and power up close. I’d seen how just a handful of votes in every precinct could
mean the difference not just between one candidate and another but between one
value system and the next. If a few people stayed home in each neighborhood, it
could determine what our kids learned in schools, which health-care options we
had available, or whether or not we sent our troops to war. Voting was both
simple and incredibly effective.
That day, I stared for a few extra seconds at the little oblong bubble next to
my husband’s name for president of the United States. After almost twenty-one
months of campaigning, attacks, and exhaustion, this was it—the last thing I
needed to do.
Barack glanced my way and laughed. “You still trying to make up your
mind?” he said. “Need a little more time?”
Were it not for the anxiety, an Election Day might qualify as a kind of mini-
vacation, a surreal pause between everything that’s happened and whatever lies
ahead. You’ve leaped but you haven’t landed. You can’t know yet how the
future’s going to feel. After months of everything going too fast, time slows to an
agonizing crawl. Back at home, I played hostess to family and friends who
stopped by our house to make small talk and help pass the hours.
At some point that morning, Barack went off to play basketball with Craig
and some friends at a nearby gym, which had become a kind of Election Day
custom. Barack loved nothing more than a strenuous thrash-or-be-thrashed game
of basketball to settle his nerves.
“Just don’t let anyone break his nose,” I said to Craig as the two of them
walked out the door. “He’s gotta be on TV later, you know.”
“Way to make me responsible for everything,” Craig said back, as only a
brother can. And then they were gone.
If you believed the polls, it appeared that Barack was poised to win, but I
also knew he’d been working on two possible speeches for the night ahead—one
for a victory, another for a concession. By now we understood enough about
politics and polling to take nothing for granted. We knew of the phenomenon
called the Bradley effect, named for an African American candidate, Tom
Bradley, who’d run for governor in California in the early 1980s. While the polls
had consistently shown Bradley leading, he’d lost on Election Day, surprising
everyone and supplying the world with a bigger lesson about bigotry, as the
pattern repeated itself for years to come in different high-profile races involving
black candidates around the country. The theory was that when it came to