potential. I was aware that he’d been having private conversations with friends,
advisers, and prospective donors, signaling to everyone that he was mulling over
the idea. But there was one conversation he avoided having, and that was with
me.
He knew, of course, how I felt. We’d discussed it obliquely, around the
edges of other topics. We’d lived with other people’s expectations so long that
they were almost embedded in every conversation we had. Barack’s potential sat
with our family at the dinner table. Barack’s potential rode along to school with
the girls and to work with me. It was there even when we didn’t want it to be
there, adding a strange energy to everything. From my point of view, my
husband was doing plenty already. If he was going to even think about running
for president, I hoped he’d take the prudent path, preparing slowly, biding his
time in the Senate, and waiting until the girls were older—until 2016, maybe.
Since I’d known him, it seemed to me that Barack had always had his eyes
on some far-off horizon, on his notion of the world as it should be. Just for once,
I wanted him to be content with life as it was. I didn’t understand how he could
look at Sasha and Malia, now five and eight, with their pigtailed hair and giggly
exuberance, and feel any other way. It hurt me sometimes to think that he did.
We were riding a seesaw, the two of us, the mister on one side and the
missus on the other. We lived in a nice house now, a Georgian brick home on a
quiet street in the Kenwood neighborhood, with a wide porch and tall trees in
the yard—exactly the kind of place Craig and I used to gape at during Sunday
drives in my dad’s Buick. I thought often of my father and all he’d invested in us.
I wished desperately for him to be alive, to see how things were playing out.
Craig was profoundly happy now, having finally made a swerve, leaving his
career in investment banking and pivoting back to his first love—basketball. After
a few years as an assistant at Northwestern, he was now head coach at Brown
University in Rhode Island, and he was getting married again, to Kelly McCrum,
a beautiful, down-to-earth college dean of admissions from the East Coast. His
two children had grown tall and confident, vibrant advertisements for what the
next generation could do.
I was a senator’s wife, but beyond that, and more important, I had a career
that mattered to me. Back in the spring, I’d been promoted to become a vice
president at the University of Chicago Medical Center. I’d spent the past couple
of years leading the development of a program called the South Side Healthcare
Collaborative, which had already connected more than fifteen hundred patients