young woman from Miami who quickly became another big sister to our girls
and was central to keeping my life running smoothly.
I considered all these people, current and former staff, to be family. And I
was so proud of what we’d done.
For every video that swiftly saturated the internet—I’d mom-danced with
Jimmy Fallon, Nerf-dunked on LeBron James, and college-rapped with Jay
Pharoah—we’d focused ourselves on doing more than trending for a few hours
on Twitter. And we had results. Forty-five million kids were eating healthier
breakfasts and lunches; eleven million students were getting sixty minutes of
physical activity every day through our Let’s Move! Active Schools program.
Children overall were eating more whole grains and produce. The era of
supersized fast food was coming to a close.
Through my work with Jill Biden on Joining Forces, we’d helped persuade
businesses to hire or train more than 1.5 million veterans and military spouses.
Following through on one of the very first concerns I’d heard on the campaign
trail, we’d gotten all fifty states to collaborate on professional licensing
agreements, which would help keep military spouses’ careers from stalling every
time they moved.
On education, Barack and I had leveraged billions of dollars to help girls
around the world get the schooling they deserve. More than twenty-eight
hundred Peace Corps volunteers were now trained to implement programs for
girls internationally. And in the United States, my team and I had helped more
young people sign up for federal student aid, supported school counselors, and
elevated College Signing Day to a national level.
Barack, meanwhile, had managed to reverse the most serious economic crisis
since the Great Depression. He’d helped to broker the Paris Agreement on
climate change, brought tens of thousands of troops home from Iraq and
Afghanistan, and led the effort to effectively shut down Iran’s nuclear program.
Twenty million more people had the security of health insurance. And we’d
managed two terms in office without a major scandal. We had held ourselves and
the people who worked with us to the highest standards of ethics and decency,
and we’d made it all the way through.
For us, some changes were harder to measure but felt just as important. Six
months before the garden dedication, Lin-Manuel Miranda, the young composer
I’d met at one of our first arts events, returned to the White House. His hip-hop
riff on Alexander Hamilton had exploded into a Broadway sensation, and with it