bank balance. How much resilience did we have? What was our limit? What would be left in the end? The uncertainty alone felt like a threat, a thing that could drown us. I’d been raised, after all, in a family that believed in forethought—that ran fire drills at home and showed up early to everything. Growing up in a working-class community and with a disabled parent, I’d learned that planning and vigilance mattered a lot. It could mean the difference between stability and poverty. The margins always felt narrow. One missed paycheck could leave you without electricity; one missed homework assignment could put you behind and possibly out of college.
Having lost a fifth-grade classmate to a house fire, having watched Suzanne die before she’d had a chance to really be an adult, I’d learned that the world could be brutal and random, that hard work didn’t always assure positive outcomes. My sense of this would only grow in the future, but even now, sitting in our quiet brick home on our quiet street, I couldn’t help but want to protect what we had—to look after our girls and forget the rest, at least until they’d grown up a bit more.
And yet there was a flip side to this, and Barack and I both knew it well. We’d watched the devastation of Katrina from our privileged remove. We’d seen parents hoisting their babies above floodwaters and African American families trying to hold themselves together in the dehumanizing depravity that existed in the Superdome. My various jobs—from city hall to Public Allies to the university—had helped me see how hard it could be for some people to secure things like basic health care and housing. I’d seen the flimsy line that separated getting by and going under. Barack, for his part, had spent plenty of time listening to laid-off factory workers, young military veterans trying to manage lifelong disabilities, mothers fed up with sending their kids to poorly functioning schools. We understood, in other words, how ridiculously fortunate we were, and we both felt an obligation not to be complacent.
Knowing that I really had no choice but to consider it, I finally opened the door and allowed the possibility of this thing inside. Barack and I talked the idea through, not once, but many times, right up to and through our Christmas trip to visit Toot in Hawaii. Some of our conversations were angry and tearful, some of them earnest and positive. It was the extension of a dialogue we’d been having over seventeen years already. Who were we? What mattered to us? What could we do?
In the end, it boiled down to this: I said yes because I believed that Barack could be a great president. He was self-assured in ways that few people are. He had the intellect and discipline to do the job, the temperament to endure everything that would make it hard, and the rare degree of empathy that would keep him tuned carefully to the country’s needs. He was also surrounded by good, smart people who were ready to help. Who was I to stop him? How could I put my own needs, and even those of our girls, in front of the possibility that Barack could be the kind of president who helped make life better for millions of people?
I said yes because I loved him and had faith in what he could do.
I said yes, though I was at the same time harboring a painful thought, one I wasn’t ready to share: I supported him in campaigning, but I also felt certain he wouldn’t make it all the way. He spoke so often and so passionately of healing our country’s divisions, appealing to a set of higher ideals he believed were innate in most people. But I’d seen enough of the divisions to temper my own hopes. Barack was a black man in America, after all. I didn’t really think he could win.
16
Almost from the minute we agreed it would be okay for him to run, Barack became a kind of human blur, a pixelated version of the guy I knew—a man who quite suddenly had to be everywhere all at once, driven by and beholden to the force of the larger effort. There was not quite a year until the primary contests got started, beginning in Iowa. Barack had to quickly hire staff, woo the types of donors who could write big checks, and figure out