I laughed. I’d been worried about how the girls would handle their first
Christmas break away from their great-grandmother in Hawaii. But blessedly, a
bag of flour in Des Moines appeared to be a fine substitute for a beach towel in
Waikiki.
Several days later, a Thursday, the caucuses arrived. Barack and I dropped
into a downtown Des Moines food court over lunch and later made visits to
various caucus sites to greet as many voters as we could. Late that evening, we
joined a group of friends and family at dinner, thanking them for their support
during what had been a nutty eleven months since the announcement in
Springfield. I left the meal early to return to my hotel room in time to prepare,
win or lose, for Barack’s speech later that night. Within moments, Katie and
Melissa burst in with fresh news from the campaign’s war room: “We won!”
We were wild with joy, shouting so loudly that the Secret Service rapped on
our door to make sure something wasn’t wrong.
On one of the coldest nights of the year, a record number of Iowans had
fanned out to their local caucuses, almost double the turnout from four years
earlier. Barack had won among whites, blacks, and young people. More than half
of the attendees had never participated in a caucus before, and that group likely
helped secure Barack’s victory. The cable news anchors had finally made their
way to Iowa and were now singing the praises of this political wunderkind who’d
comfortably bested the Clinton machine as well as a former vice presidential
nominee.
That night at Barack’s victory speech, as the four of us—Barack, me, Malia,
Sasha—stood onstage at Hy-Vee Hall, I felt great, even a little chastened. Maybe,
I thought to myself, everything Barack had been talking about for all those years
really was possible. All those drives to Springfield, all his frustrations about not
making a big enough impact, all his idealism, his unusual and earnest belief that
people were capable of moving past the things that divided them, that in the end
politics could work—maybe he’d been right all along.
We’d accomplished something historic, something monumental—not just
Barack, not just me, but Melissa and Katie, and Plouffe, Axelrod, and Valerie, and
every young staffer, every volunteer, every teacher and farmer and retiree and
high schooler who stood up that night for something new.
It was after midnight when Barack and I went to the airport to leave Iowa,
knowing we wouldn’t be back for months. The girls and I were headed home to
Chicago, returning to work and school. Barack was flying to New Hampshire,