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and his vision for the country, threshing them into words on his legal pads late at
night. He really was content, he told me, to stay where he was, building his
influence over time, awaiting his turn to speak inside the deliberative cacophony
of the Senate, but then a storm arrived.

Hurricane Katrina blasted the Gulf Coast of the United States late in August
2005, overwhelming the levees in New Orleans, swamping low-lying regions,
stranding people—black people, mostly—on the rooftops of their destroyed
homes. The aftermath was horrific, with media reports showing hospitals without
backup power, distraught families herded into the Superdome, emergency
workers hamstrung by a lack of supplies. In the end, some eighteen hundred
people died, and more than half a million others were displaced, a tragedy
exacerbated by the ineptitude of the federal government’s response. It was a
wrenching exposure of our country’s structural divides, most especially the
intense, lopsided vulnerability of African Americans and poor people of all races
when things got rough.

Where was hope now?
I watched the Katrina coverage with a knot in my stomach, knowing that if
a disaster hit Chicago, many of my aunts and uncles, cousins and neighbors,
would have suffered a similar fate. Barack’s reaction was no less emotional. A
week after the hurricane, he flew to Houston to join former president George H.
W. Bush, along with Bill and Hillary Clinton, who was then a colleague of his in
the Senate, spending time with the tens of thousands of New Orleans evacuees
who’d sought shelter in the Astrodome there. The experience kindled something
in him, that nagging sense he wasn’t yet doing enough.

his was the thought I returned to a year or so later, when the drumbeat
truly got loud, when the pressure on both of us felt immense. We went about
our regular business, but the question of whether Barack would run for president
unsettled the air around us. Could he? Will he? Should he? In the summer of 2006,
poll respondents filling out open-ended questionnaires were naming him as a
presidential possibility, though Hillary Clinton was decidedly the number one
pick. By fall, though, Barack’s stock had begun to rise in part thanks to the
publication of The Audacity of Hope and a slew of media opportunities afforded by
the book tour. His poll numbers were suddenly even with or ahead of those of Al
Gore and John Kerry, the Democrats’ previous two nominees—evidence of his