who had not bothered to get to know me but was now trying to shape my story
in a cynical way.
I tried not to take this stuff personally, but sometimes it was hard not to.
With every campaign event, every article published, every sign we might be
gaining ground, we became slightly more exposed, more open to attack. Crazy
rumors swirled about Barack: that he’d been schooled in a radical Muslim
madrassa and sworn into the Senate on a Koran. That he refused to recite the
Pledge of Allegiance. That he wouldn’t put his hand over his heart during the
national anthem. That he had a close friend who was a domestic terrorist from
the 1970s. The falsehoods were routinely debunked by reputable news sources
but still blazed through anonymous email chains, forwarded not just by basement
conspiracy theorists but also by uncles and colleagues and neighbors who couldn’t
separate fact from fiction online.
Barack’s safety was something I didn’t want to think about, let alone discuss.
So many of us had been brought up with assassinations on the news at night. The
Kennedys had been shot. Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot. Ronald Reagan
had been shot. John Lennon had been shot. If you drew too much heat, you bore
a certain risk. But then again, Barack was a black man. The risk, for him, was
nothing new. “He could get shot just going to the gas station,” I sometimes tried
to remind people when they brought it up.
Beginning in May, Barack had been assigned Secret Service protection. It
was the earliest a presidential candidate had been given a protective detail ever, a
full year and a half before he could even become president-elect, which said
something about the nature and the seriousness of the threats against him. Barack
now traveled in sleek black SUVs provided by the government and was trailed by
a team of suited, ear-pieced men and women with guns. At home, an agent stood
guard on our front porch.
For my part, I rarely felt unsafe. As I continued to travel, I was managing to
pull in bigger crowds. If I’d once met with twenty people at a time at low-key
house parties, I was now speaking to hundreds in a high school gym. The Iowa
staff reported that my talks tended to yield a lot of pledges of support (measured
in signed “supporter cards,” which the campaign collected and followed up with
meticulously). At some point, the campaign began referring to me as “the Closer”
for the way I helped make up minds.
Each day brought a new lesson about how to move more efficiently, how
not to get slowed down by illness or mess of any kind. After being served some