work and left our kids with my mother in order to be there. If I was going to be
a political spouse, I wanted to treat it seriously. I didn’t care about the politics per
se, but I also didn’t want to screw anything up.
The truth was that Washington confused me, with its decorous traditions
and sober self-regard, its whiteness and maleness, its ladies having lunch off to one
side. At the heart of my confusion was a kind of fear, because as much as I hadn’t
chosen to be involved, I was getting sucked in. I’d been Mrs. Obama for the last
twelve years, but it was starting to mean something different. At least in some
spheres, I was now Mrs. Obama in a way that could feel diminishing, a missus
defined by her mister. I was the wife of Barack Obama, the political rock star, the
only black person in the Senate—the man who’d spoken of hope and tolerance
so poignantly and forcefully that he now had a hornet buzz of expectation
following him.
My husband was a senator, but somehow people seemed to want to vault
right over that. Instead, everyone was keen to know whether he would make a
run for president in 2008. There was no shaking the question. Every reporter
asked it. Nearly every person who approached him on the street asked it. My
colleagues at the hospital would stand in my doorway and casually drop the
question, probing for some bit of early news. Even Malia, who was six and a half
on the day she put on a pink velvet dress and stood next to Barack as he was
sworn in to the Senate by Dick Cheney, wanted to know. Unlike many of the
others, though, our first grader was wise enough to sense how premature it all
seemed.
“Daddy, are you gonna try to be president?” she’d asked. “Don’t you think
maybe you should be vice president or something first?”
I was with Malia on this matter. As a lifelong pragmatist, I would always
counsel a slow approach, the methodical checking of boxes. I was a natural-born
fan of the long and judicious wait. In this regard, I felt better anytime I heard
Barack pushing back at his inquisitors with an aw-shucks kind of modesty, batting
away questions about the presidency, saying that the only thing he was planning
was to put his head down and work hard in the Senate. He often reminded
people that he was just a low-ranking member of the minority party, a backbench
player if there ever was one. And, he would sometimes add, he had two kids he
needed to raise.
But the drum was already beating. It was hard to make it stop. Barack was
writing what would become The Audacity of Hope—thinking through his beliefs