W

ith the book finished, there was new space in his life, and—also in
keeping with who he’d always been—Barack felt compelled to fill it immediately.
On the personal side, he’d been coping with difficult news: His mother, Ann,
had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer and had moved from Jakarta back to
Honolulu for treatment. As far as we knew, she was getting good medical care,
and the chemotherapy seemed to be working. Both Maya and Toot were helping
look after her in Hawaii, and Barack checked in often. But her diagnosis had
come late, after the cancer had advanced, and it was difficult to know what
would happen. I knew this weighed heavily on Barack’s mind.

In Chicago, meanwhile, the political chatter was starting to kick up again.
Mayor Daley had been elected to a third term in the spring of 1995, and now
everyone was gearing up for the 1996 election, in which Illinois would select a
new U.S. senator and President Clinton would make his bid for a second term.
More scandalously, we had a sitting U.S. congressman under investigation for sex
crimes, leaving an opening for a new Democratic contender in the state’s Second
District, which included much of Chicago’s South Side. A popular state senator
named Alice Palmer, who represented Hyde Park and South Shore and whom
Barack had gotten to know while working on Project VOTE!, had begun saying
privately that she intended to run for it. Which, in turn, would leave her state
senate seat vacant, opening up the possibility that Barack could run for it.

Was he interested? Would he run?
I couldn’t have known it then, but these questions would come to dominate
the next decade of our lives, pulsing like a drumbeat behind almost everything
we did. Would he? Could he? Was he? Should he? But ahead of these always came
another question, posed by Barack himself, preliminary and supposedly
preemptive when it came to running for office of any sort. The first time he
asked it was on the day he’d let me know about Alice Palmer and her open seat
and this notion he had that maybe he could be not just a
lawyer/professor/organizer/author but all those things plus a state legislator as
well: “What do you think about it, Miche?”

For me, the answer was never actually all that tough to come up with. I
didn’t think it was a great idea for Barack to run for office. My specific reasoning
might have varied slightly each time the question came back around, but my
larger stance would hold, like a sequoia rooted in the ground, though clearly you
can see that it stopped absolutely nothing.