“Raindance.”)
When speaking to me directly, the Secret Service agents almost always called
me “ma’am.” As in, “This way, ma’am. Please step back, ma’am.” And, “Ma’am,
your car will be here shortly.”
Who’s “Ma’am”? I’d wanted to ask at first. Ma’am sounded to me like an
older woman with a proper purse, good posture, and sensible shoes who was
maybe sitting somewhere nearby.
But I was Ma’am. Ma’am was me. It was part of this larger shift, this crazy
transition we were in.
All this was on my mind the day I traveled to Washington to visit schools.
After one of my meetings, I went back to Reagan National Airport to meet
Barack, who was due in on a chartered flight from Chicago. As was protocol for
the president-elect, we’d been invited by President and Mrs. Bush to drop by for
a visit to the White House and had scheduled it to coincide with my trip to look
at schools. I stood waiting at the private terminal as Barack’s plane touched down.
Next to me was Cornelius Southall, one of the agents heading my security detail.
Cornelius was a square-shouldered former college football player who’d
previously worked as a part of President Bush’s security team. Like all of my
detail leaders, he was smart, trained to be hyperaware at every moment, a human
sensor. Even then, as the two of us watched Barack’s plane taxi and come to a
stop maybe twenty yards away on the tarmac, he was picking up on something
before I did.
“Ma’am,” he said as some new piece of information arrived via his earpiece,
“your life is about to change forever.”
When I looked at him quizzically, he added, “Just wait.”
He then pointed to the right, and I turned to look. Exactly on cue,
something massive came around the corner: a snaking, vehicular army that
included a phalanx of police cars and motorcycles, a number of black SUVs, two
armored limousines with American flags mounted on their hoods, a hazmat
mitigation truck, a counterassault team riding with machine guns visible, an
ambulance, a signals truck equipped to detect incoming projectiles, several
passenger vans, and another group of police escorts. The presidential motorcade.
It was at least twenty vehicles long, moving in orchestrated formation, car after
car after car, before finally the whole fleet rolled to a quiet halt, and the limos
stopped directly in front of Barack’s parked plane.
I turned to Cornelius. “Is there a clown car?” I said. “Seriously, this is what