minority candidates, voters often hid their prejudice from pollsters, expressing it
only from the privacy of the voting booth.
Throughout the campaign, I’d asked myself over and over whether America
was really ready to elect a black president, whether the country was in a strong
enough place to see beyond race and move past prejudice. Finally, we were about
to find out.
As a whole, the general election had been less grueling than the pitched
battle of the primaries. John McCain had done himself no favors by choosing
Alaska’s governor, Sarah Palin, as his running mate. Inexperienced and
unprepared, she’d quickly become a national punch line. And then, in mid-
September, the news had turned disastrous. The U.S. economy began to spiral
out of control when Lehman Brothers, one of the country’s largest investment
banks, abruptly went belly-up. The titans of Wall Street, the world now realized,
had spent years racking up profits on the backs of junk home loans. Stocks
plummeted. Credit markets froze. Retirement funds vanished.
Barack was the right person for this moment in history, for a job that was
never going to be easy but that had grown, thanks to the financial crisis,
exponentially more difficult. I’d been trumpeting it for more than a year and a
half now, all over America: My husband was calm and prepared. Complexity
didn’t scare him. He had a brain capable of sorting through every intricacy. I was
biased, of course, and personally I still would’ve been content to lose the election
and reclaim some version of our old lives, but I also was feeling that as a country
we truly needed his help. It was time to stop thinking about something as
arbitrary as skin color. We’d be foolish at this point not to put him in office. Still,
he would inherit a mess.
As evening drew closer, I felt my fingers getting numb, a nervous tingle
running through my body. I couldn’t really eat. I lost interest in making small talk
with my mom or the friends who’d stopped in. At some point, I went upstairs
just to catch a moment to myself.
Barack, it turned out, had retreated up there as well, clearly needing a
moment of his own.
I found him sitting at his desk, looking over the text of his victory speech in
the little book-strewn office adjacent to our bedroom—his Hole. I walked over
and began rubbing his shoulders.
“You doing okay?” I said.
“Yep.”