United States of America.”
The auditorium thundered. I watched from the floor with huge pride.
“America, our moment is now,” Barack said. “Our moment is now.”
His performance that night gave the campaign exactly what it needed,
catapulting him forward in the race. He took the lead in about half the Iowa polls
and was only gaining steam as the caucuses approached.
In the days after Christmas, with just a week or so left in the Iowa campaign,
it seemed as if half of the South Side had migrated to the deep freeze of Des
Moines. My mother and Mama Kaye showed up. My brother and Kelly came,
bringing their kids. Sam Kass was there. Valerie, who’d joined the campaign
earlier in the fall as one of Barack’s advisers, was there, along with Susan and my
posse of girlfriends and their husbands and children. I was touched when
colleagues from the hospital showed up, friends of ours from Sidley & Austin, law
professors who’d taught with Barack. And, in step with the use-every-moment
ethic of the campaign, they all signed on to help make the final push, reporting to
a local field office, knocking on doors in zero-degree weather, talking up Barack,
and reminding people to caucus. The campaign was further reinforced by
hundreds of others who’d traveled to Iowa from around the country for the final
week, staying in the spare bedrooms of local supporters, heading out each day
into even the smallest towns and down the most tucked away of gravel roads.
I myself was barely present in Des Moines, doing five or six events a day that
kept me moving back and forth across the state, traveling in a rented van with
Melissa and Katie, driven by a rotating crew of volunteers. Barack was out doing
the same, his voice beginning to grow hoarse.
Regardless of how many miles we had to cover, I made sure to be back at
the Residence Inn in West Des Moines, our home-base hotel, each night in time
for Malia and Sasha’s eight o’clock bedtime. They, of course, barely seemed to
notice I wasn’t around, having been surrounded by cousins and friends and
babysitters all day long, playing games in the hotel room and going on excursions
around town. One night, I opened the door, hoping to flop on the bed for a few
moments of silence, only to find our room strewn with kitchen utensils. There
were rolling pins on the bedspread, dirty cutting boards on the small table,
kitchen shears on the floor. The lamp shades and the television screen were
covered with a light dusting of...was that flour?
“Sam taught us to make pasta!” Malia announced. “We got a little carried
away.”