Which was code for “Only if Michelle says I can.”
On nights when Barack was in Washington, I lay alone in bed, feeling as if it
were me against the world. I wanted Barack for our family. Everyone else seemed
to want him for our country. He had his council of advisers—David Axelrod and
Robert Gibbs, the two campaign strategists who’d been critical in getting him
elected to the Senate; David Plouffe, another consultant from Axelrod’s firm; his
chief of staff, Pete Rouse; and Valerie—all of whom were cautiously supportive.
But they’d also made clear that there was no half doing a presidential
campaign.Barack and I both would need to be fully on board. The demands on
him would be unimaginable. Without missing a beat in his Senate duties, he’d
have to build and maintain a coast-to-coast campaign operation, develop a policy
platform, and also raise an astonishing amount of money. My job would be not
just to give tacit support to the campaign but to participate in it. I’d be expected
to make myself and our children available for viewing, to smile approvingly and
shake a lot of hands. Everything would be about him now, I realized, in support
of this larger cause.
Even Craig, who’d so avidly protected me since the day I was born, had
gotten swept up in the excitement of a potential run. He called me one evening
explicitly to make a plug. “Listen, Miche,” he said, speaking as he often did, in
basketball terms. “I know you’re worried about this, but if Barack’s got a shot,
he’s got to take it. You can see that, right?”
It was on me. It was all on me. Was I afraid or just tired?
For better or worse, I’d fallen in love with a man with a vision who was
optimistic without being naive, undaunted by conflict, and intrigued by how
complicated the world was. He was strangely unintimidated by how much work
there was to be done. He was dreading the thought of leaving me and the girls
for long stretches, he said, but he also kept reminding me of how secure our love
was. “We can handle this, right?” he said, holding my hand one night as we sat in
his upstairs study and finally began to really talk about it. “We’re strong and we’re
smart, and so are our kids. We’ll be just fine. We can afford this.”
What he meant was yes, a campaign would be costly. There were things
we’d give up—time, togetherness, our privacy. It was too early to predict exactly
how much would be required, but surely it would be a lot. For me, it was like
spending money without knowing your bank balance. How much resilience did
we have? What was our limit? What would be left in the end? The uncertainty
alone felt like a threat, a thing that could drown us. I’d been raised, after all, in a