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doing interviews with big newspapers or cable news outlets, I began sitting down
with influential “mommy bloggers” who reached an enormous and dialed-in
audience of women. Watching my young staffers interact with their phones,
seeing Malia and Sasha start to take in news and chat with their high school
friends via social media, I realized there was opportunity to be tapped there as
well. I crafted my first tweet in the fall of 2011 to promote Joining Forces and
then watched it zing through the strange, boundless ether where people
increasingly spent their time.

It was a revelation. All of it was a revelation. With my soft power, I was
finding I could be strong.

If reporters and television cameras wanted to follow me, then I was going to
take them places. They could come watch me and Jill Biden paint a wall, for
example, at a nondescript row house in the Northwest part of Washington.
There was nothing inherently interesting about two ladies with paint rollers, but
it baited a certain hook.

It brought everyone to the doorstep of Sergeant Johnny Agbi, who’d been
twenty-five years old and a medic in Afghanistan when his transport helicopter
was attacked, shattering his spine, injuring his brain, and requiring a long
rehabilitation at Walter Reed. His first floor was now being retrofitted to
accommodate his wheelchair—its doorways widened, its kitchen sink lowered—
part of a joint effort between a nonprofit called Rebuilding Together and the
company that owned Sears and Kmart. This was the thousandth such home
they’d renovated on behalf of veterans in need. The cameras caught all of it—the
soldier, his house, the goodwill and energy being poured in. The reporters
interviewed not just me and Jill but Sergeant Agbi and the folks who’d done the
real work. For me, this was how it should be. The gaze belonged here.

n Election Day—November 6, 2012—my fears sat with me quietly.
Barack and the girls and I were back in Chicago, at home on Greenwood
Avenue, caught in the purgatory of waiting for an entire nation to accept or
reject us. This vote, for me, was more fraught than any other we’d gone through.
It felt like a referendum not only on Barack’s political performance and the state
of the country but also on his character, on our very presence in the White
House. Our girls had established a strong community for themselves, and a sense
of normalcy that I didn’t want to upend yet again. I was so invested now, having