air around us. Could he? Will he? Should he? In the summer of 2006, poll respondents filling out open-ended questionnaires were naming him as a presidential possibility, though Hillary Clinton was decidedly the number one pick. By fall, though, Barack’s stock had begun to rise in part thanks to the publication of The Audacity of Hope and a slew of media opportunities afforded by the book tour. His poll numbers were suddenly even with or ahead of those of Al Gore and John Kerry, the Democrats’ previous two nominees—evidence of his potential. I was aware that he’d been having private conversations with friends, advisers, and prospective donors, signaling to everyone that he was mulling over the idea. But there was one conversation he avoided having, and that was with me.
He knew, of course, how I felt. We’d discussed it obliquely, around the edges of other topics. We’d lived with other people’s expectations so long that they were almost embedded in every conversation we had. Barack’s potential sat with our family at the dinner table. Barack’s potential rode along to school with the girls and to work with me. It was there even when we didn’t want it to be there, adding a strange energy to everything. From my point of view, my husband was doing plenty already. If he was going to even think about running for president, I hoped he’d take the prudent path, preparing slowly, biding his time in the Senate, and waiting until the girls were older—until 2016, maybe.
Since I’d known him, it seemed to me that Barack had always had his eyes on some far-off horizon, on his notion of the world as it should be. Just for once, I wanted him to be content with life as it was. I didn’t understand how he could look at Sasha and Malia, now five and eight, with their pigtailed hair and giggly exuberance, and feel any other way. It hurt me sometimes to think that he did.
We were riding a seesaw, the two of us, the mister on one side and the missus on the other. We lived in a nice house now, a Georgian brick home on a quiet street in the Kenwood neighborhood, with a wide porch and tall trees in the yard—exactly the kind of place Craig and I used to gape at during Sunday drives in my dad’s Buick. I thought often of my father and all he’d invested in us. I wished desperately for him to be alive, to see how things were playing out. Craig was profoundly happy now, having finally made a swerve, leaving his career in investment banking and pivoting back to his first love—basketball. After a few years as an assistant at Northwestern, he was now head coach at Brown University in Rhode Island, and he was getting married again, to Kelly McCrum, a beautiful, down-to-earth college dean of admissions from the East Coast. His two children had grown tall and confident, vibrant advertisements for what the next generation could do.
I was a senator’s wife, but beyond that, and more important, I had a career that mattered to me. Back in the spring, I’d been promoted to become a vice president at the University of Chicago Medical Center. I’d spent the past couple of years leading the development of a program called the South Side Healthcare Collaborative, which had already connected more than fifteen hundred patients who’d turned up in our Emergency Department with care providers they could see regularly, regardless of whether they could pay or not. My work felt personal. I saw black folks streaming into the ER with issues that had long been neglected—diabetic patients whose circulation issues had gone untended and who now needed a leg amputated, for example—and couldn’t help but think of every medical appointment my own father had failed to make for himself, every symptom of his MS he’d downplayed in order not to make a fuss, or cost anyone money, or generate paperwork, or to spare himself the feeling of being belittled by a wealthy white doctor.
I liked my job, and while it wasn’t perfect, I also liked my life. With Sasha about to move into elementary school, I felt as though I was at the start of a new phase, on the brink of being able to fire up my ambition again and consider a new set of goals. What would a presidential campaign do? It would hijack all that. I knew