A

to the same publication, Bobby Rush said, “He went to Harvard and became an
educated fool. We’re not impressed with these folks with these eastern elite
degrees.” He’s not one of us, in other words. Barack wasn’t a real black man, like
them—someone who spoke like that, looked like that, and read that many books
could never be.

What bothered me most was that Barack exemplified everything parents on
the South Side often said they wanted for their kids. He was everything people
like Bobby Rush and Jesse Jackson and so many black leaders had talked about for
years: He’d gotten an education, and rather than abandoning the African
American community, he was now trying to serve it. This was a heated election,
sure, but Barack was being attacked for all the wrong things. I was astonished to
see how our leaders treated him only as a threat to their power, inciting mistrust
by playing on backward, anti-intellectual ideas about race and class.

It made me sick.
Barack, for his part, took it more in stride than I did, having already seen in
Springfield how nasty politics could get and how the truth was so often distorted
to serve people’s political aims. Bruised but unwilling to give up, he continued to
campaign through the winter, making his weekly trips back and forth to
Springfield while trying earnestly to beat back the storm, even as donations began
to dwindle and more and more endorsements went to Bobby Rush. With the
clock ticking down to the primary, Malia and I hardly saw him at all, though he
called us every evening to say good night.

I was more grateful than ever for those few stolen days we’d had on the
beach. I knew that in his heart Barack was, too. What never got lost inside all the
noise, inside all those nights he spent away from us, was that he cared. He took
none of it lightly. I caught a trace of agony in his voice nearly every time he
hung up the phone. It was almost as if every day he were forced to cast another
vote, between family and politics, politics and family.

In March, Barack lost the Democratic primary in what ended up being a
resounding victory for Bobby Rush.

All the while,  I   just    kept    hugging our girl.

nd then came our second girl. Natasha Marian Obama was born on June 10,
2001, at the University of Chicago Medical Center, after a single round of IVF, a