nearly every person who approached him on the street asked it. My colleagues at the hospital would stand in my doorway and casually drop the question, probing for some bit of early news. Even Malia, who was six and a half on the day she put on a pink velvet dress and stood next to Barack as he was sworn in to the Senate by Dick Cheney, wanted to know. Unlike many of the others, though, our first grader was wise enough to sense how premature it all seemed.
“Daddy, are you gonna try to be president?” she’d asked. “Don’t you think maybe you should be vice president or something first?”
I was with Malia on this matter. As a lifelong pragmatist, I would always counsel a slow approach, the methodical checking of boxes. I was a natural-born fan of the long and judicious wait. In this regard, I felt better anytime I heard Barack pushing back at his inquisitors with an aw-shucks kind of modesty, batting away questions about the presidency, saying that the only thing he was planning was to put his head down and work hard in the Senate. He often reminded people that he was just a low-ranking member of the minority party, a backbench player if there ever was one. And, he would sometimes add, he had two kids he needed to raise.
But the drum was already beating. It was hard to make it stop. Barack was writing what would become The Audacity of Hope—thinking through his beliefs and his vision for the country, threshing them into words on his legal pads late at night. He really was content, he told me, to stay where he was, building his influence over time, awaiting his turn to speak inside the deliberative cacophony of the Senate, but then a storm arrived.
Hurricane Katrina blasted the Gulf Coast of the United States late in August 2005, overwhelming the levees in New Orleans, swamping low-lying regions, stranding people—black people, mostly—on the rooftops of their destroyed homes. The aftermath was horrific, with media reports showing hospitals without backup power, distraught families herded into the Superdome, emergency workers hamstrung by a lack of supplies. In the end, some eighteen hundred people died, and more than half a million others were displaced, a tragedy exacerbated by the ineptitude of the federal government’s response. It was a wrenching exposure of our country’s structural divides, most especially the intense, lopsided vulnerability of African Americans and poor people of all races when things got rough.
Where was hope now?
I watched the Katrina coverage with a knot in my stomach, knowing that if a disaster hit Chicago, many of my aunts and uncles, cousins and neighbors, would have suffered a similar fate. Barack’s reaction was no less emotional. A week after the hurricane, he flew to Houston to join former president George H. W. Bush, along with Bill and Hillary Clinton, who was then a colleague of his in the Senate, spending time with the tens of thousands of New Orleans evacuees who’d sought shelter in the Astrodome there. The experience kindled something in him, that nagging sense he wasn’t yet doing enough.
* * *
This was the thought I returned to a year or so later, when the drumbeat truly got loud, when the pressure on both of us felt immense. We went about our regular business, but the question of whether Barack would run for president unsettled the