with Reverend Wright, Barack walked out to greet the audience, his appearance met with a roar I could hear from inside the capitol. I went back to find Sasha and Malia, beginning to feel truly nervous. “Are you girls ready?” I said.
“Mommy, I’m hot,” Sasha said, tearing off her pink hat.
“Oh, sweetie, you’ve got to keep that on. It’s freezing outside.” I grabbed the hat and fitted it back on her head.
“But we’re not outside, we’re inside,” she said.
This was Sasha, our round-faced little truth teller. I couldn’t argue with her logic. Instead, I glanced at one of the staffers nearby, trying to telegraph a message to a young person who almost certainly didn’t have kids of her own: Dear God, if we don’t get this thing started now, we’re going to lose these two.
In an act of mercy, she nodded and motioned us toward the entrance. It was time.
I’d been to a fair number of Barack’s political events by now and had seen him interact many times with big groups of constituents. I’d been at campaign kickoffs, fund-raisers, and election-night parties. I’d seen audiences filled with old friends and longtime supporters. But Springfield was something else entirely.
My nerves left me the moment we stepped onstage. I was focused completely on Sasha, making sure she was smiling and not about to trip over her own booted feet. “Look up, sweetie,” I said, holding her hand. “Smile!” Malia was out ahead of us already, her chin high and her smile giant as she caught up with her father and waved. It wasn’t until we ascended the stairs that I was finally able to take in the crowd, or at least try to. The rush was enormous. More than fifteen thousand people, it turned out, had come that day. They were spread out in a three-hundred-degree panorama, spilling out from the capitol, enveloping us with their enthusiasm.
I’d never been one who’d choose to spend a Saturday at a political rally. The appeal of standing in an open gym or high school auditorium to hear lofty promises and platitudes never made much sense to me. Why, I wondered, were all these people here? Why would they layer on extra socks and stand for hours in the cold? I could imagine people bundling up and waiting to hear a band whose every lyric they could sing or enduring a snowy Super Bowl for a team they’d followed since childhood. But politics? This was unlike anything I’d experienced before.
It began dawning on me that we were the band. We were the team about to take the field. What I felt more than anything was a sudden sense of responsibility. We owed something to each one of these people. We were asking for an investment of their faith, and now we had to deliver on what they’d brought us, carrying that enthusiasm through twenty months and fifty states and right into the White House. I hadn’t believed it was possible, but maybe now I did. This was the call-and-response of democracy, I realized, a contract forged person by person. You show up for us, and we’ll show up for you. I had fifteen thousand more reasons to want Barack to win.
I was fully committed now. Our whole family was committed, even if it felt a little scary. I couldn’t yet begin to imagine what lay ahead. But there we were—out there—the four of us standing before the crowd and the cameras, naked but for the coats on our backs and a slightly too big pink hat on a tiny head.
* * *
Hillary Clinton was a serious and formidable opponent. In poll after poll, she held a commanding lead among the country’s potential Democratic primary voters, with Barack lagging ten or twenty points behind, and Edwards sitting a few points behind Barack. Democratic voters knew the Clintons, and they were hungry for a win. Far fewer people could even pronounce my husband’s name. All of us—Barack and I as well as the campaign team—understood long before his announcement that regardless of his political gifts a black man named Barack Hussein Obama would always be a long shot.
It was a hurdle we faced within the black community, too. Similar to how I’d initially felt about Barack’s candidacy, plenty of black folks couldn’t bring themselves to believe that my husband had a real chance of winning. Many had yet to believe that a black man