I

nutrition, and a handful of grocery shoppers who safeguarded us from any sort of
food sabotage by making anonymous runs to different stores, picking up supplies
without ever revealing whom they worked for.

As long as I’ve known him, Barack has never derived pleasure from
shopping, cooking, or home maintenance of any kind. He’s not someone who
keeps power tools in the basement or shakes off work stress by making a risotto
or trimming hedges. For him, the removal of all obligations and worries
concerning the home made him nothing but happy, if only because it freed his
brain, allowing it to roam unfettered over larger concerns, of which there were
many.

Most amusing to me was the fact that he now had three personal military
valets whose duties included standing watch over his closet, making sure his shoes
were shined, his shirts pressed, his gym clothes always fresh and folded. Life in the
White House was very different from life in the Hole.

“You see how neat I am now?” Barack said to me one day as we sat at
breakfast, his eyes mirthful. “Have you looked in my closet?”

“I  have,”  I   said,   smiling back.   “And    you get no  credit  for any of  it.”

n his first month in office, Barack signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act,
which helped protect workers from wage discrimination based on factors like
gender, race, or age. He ordered the end of the use of torture in interrogations
and began an effort (ultimately unsuccessful) to close the detention facility at
Guantánamo Bay within a year. He overhauled ethics rules governing White
House employees’ interactions with lobbyists and, most important, managed to
push a major economic stimulus bill through Congress, even though not a single
House Republican voted in its favor. From where I sat, he seemed to be on a
roll. The change he’d promised was becoming real.

As an added bonus, he was showing up for dinner on time.
For me and the girls, this was the startling, happy shift that came from living
in the White House with the president of the United States as opposed to living
in Chicago with a father who served in some faraway senate and was often out
campaigning for higher office. We had access, at long last, to Dad. His life was
more orderly now. He worked a ridiculous number of hours, as he always had,
but at 6:30 p.m. sharp he’d get on the elevator and ride upstairs to have a family