who you are; it reveals who you are.”
This time, I was stumping for Hillary Clinton, Barack’s opponent in the
brutal 2008 primary who’d gone on to become his loyal and effective secretary of
state. I’d never feel as passionately about another candidate as I did about my own
husband, which made campaigning for others sometimes difficult for me. I
maintained a code for myself, though, when it came to speaking publicly about
anything or anyone in the political sphere: I said only what I absolutely believed
and what I absolutely felt.
We landed in Philadelphia and I rushed to the convention center, finding
just enough time to change clothes and run through my speech twice. Then I
stepped out and spoke my truth. I talked about the fears I’d had early on about
raising our daughters in the White House and how proud I was of the intelligent
young women they’d become. I said that I trusted Hillary because she understood
the demands of the presidency and had the temperament to lead, because she was
as qualified as any nominee in history. And I acknowledged the stark choice now
being put before the country.
Since childhood, I’d believed it was important to speak out against bullies
while also not stooping to their level. And to be clear, we were now up against a
bully, a man who among other things demeaned minorities and expressed
contempt for prisoners of war, challenging the dignity of our country with
practically his every utterance. I wanted Americans to understand that words
matter—that the hateful language they heard coming from their TVs did not
reflect the true spirit of our country and that we could vote against it. It was
dignity I wanted to make an appeal for—the idea that as a nation we might hold
on to the core thing that had sustained my family, going back generations.
Dignity had always gotten us through. It was a choice, and not always the easy
one, but the people I respected most in life made it again and again, every single
day. There was a motto Barack and I tried to live by, and I offered it that night
from the stage: When they go low, we go high.
Two months later, just weeks before the election, a tape would surface of
Donald Trump in an unguarded moment, bragging to a TV host in 2005 about
sexually assaulting women, using language so lewd and vulgar that it put media
outlets in a quandary about how to quote it without violating the established
standards of decency. In the end, the standards of decency were simply lowered
in order to make room for the candidate’s voice.
When I heard it, I could hardly believe it. And then again, there was