process none of it. It all felt too big.
I remember little of Barack’s speech that night. Sasha, Malia, and I watched
him from the wings as he said his words, surrounded by those glass shields and by
our city and by the comfort of more than sixty-nine million votes. What stays
with me is that sense of comfort, the unusual calmness of that unusually warm
November night by the lake in Chicago. After so many months of going to high-
energy campaign rallies with crowds deliberately whipped up into a shouting,
chanting frenzy, the atmosphere in Grant Park was different. We were standing
before a giant, jubilant mass of Americans who were also palpably reflective.
What I heard was relative silence. It seemed almost as if I could make out every
face in the crowd. There were tears in many eyes.
Maybe the calmness was something I imagined, or maybe for all of us, it was
just a product of the late hour. It was almost midnight, after all. And everyone
had been waiting. We’d been waiting a long, long time.