match at a senior citizens’ picnic on the North Side. None of this was what a corporate lawyer did, and for this reason I found it compelling. I was experiencing Chicago in a way I never had before.
I was learning something else of value, too, spending much of my time in the presence of Susan Sher and Valerie Jarrett, two women who—I was seeing—managed to be both tremendously confident and tremendously human at the same time. Susan ran meetings with a steely and unflappable grace. Valerie thought nothing of speaking her mind in a roomful of opinionated men, often managing to deftly bring people around to whatever side she was arguing. She was like a fast-moving comet, someone who was clearly going places. Not long before my wedding, she’d been promoted to the role of commissioner in charge of planning and economic development for the city and had offered me a job as an assistant commissioner. I was going to begin work as soon as we got back from our honeymoon.
I saw more of Valerie than I did of Susan, but I took careful note of everything each of them did, similarly to how I’d observed Czerny, my college mentor. These were women who knew their own voices and were unafraid to use them. They could be humorous and humble when the moment called for it, but they were unfazed by blowhards and didn’t second-guess the power in their own points of view. Also, importantly, they were working moms. I watched them closely in this regard as well, knowing that I wanted someday to be one myself. Valerie never hesitated to step out of a big meeting when a call came in from her daughter’s school. Susan, likewise, dashed out in the middle of the day if one of her sons spiked a fever or was performing in a preschool music show. They were unapologetic about prioritizing the needs of their children, even if it meant occasionally disrupting the flow at work, and didn’t try to compartmentalize work and home the way I’d noticed male partners at Sidley seemed to do. I’m not sure compartmentalization was even a choice for Valerie and Susan, given that they were juggling the expectations unique to mothers and were also both divorced, which came with its own emotional and financial challenges. They weren’t striving for perfect, but managed somehow to be always excellent, the two of them bound in a deep and mutually helpful friendship, which also made a real impression on me. They’d dropped any masquerade and were just wonderfully, powerfully, and instructively themselves.
* * *
Barack and I came back from our honeymoon in Northern California to both good and bad news. The good news came in the form of the November election, which brought what felt like a tide of encouraging change. Bill Clinton won overwhelmingly in Illinois and across the country, moving President Bush out of office after only one term. Carol Moseley Braun also won decisively, becoming the first African American woman ever to hold a Senate seat. What was even more exciting to Barack was that the Election Day turnout had been nothing short of epic: Project VOTE! had directly registered 110,000 new voters, and its broader get-out-the-vote campaign had likely boosted overall turnout as well.
For the first time in a decade, over half a million black voters in Chicago went to the polls, proving that they had the collective power to shape political outcomes. This sent a clear message to lawmakers and future politicians and reestablished a feeling that seemed to have been lost when Harold Washington died: The African American vote mattered. It would be costly politically for anyone to ignore or discount black people’s needs and concerns. Inside of this, too, was a secondary message to the black community itself, a reminder that progress was possible, that our worth was measurable. All this was heartening for Barack. As tiring as it was, he’d loved his job for what it taught him about Chicago’s complex political system and for proving that his organizing instincts could work on a larger scale. He’d collaborated with grassroots leaders, everyday citizens, and elected officials, and almost miraculously it had yielded results. Several media outlets noted the impressive impact of Project VOTE! A writer for Chicago magazine described Barack as “a tall, affable workaholic,” suggesting that he should someday run for office, an idea that he simply shrugged off.
And here was the bad news: That