the opportunity to depict Barack as some kind of bon vivant lawmaker who’d
been on vacation—in Hawaii, no less—and hadn’t deigned to come back to vote
on something as significant as gun control.
Bobby Rush, the incumbent congressman, had tragically lost a family
member to gun violence in Chicago only a few months earlier, which cast Barack
in an even poorer light. Nobody seemed to register that he was from Hawaii, that
he’d been visiting his widowed grandmother, or that his daughter had fallen ill.
All that mattered was the vote. The press hammered on it for weeks. The Chicago
Tribune’s editorial page criticized the group of senators who hadn’t managed to
vote that day, calling them “a bunch of gutless sheep.” Barack’s other opponent,
a fellow state senator named Donne Trotter, took his own shots, telling a reporter
that “to use your child as an excuse for not going to work also shows poorly on
the individual’s character.”
I wasn’t accustomed to any of this. I wasn’t used to having opponents or
seeing my family life scrutinized in the news. Never before had I heard my
husband’s character questioned like that. It hurt to think that a good decision—
the right decision, as far as I was concerned—seemed to be costing him so much.
In a column he wrote for our neighborhood’s weekly newspaper, Barack calmly
defended his choice to stay with me and Malia in Hawaii. “We hear a lot of talk
from politicians about the importance of family values,” he wrote. “Hopefully,
you will understand when your state senator tries to live up to those values as best
he can.”
It seemed that with the fickleness of a child’s earache, Barack’s three years of
work in the state senate had been all but wiped away. He’d led an overhaul of
state campaign finance laws that ushered in stricter ethics rules for elected officials.
He’d fought for tax cuts and credits for the working poor and was focused on
cutting prescription drug costs for senior citizens. He’d earned the trust of
legislators from all parts of the state, Republican and Democrat alike. But none of
the real stuff seemed to matter now. The race had devolved into a series of low
blows.
From the start of the campaign, Barack’s opponents and their supporters had
been propagating unseemly ideas meant to gin up fear and mistrust among
African American voters, suggesting that Barack was part of an agenda cooked up
by the white residents of Hyde Park—read, white Jews—to foist their preferred
candidate on the South Side. “Barack is viewed in part to be the white man in
blackface in our community,” Donne Trotter told the Chicago Reader. Speaking