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sure about my husband: You don’t dangle an opportunity in front of him,
something that could give him a wider field of impact, and expect him just to
walk away. Because he doesn’t. He won’t.

t the end of 1999, when Malia was almost eighteen months old, we took
her to Hawaii at Christmastime to visit her great-grandmother Toot, who was
now seventy-seven years old and living in the same small high-rise apartment
she’d been in for decades. It was meant to be a family visit—the one time each
year Toot could see her grandson and great-granddaughter. Winter had once
again clapped itself over Chicago, siphoning the warmth from the air and the blue
from the sky. Feeling antsy both at home and at work, we’d booked a modest
hotel room near Waikiki Beach and started counting down the days. Barack’s
teaching duties at the law school had wrapped up for the semester, and I’d put in
for time off at my job. But then politics got in the way.

The Illinois senate was hung up in a marathon debate, trying to settle on the
provisions of a major crime bill. Instead of breaking for the holidays, it went into
a special session with the aim of pushing through to a vote before Christmas.
Barack called me from Springfield, saying we’d need to delay our trip by a few
days. This wasn’t great news, but I understood it was out of his hands. All I cared
was that we eventually got there. I didn’t want Toot spending Christmas alone,
and beyond that Barack and I needed the downtime. The trip to Hawaii, I was
figuring, would separate both of us from our work and give us a chance to simply
breathe.

He was now officially running for Congress, which meant that he rarely
switched off. He would later give an interview to a local paper, estimating that
during the six or so months he campaigned for Congress, he spent less than four
full days at home with me and Malia. This was the painful reality of campaigning.
On top of his other responsibilities, Barack lived with a ticking clock, one that
incessantly reminded him of the minutes and hours remaining before the March
primary. How he spent each of those minutes and hours could, at least in theory,
affect the eventual outcome. What I was learning, too, was that in the eyes of a
campaign operation, any minutes or hours a candidate spends privately with
family are viewed basically as a waste of that valuable time.

I was enough of a veteran now to try to keep myself largely disengaged from
the daily ups and downs of the race. I’d given Barack’s decision to run a wan