me more than the tidy triumph delivered by a home-makeover show.
All of this is to say that I saw ways to connect with Americans that Barack and his West Wing advisers didn’t fully recognize, at least initially. Rather than doing interviews with big newspapers or cable news outlets, I began sitting down with influential “mommy bloggers” who reached an enormous and dialed-in audience of women. Watching my young staffers interact with their phones, seeing Malia and Sasha start to take in news and chat with their high school friends via social media, I realized there was opportunity to be tapped there as well. I crafted my first tweet in the fall of 2011 to promote Joining Forces and then watched it zing through the strange, boundless ether where people increasingly spent their time.
It was a revelation. All of it was a revelation. With my soft power, I was finding I could be strong.
If reporters and television cameras wanted to follow me, then I was going to take them places. They could come watch me and Jill Biden paint a wall, for example, at a nondescript row house in the Northwest part of Washington. There was nothing inherently interesting about two ladies with paint rollers, but it baited a certain hook.
It brought everyone to the doorstep of Sergeant Johnny Agbi, who’d been twenty-five years old and a medic in Afghanistan when his transport helicopter was attacked, shattering his spine, injuring his brain, and requiring a long rehabilitation at Walter Reed. His first floor was now being retrofitted to accommodate his wheelchair—its doorways widened, its kitchen sink lowered—part of a joint effort between a nonprofit called Rebuilding Together and the company that owned Sears and Kmart. This was the thousandth such home they’d renovated on behalf of veterans in need. The cameras caught all of it—the soldier, his house, the goodwill and energy being poured in. The reporters interviewed not just me and Jill but Sergeant Agbi and the folks who’d done the real work. For me, this was how it should be. The gaze belonged here.
* * *
On Election Day—November 6, 2012—my fears sat with me quietly. Barack and the girls and I were back in Chicago, at home on Greenwood Avenue, caught in the purgatory of waiting for an entire nation to accept or reject us. This vote, for me, was more fraught than any other we’d gone through. It felt like a referendum not only on Barack’s political performance and the state of the country but also on his character, on our very presence in the White House. Our girls had established a strong community for themselves, and a sense of normalcy that I didn’t want to upend yet again. I was so invested now, having given over four years of our family’s life, that it was impossible not to feel everything a bit personally.
The campaign had worn us out, maybe even more than I’d anticipated. While working on my initiatives and keeping up with things like parent-teacher conferences and monitoring the girls’ homework, I’d been speaking at campaign events at an average of three cities a day, three days a week. And Barack’s pace had been even more grueling. Polls consistently showed him with only a tenuous lead over Mitt Romney. Making matters worse, he’d bombed during their first debate in October, triggering a wave of eleventh-hour anxiety among donors and advisers. We could read the exhaustion on the faces of our hardworking staffers. Though they aimed never to show it, they were surely unsettled by the possibility that Barack could be forced out of office in a matter of months.
Throughout it, Barack stayed calm, though I could see what the pressure did to him. During the final weeks, he began to look a little wan and even skinnier than usual, chewing his Nicorette with unusual vigor. I’d watched with wifely concern as he tried to do everything—soothe the worriers, finish out the campaign, and govern the nation all at once, including responding to a terrorist attack on American diplomats in Benghazi, Libya, and managing a massive federal response to Hurricane Sandy, which tore up the Eastern Seaboard just a week before the election.
As polls on the East Coast began to close that evening, I headed up to the third floor of our house, where we’d set up a kind of de facto hair and makeup salon to prepare for the public part of the night ahead. Meredith