I waited fifteen minutes, then thirty, but nobody responded. The room
around me began to feel strangely silent. My mother sat in the kitchen
downstairs, reading a magazine. Meredith was getting the girls ready for the
evening. Johnny ran a flat iron over my hair. Was I being paranoid, or were
people not looking me in the eye? Did they somehow know something I didn’t?
As more time passed, my head started to throb. I felt my equilibrium
beginning to slip. I didn’t dare turn on the news, assuming suddenly that it was
bad. I was accustomed at this point to fighting off negative thoughts, sticking to
the good until I was absolutely forced to contend with something unpleasant. I
kept my confidence in a little citadel, high on a hill inside my own heart. But for
every minute my BlackBerry lay dormant in my lap, I felt the walls starting to
breach, the doubts beginning to rampage. Maybe we hadn’t worked hard
enough. Maybe we didn’t deserve another term. My hands had started to shake.
I was just about ready to pass out from the anxiety when Barack came
trotting up the stairs, wearing his big old confident grin. His worries were well
behind him already. “We’re kicking butt,” he said, looking surprised that I didn’t
know it already. “It’s basically done.”
It turned out that downstairs, the mood had been jubilant all along, the
basement TV pumping out a consistent stream of good news. The problem for
me was that the cell service on my BlackBerry had somehow disconnected, never
sending out my messages or downloading updates from others. I’d allowed myself
to get trapped in my own head. Nobody had known I was worrying, not even
the people in the room with me.
Barack would win all but one of the battleground states that night. He’d win
among young people, minorities, and women, just as he had in 2008. Despite
everything the Republicans had done to try to thwart him, despite the many
attempts to obstruct his presidency, his vision had prevailed. We’d asked
Americans for permission to keep working—to finish strong—and now we’d
gotten it. The relief was immediate. Are we good enough? Yes we are.
At some late hour, Mitt Romney called to concede. Once again, we found
ourselves dressed up and waving from a stage, four Obamas and a lot of confetti,
glad to have another four years.
The certainty that came with reelection held me steady. We had more time
to further our aims. We could be more patient with our push for progress. We
had a sense of the future now, which made me happy. We could keep Sasha and
Malia enrolled at school; our staff could stay in their jobs; our ideas still mattered.