by Obama Barack
And what was Michelle thinking? I imagine her just before we met, very much the young professional, tailored and crisp, focused on her career and doing things the way they’re supposed to be done, with no time for nonsense. And then this strange guy from Hawaii with a scruffy wardrobe and crazy dreams wanders into her life. That was part of my appeal, she would tell me, how different I was from the guys she’d grown up with, the men she had dated. Different even from her own father, whom she adored: a man who had never finished community college, who had been struck by MS in his early thirties, but who had never complained and had gone to work every single day and made all of Michelle’s dance recitals and Craig’s basketball games, and was always present for his family, truly his pride and joy.
Life with me promised Michelle something else, those things that she saw she had missed as a child. Adventure. Travel. A breaking of constraints. Just as her roots in Chicago—her big, extended family, her common sense, her desire to be a good mom above all else—promised an anchor that I’d been missing for much of my youth. We didn’t just love each other and make each other laugh and share the same basic values—there was symmetry there, the way we complemented each other. We could have each other’s back, guard each other’s blind spots. We could be a team.
Of course, that was another way of saying we were very different, in experience and in temperament. For Michelle, the road to the good life was narrow and full of hazards. Family was all you could count on, big risks weren’t taken lightly, and outward success—a good job, a nice house—never made you feel ambivalent because failure and want were all around you, just a layoff or a shooting away. Michelle never worried about selling out, because growing up on the South Side meant you were always, at some level, an outsider. In her mind, the roadblocks to making it were plenty clear; you didn’t have to go looking for them. The doubts arose from having to prove, no matter how well you did, that you belonged in the room—prove it not just to those who doubted you but to yourself.
* * *
—
AS LAW SCHOOL was coming to an end, I told Michelle of my plan. I wouldn’t clerk. Instead, I’d move back to Chicago, try to keep my hand in community work while also practicing law at a small firm that specialized in civil rights. If a good opportunity presented itself, I said, I could even see myself running for office.
None of this came as a surprise to her. She trusted me, she said, to do what I believed was right.
“But I need to tell you, Barack,” she said, “I think what you want to do is really hard. I mean, I wish I had your optimism. Sometimes I do. But people can be so selfish and just plain ignorant. I think a lot of people don’t want to be bothered. And I think politics seems like it’s full of people willing to do anything for power, who just think about themselves. Especially in Chicago. I’m not sure you’ll ever change that.”
“I can try, can’t I?” I said with a smile. “What’s the point of having a fancy law degree if you can’t take some risks? If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. I’ll be okay. We’ll be okay.”
She took my face in her hands. “Have you ever noticed that if there’s a hard way and an easy way, you choose the hard way every time? Why do you think that is?”
We both laughed. But I could tell Michelle thought she was onto something. It was an insight that would carry implications for us both.
* * *
—
AFTER SEVERAL YEARS of dating, Michelle and I were married at Trinity United Church of Christ on October 3, 1992, with more than three hundred of our friends, colleagues, and family members crammed happily into the pews. The service was officiated by the church’s pastor, Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., whom I’d come to know and admire during my organizer days. We were joyful. Our future together was officially beginning.
I had passed the bar and then delayed my law practice for a year to run Project VOTE! in advance of the 1992 presidential race—one of the largest voter-registration drives in Illinois history. After returning from our honeymoon on the California coast, I taught at the University of Chicago Law School, finished my book, and officially joined Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, a small civil rights firm that specialized in employment discrimination cases and did real estate work for affordable housing groups. Michelle, meanwhile, had decided she’d had enough of corporate law and made a move to the City of Chicago’s Department of Planning and Development, working there for a year and a half before agreeing to direct a nonprofit youth leadership program called Public Allies.
Both of us enjoyed our jobs and the people we worked with, and as time went on, we got involved with various civic and philanthropic efforts. We took in ball games and concerts and shared dinners with a widening circle of friends. We were able to buy a modest but cozy condo in Hyde Park, right across from Lake Michigan and Promontory Point, just a few doors down from where Craig and his young family lived. Michelle’s mother, Marian, still lived in the family’s South Shore house, less than fifteen minutes away, and we visited often, feasting on her fried chicken and greens and red velvet cake and barbecue made by Michelle’s Uncle Pete. Once we were stuffed, we’d sit around the kitchen and listen to her uncles tell stories of growing up, the laughter louder as the evening wore on, while cousins and nephews and nieces bounced on the sofa cushions until they were sent out into the yard.
Driving home in the twilight, Michelle and I sometimes talked about having kids of our own—what they might be like, or how many, and what about a dog?—and imagined all the things we’d do together as a family.
A normal life. A productive, happy life. It should have been enough.
* * *
—
BUT THEN IN the summer of 1995, a political opportunity arose suddenly, through a strange chain of events. The sitting congressman from the Second District of Illinois, Mel Reynolds, had been indicted on several charges, including allegedly having sex with a sixteen-year-old campaign volunteer. If he was convicted, a special election would be promptly held to replace him.
I didn’t live in the district, and I lacked the name recognition and base of support to launch a congressional race. The state senator from our area, Alice Palmer, however, was eligible to run for the seat and, not long before the congressman was convicted in August, she threw her hat into the ring. Palmer, an African American former educator with deep roots in the community, had a solid if unremarkable record and was well liked by progressives and some of the old-time Black activists who had helped Harold get elected; and although I didn’t know her, we had mutual friends. Based on the work I’d done for Project VOTE! I was asked to help her nascent campaign, and as the weeks went by, several people encouraged me to think about filing to run for Alice’s soon-to-be-vacant senate seat.
Before talking to Michelle, I made a list of pros and cons. A state senator wasn’t a glamorous post—most people had no idea who their state legislators were—and Springfield, the state capital, was notorious for old-style pork-barreling, logrolling, payola, and other political mischief. On the other hand, I had to start somewhere and pay my dues. Also, the Illinois state legislature was in session only a few weeks out of the year, which meant I could continue teaching and working at the law firm.
Best of all, Alice Palmer agreed to endorse me. With Reynolds’s trial still pending, it was difficult to know how the timing would work. Technically it would be possible for Alice to run for Congress while keeping the option of retaining her state seat if she lost the bigger race, but she insisted to me and others that she was done with the senate, ready to move on. Along with an offer of support from our local alderman, Toni Preckwinkle, who boasted the best organization in the area, my chances looked better than good.
I went to Michelle and made my pitch. “Think of it as a test run,” I said.
“Hmph.”
“Dipping our toes in the water.”
“Right.”
“So
what do you think?”
She pecked me on the cheek. “I think this is something you want to do, so you should do it. Just promise me I won’t have to spend time in Springfield.”
I had one last person to check in with before I pulled the trigger. Earlier in the year, my mother had fallen sick and had been diagnosed with uterine cancer.
The prognosis wasn’t good. At least once a day, the thought of losing her made my heart constrict. I’d flown to Hawaii right after she’d gotten the news and had been relieved to find that she looked like herself and was in good spirits. She confessed she was scared but wanted to be as aggressive as possible with her treatment.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she said, “until you give me some grandchildren.”
She received the news of my possible state senate run with her usual enthusiasm, insisting I tell her every detail. She acknowledged it would be a lot of work, but my mother was never one to see hard work as anything but good.
“Make sure Michelle’s all right with it,” she said. “Not that I’m the marriage expert. And don’t you dare use me as an excuse not to do it. I’ve got enough to deal with without feeling like everybody’s putting their lives on hold. It’s morbid, understand?”
“Got it.”
Seven months after her diagnosis, the situation would turn grim. In September, Michelle and I flew to New York to join Maya and my mother for a consultation with a specialist at Memorial Sloan Kettering. Midway through chemo now, she was physically transformed. Her long dark hair was gone; her eyes looked hollow. Worse, the specialist’s assessment was that her cancer was at stage four and that treatment options were limited. Watching my mother suck on ice cubes because her saliva glands had shut down, I did my best to put on a brave face. I told her funny stories about my work and recounted the plot of a movie I’d just seen. We laughed as Maya—nine years younger than me and then studying at New York University—reminded me what a bossy big brother I’d been. I held my mother’s hand, making sure she was comfortable before she settled in to rest. Then I went back to the hotel room and cried.
It was on that trip to New York that I suggested my mother come stay with us in Chicago; my grandmother was too old to care for her full-time. But my mother, forever the architect of her own destiny, declined. “I’d rather be someplace familiar and warm,” she said, looking out the window. I sat there feeling helpless, thinking about the long path she had traveled in her life, how unexpected each step along the way must have been, so full of happy accidents. I’d never once heard her dwell on the disappointments. Instead she seemed to find small pleasures everywhere.
Until this.
“Life is strange, isn’t it?” she said softly.
It was.
* * *
—
FOLLOWING MY MOTHER’S advice, I threw myself into my maiden political campaign. It makes me laugh to think back on what a bare-bones operation it was—not much more sophisticated than a campaign for student council. There were no pollsters, no researchers, no TV or radio buys. My announcement, on September 19, 1995, was at the Ramada Inn in Hyde Park, with pretzels and chips and a couple hundred supporters—probably a quarter of whom were related to Michelle. Our campaign literature consisted of an eight-by-four-inch card with what looked like a passport picture of me, a few lines of biography, and four or five bullet points that I’d tapped out on my computer. I’d had it printed at Kinko’s.
I did make a point of hiring two political veterans I’d met working on Project VOTE! Carol Anne Harwell, my campaign manager, was tall and sassy, in her early forties and on loan from a West Side ward office. Although she came off as irrepressibly cheerful, she knew her way around Chicago’s bare-knuckle politics. Ron Davis, a big grizzly bear of a man, was our field director and petition expert. He had a gray-flecked Afro, scraggly facial hair, and thick wire-rimmed glasses, his bulk hidden by the untucked black shirt he seemed to wear every single day.
Ron proved to be indispensable: Illinois had strict ballot access rules, designed to make life hard on challengers who didn’t have party support. To get on the ballot, a candidate needed more than seven hundred registered voters who lived in the district to sign a petition that was circulated and attested to by someone who also lived in the district. A “good” signature had to be legible, accurately linked to a local address, and from a registered voter. I still remember the first time a group of us gathered around our dining room table, Ron huffing and puffing as he passed out clipboards with the petitions attached, along with voter files and a sheet of instructions. I suggested that before we talked about petitions, we should organize some meet-the-candidate forums, maybe draft some position papers. Carol and Ron looked at each other and laughed.
“Boss, let me tell you something,” Carol said. “You can save all that League of Women Voters shit for after the election. Right now, the only thing that matters is these petitions. The folks you’re running against, they’re gonna go through these things with a fine-tooth comb to see if your signatures are legit. If they’re not, you don’t get to play. And I guarantee you, no matter how careful we are, about half of the signatures will end up being bad, which is why we got to get at least twice as many as they say we do.”
“Four times as many,” Ron corrected, handing me a clipboard.
Duly chastened, I drove out to one of the neighborhoods Ron had selected to gather signatures. It felt just like my early organizing days, going from house to house, some people not home or unwilling to open the door; women in hair curlers with kids scampering about, men doing yard work; occasionally young men in T-shirts and do-rags, breath thick with alcohol as they scanned the block. There were those who wanted to talk to me about problems at the local school or the gun violence that was creeping into what had been a stable, working-class neighborhood. But mostly folks would take the clipboard, sign it, and try as quickly as possible to get back to what they’d been doing.
If knocking on doors was pretty standard fare for me, the experience was new to Michelle, who gamely dedicated part of every weekend to helping out. And while she’d often collect more signatures than I did—with her megawatt smile and stories of growing up just a few blocks away—there were no smiles two hours later when we’d get back into the car to drive home.
“All I know,” she said at one point, “is that I must really love you to spend my Saturday morning doing this.”
Over the course of several months, we managed to collect four times the number of required signatures. When I wasn’t at the firm or teaching, I visited block clubs, church socials, and senior citizen homes, making my case to voters. I wasn’t great. My stump speech was stiff, heavy on policy speak, short on inspiration and humor. I also found it awkward to talk about myself. As an organizer, I’d been trained to always stay in the background.
I did get better, though, more relaxed, and slowly the ranks of my supporters grew. I rounded up endorsements from local officials, pastors, and a handful of progressive organizations; I even got a few position papers drafted. And I’d like to say that this is how my first campaign ended—the plucky young candidate and his accomplished, beautiful, and forbearing wife, starting with a few friends in their dining room, rallying the people around a new brand of politics.
But that’s not how it happened. In August 1995, our disgraced congressman was finally convicted and sentenced to prison; a special election was called for late November. With his seat empty and the timeline officially set, others besides Alice Palmer jumped into the congressional race, among them Jesse Jackson, Jr., who had drawn national attention for the stirring introduction of his father at the 1988 Democratic National Convention. Michelle and I knew and liked Jesse Jr. His sister Santita had been one of Michelle’s best friends in high school and the maid of honor at our wedding. He was popular enough that his announcement immediately changed the dynamics of the race, putting Alice at an enormous disadvantage.
&
nbsp; And because the special congressional election was now going to take place a few weeks before petitions for Alice’s senate seat had to be filed, my team started to worry.
“You better check again to make sure Alice isn’t going to mess with you if she loses to Jesse Jr.,” Ron said.
I shook my head. “She promised me she wasn’t running. Gave me her word. And she’s said it publicly. In the papers, even.”
“That’s fine, Barack. But can you just check again, please?”
I did, phoning Alice and once again getting her assurance that regardless of what happened with her congressional run, she still intended to leave state politics.
But when Jesse Jr. handily won the special election, with Alice coming in a distant third, something shifted. Stories started surfacing in the local press about a “Draft Alice Palmer” campaign. A few of her longtime supporters asked for a meeting, and when I showed up they advised me to get out of the race. The community couldn’t afford to give up Alice’s seniority, they said. I should be patient; my turn would come. I stood my ground—I had volunteers and donors who had already invested a lot in the campaign, after all; I had stuck with Alice even when Jesse Jr. got in—but the room was unmoved. By the time I spoke to Alice, it was clear where events were headed. The following week she held a press conference in Springfield, announcing that she was filing her own last-minute petitions to get on the ballot and retain her seat.
