I

were police officers stationed on practically every corner, Coast Guard boats
patrolling the lake, helicopters overhead. All of Chicago, it seemed, was holding
its breath, waiting for news.

Connecticut went for Barack. Then New Hampshire went for Barack. So
did Massachusetts, Maine, Delaware, and D.C. When Illinois was called for
Barack, we could hear cars honking and shouts of excitement from the streets
below. I found a chair near the door to the suite and sat alone, surveying the
scene in front of me. The room had gone mostly quiet now, the political team’s
nervous updates having given way to an expectant, almost sober kind of calm. To
my right, the girls sat in their red and black dresses on a couch, and to my left,
Barack, his suit coat draped elsewhere in the room, had taken a seat on another
couch next to my mother, who was dressed that evening in an elegant black suit
and silver earrings.

“Are you ready for this, Grandma?” I heard Barack say to her.
Never one to overemote, my mom just gave him a sideways look and
shrugged, causing them both to smile. Later, though, she’d describe to me how
overcome she’d felt right then, struck just as I’d been by his vulnerability.
America had come to see Barack as self-assured and powerful, but my mother also
recognized the gravity of the passage, the loneliness of the job ahead. Here was
this man who no longer had a father or a mother, about to be elected the leader
of the free world.

The next    time    I   looked  over,   I   saw that    she and Barack  were    holding hands.

t was exactly ten o’clock when the networks began to flash pictures of my
smiling husband, declaring that Barack Hussein Obama would become the forty-
fourth president of the United States. We all leaped to our feet and started
instinctively to yell. Our campaign staff streamed into the room, as did the
Bidens, everyone hurling themselves from one hug to the next. It was surreal. I
felt as if I’d been lifted out of my own body, only watching myself react.

He had done it. We’d all done it. It hardly seemed possible, but the victory
was sound.

Here is where I felt like our family got launched out of a cannon and into
some strange underwater universe. Things felt slow and aqueous and slightly
distorted, even if we were moving quickly and with precise guidance, waved by