they were.
I put this on myself as pressure, a driving need not to screw anything up.
Though I was thought of as a popular First Lady, I couldn’t help but feel haunted
by the ways I’d been criticized, by the people who’d made assumptions about me
based on the color of my skin. To this end, I rehearsed my speeches again and
again using a teleprompter set up in one corner of my office. I pushed hard on
my schedulers and advance teams to make sure every one of our events ran
smoothly and on time. I pushed even harder on my policy advisers to continue
growing the reach of Let’s Move! and Joining Forces. I was focused on not
wasting any of the opportunities I now had, but sometimes I had to remind
myself just to breathe.
Barack and I both knew that the months of campaigning ahead would
involve extra travel, extra strategizing, and extra worry. It was impossible not to
worry about reelection. The cost was huge. (Barack and Mitt Romney, the
former Massachusetts governor who would eventually become the Republican
nominee, would each raise over a billion dollars in the end to keep their
campaigns competitive.) And the responsibility was also huge. The election
would determine everything from the fate of the new health-care law to whether
America would be part of the global effort to combat climate change. Everyone
working in the White House lived in the limbo of not knowing whether we’d
get a second term. I tried not to even consider the possibility that Barack might
lose the election, but it was there—a kernel of fear he and I carried privately,
neither of us daring to give it voice.
The summer of 2011 turned out to be especially bruising for Barack. A
group of obstinate congressional Republicans refused to authorize the issuing of
new government bonds—a relatively routine process known as raising the debt
ceiling—unless he made a series of painful cuts to government programs like
Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, which he opposed because they would
hurt the people who were struggling the most. Meanwhile, the monthly jobs
reports published by the Labor Department were showing consistent but sluggish
growth, suggesting that when it came to recovering from the 2008 crisis, the
nation still wasn’t where it needed to be. Many people blamed Barack. In the
relief following the death of Osama bin Laden, his approval ratings had spiked,
hitting a two-year high, but then, just a few months later, following the debt-
ceiling brawl and worries about a new recession, they’d plunged to the lowest
they’d been.