Барак Обама - The Audacity of Hope

“Great!” She took a swig of water. “Daddy, I have a question.”

“Shoot.”

“Can we get a dog?”

“What does your mother say?”

“She told me to ask you. I think I’m wearing her down.”

I looked at Michelle, who smiled and offered a shrug.

“How about we talk it over after the game?” I said.

“Okay.” Malia took another sip of water and kissed me on the cheek. “I’m glad you’re home,” she said.

Before I could answer, she had turned around and started back out onto the field. And for an instant, in the glow of the late afternoon, I thought I saw my older daughter as the woman she would become, as if with each step she were growing taller, her shape filling out, her long legs carrying her into a life of her own.

I squeezed Sasha a little tighter in my lap. Perhaps sensing what I was feeling, Michelle took my hand. And I remembered a quote Michelle had given to a reporter during the campaign, when he’d asked her what it was like being a political wife.

“It’s hard,” Michelle had said. Then, according to the reporter, she had added with a sly smile, “And that’s why Barack is such a grateful man.”

As usual, my wife is right.

M Y SWEARING IN to the U.S. Senate in January 2005 completed a process that had begun the day I announced my candidacy two years earlier — the exchange of a relatively anonymous life for a very public one.

To be sure, many things have remained constant. Our family still makes its home in Chicago. I still go to the same Hyde Park barbershop to get my hair cut, Michelle and I have the same friends over to our house as we did before the election, and our daughters still run through the same playgrounds.

Still, there’s no doubt that the world has changed profoundly for me, in ways that I don’t always care to admit. My words, my actions, my travel plans, and my tax returns all end up in the morning papers or on the nightly news broadcast. My daughters have to endure the interruptions of well-meaning strangers whenever their father takes them to the zoo. Even outside of Chicago, it’s becoming harder to walk unnoticed through airports.

As a rule, I find it difficult to take all this attention very seriously. After all, there are days when I still walk out of the house with a suit jacket that doesn’t match my suit pants. My thoughts are so much less tidy, my days so much less organized than the image of me that now projects itself into the world, that it makes for occasional comic moments. I remember the day before I was sworn in, my staff and I decided we should hold a press conference in our office. At the time, I was ranked ninety-ninth in seniority, and all the reporters were crammed into a tiny transition office in the basement of the Dirksen Office Building, across the hall from the Senate supply store. It was my first day in the building; I had not taken a single vote, had not introduced a single bill — indeed I had not even sat down at my desk when a very earnest reporter raised his hand and asked, “Senator Obama, what is your place in history?”

Even some of the other reporters had to laugh.

Some of the hyperbole can be traced back to my speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston, the point at which I first gained national attention. In fact, the process by which I was selected as the keynote speaker remains something of a mystery to me. I had met John Kerry for the first time after the Illinois primary, when I spoke at his fund-raiser and accompanied him to a campaign event highlighting the importance of job-training programs. A few weeks later, we got word that the Kerry people wanted me to speak at the convention, although it was not yet clear in what capacity. One afternoon, as I drove back from Springfield to Chicago for an evening campaign event, Kerry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill called to deliver the news. After I hung up, I turned to my driver, Mike Signator.

“I guess this is pretty big,” I said.

Mike nodded. “You could say that.”

I had only been to one previous Democratic convention, the 200 °Convention in Los Angeles. I hadn’t planned to attend that convention; I was just coming off my defeat in the Democratic primary for the Illinois First Congressional District seat, and was determined to spend most of the summer catching up on work at the law practice that I’d left unattended during the campaign (a neglect that had left me more or less broke), as well as make up for lost time with a wife and daughter who had seen far too little of me during the previous six months.

At the last minute, though, several friends and supporters who were planning to go insisted that I join them. You need to make national contacts, they told me, for when you run again — and anyway, it will be fun. Although they didn’t say this at the time, I suspect they saw a trip to the convention as a bit of useful therapy for me, on the theory that the best thing to do after getting thrown off a horse is to get back on right away.

Eventually I relented and booked a flight to L.A. When I landed, I took the shuttle to Hertz Rent A Car, handed the woman behind the counter my American Express card, and began looking at the map for directions to a cheap hotel that I’d found near Venice Beach. After a few minutes the Hertz woman came back with a look of embarrassment on her face.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Obama, but your card’s been rejected.”

“That can’t be right. Can you try again?”

“I tried twice, sir. Maybe you should call American Express.”

After half an hour on the phone, a kindhearted supervisor at American Express authorized the car rental. But the episode served as an omen of things to come. Not being a delegate, I couldn’t secure a floor pass; according to the Illinois Party chairman, he was already inundated with requests, and the best he could do was give me a pass that allowed entry only onto the convention site. I ended up watching most of the speeches on various television screens scattered around the Staples Center, occasionally following friends or acquaintances into skyboxes where it was clear I didn’t belong. By Tuesday night, I realized that my presence was serving neither me nor the Democratic Party any apparent purpose, and by Wednesday morning I was on the first flight back to Chicago.

Given the distance between my previous role as a convention gate-crasher and my newfound role as convention keynoter, I had some cause to worry that my appearance in Boston might not go very well. But perhaps because by that time I had become accustomed to outlandish things happening in my campaign, I didn’t feel particularly nervous. A few days after the call from Ms. Cahill, I was back in my hotel room in Springfield, making notes for a rough draft of the speech while watching a basketball game. I thought about the themes that I’d sounded during the campaign — the willingness of people to work hard if given the chance, the need for government to help provide a foundation for opportunity, the belief that Americans felt a sense of mutual obligation toward one another. I made a list of the issues I might touch on — health care, education, the war in Iraq.

But most of all, I thought about the voices of all the people I’d met on the campaign trail. I remembered Tim Wheeler and his wife in Galesburg, trying to figure out how to get their teenage son the liver transplant he needed. I remembered a young man in East Moline named Seamus Ahern who was on his way to Iraq — the desire he had to serve his country, the look of pride and apprehension on the face of his father. I remembered a young black woman I’d met in East St. Louis whose name I never would catch, but who told me of her efforts to attend college even though no one in her family had ever graduated from high school.