family that believed in forethought—that ran fire drills at home and showed up
early to everything. Growing up in a working-class community and with a
disabled parent, I’d learned that planning and vigilance mattered a lot. It could
mean the difference between stability and poverty. The margins always felt
narrow. One missed paycheck could leave you without electricity; one missed
homework assignment could put you behind and possibly out of college.
Having lost a fifth-grade classmate to a house fire, having watched Suzanne
die before she’d had a chance to really be an adult, I’d learned that the world
could be brutal and random, that hard work didn’t always assure positive
outcomes. My sense of this would only grow in the future, but even now, sitting
in our quiet brick home on our quiet street, I couldn’t help but want to protect
what we had—to look after our girls and forget the rest, at least until they’d
grown up a bit more.
And yet there was a flip side to this, and Barack and I both knew it well.
We’d watched the devastation of Katrina from our privileged remove. We’d seen
parents hoisting their babies above floodwaters and African American families
trying to hold themselves together in the dehumanizing depravity that existed in
the Superdome. My various jobs—from city hall to Public Allies to the university
—had helped me see how hard it could be for some people to secure things like
basic health care and housing. I’d seen the flimsy line that separated getting by
and going under. Barack, for his part, had spent plenty of time listening to laid-off
factory workers, young military veterans trying to manage lifelong disabilities,
mothers fed up with sending their kids to poorly functioning schools. We
understood, in other words, how ridiculously fortunate we were, and we both
felt an obligation not to be complacent.
Knowing that I really had no choice but to consider it, I finally opened the
door and allowed the possibility of this thing inside. Barack and I talked the idea
through, not once, but many times, right up to and through our Christmas trip to
visit Toot in Hawaii. Some of our conversations were angry and tearful, some of
them earnest and positive. It was the extension of a dialogue we’d been having
over seventeen years already. Who were we? What mattered to us? What could we do?
In the end, it boiled down to this: I said yes because I believed that Barack
could be a great president. He was self-assured in ways that few people are. He
had the intellect and discipline to do the job, the temperament to endure
everything that would make it hard, and the rare degree of empathy that would
keep him tuned carefully to the country’s needs. He was also surrounded by