H

did. This was the call-and-response of democracy, I realized, a contract forged
person by person. You show up for us, and we’ll show up for you. I had fifteen
thousand more reasons to want Barack to win.

I was fully committed now. Our whole family was committed, even if it felt
a little scary. I couldn’t yet begin to imagine what lay ahead. But there we were
—out there—the four of us standing before the crowd and the cameras, naked
but for the coats on our backs and a slightly too big pink hat on a tiny head.

illary Clinton was a serious and formidable opponent. In poll after poll, she
held a commanding lead among the country’s potential Democratic primary
voters, with Barack lagging ten or twenty points behind, and Edwards sitting a
few points behind Barack. Democratic voters knew the Clintons, and they were
hungry for a win. Far fewer people could even pronounce my husband’s name.
All of us—Barack and I as well as the campaign team—understood long before
his announcement that regardless of his political gifts a black man named Barack
Hussein Obama would always be a long shot.

It was a hurdle we faced within the black community, too. Similar to how
I’d initially felt about Barack’s candidacy, plenty of black folks couldn’t bring
themselves to believe that my husband had a real chance of winning. Many had
yet to believe that a black man could win in predominantly white areas, which
meant they’d often go for the safer bet, the next-best thing. One facet of the
challenge for Barack was to shift black voters away from their long-standing
allegiance to Bill Clinton, who’d shown unusual ease with the African American
community and formed many connections there as a result. Barack had already
built goodwill with a diverse range of constituents throughout Illinois, including
in the rural white farm areas in the southern part of the state. He’d already proven
that he could reach all demographics, but many people didn’t yet understand this
about him.

The scrutiny of Barack would be extra intense, the lens always magnified.
We knew that as a black candidate he couldn’t afford any sort of stumble. He’d
have to do everything twice as well. For Barack, and for every candidate not
named Clinton, the only hope for winning the nomination was to raise a lot of
money and start spending it fast, hoping that a strong performance in the earliest
primaries would give the campaign enough momentum to slingshot past the
Clinton machine.