The Audacity of Hope (40 page)

This unwillingness to make hard choices and live up to our own ideals doesn’t just undermine U.S. credibility in the eyes of the world. It undermines the U.S. government’s credibility with the American people. Ultimately, it is how we manage that most precious resource—the American people, and the system of self-government we inherited from our Founders—that will determine the success of any foreign policy. The world out there is dangerous and complex; the work of remaking it will be long and hard, and will require some sacrifice. Such sacrifice comes about because the American people understand fully the choices before them; it is born of the confidence we have in our democracy. FDR understood this when he said, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, that “[t]his Government will put its trust in the stamina of the American people.” Truman understood this, which is why he worked with Dean Acheson to establish the

Committee for the Marshall Plan, made up of CEOs, academics, labor leaders, clergymen, and others who could stump for the plan across the country. It seems as if this is a lesson that America’s leadership needs to relearn.

I wonder, sometimes, whether men and women in fact are capable of learning from history—whether we progress from one stage to the next in an upward course or whether we just ride the cycles of boom and bust, war and peace, ascent and decline. On the same trip that took me to Baghdad, I spent a week traveling through Israel and the West Bank, meeting with officials from both sides, mapping in my own mind the site of so much strife. I talked to Jews who’d lost parents in the Holocaust and brothers in suicide bombings; I heard Palestinians talk of the indignities of checkpoints and reminisce about the land they had lost. I flew by helicopter across the line separating the two peoples and found myself unable to distinguish Jewish towns from Arab towns, all of them like fragile outposts against the green and stony hills. From the promenade above Jerusalem, I looked down at the Old City, the Dome of the Rock, the Western Wall, and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, considered the two thousand years of war and rumors of war that this small plot of land had come to represent, and pondered the possible futility of believing that this conflict might somehow end in our time, or that America, for all its power, might have any lasting say over the course of the world.

I don’t linger on such thoughts, though—they are the thoughts of an old man. As difficult as the work may seem, I believe we have an obligation to engage in efforts to bring about peace in the Middle East, not only for the benefit of the people of the region, but for the safety and security of our own children as well.

And perhaps the world’s fate depends not just on the events of its battlefields; perhaps it depends just as much on the work we do in those quiet places that require a helping hand. I remember seeing the news reports of the tsunami that hit East Asia in 2004—the towns of Indonesia’s western coast flattened, the thousands of people washed out to sea. And then, in the weeks that followed, I watched with pride as Americans sent more than a billion dollars in private relief aid and as U.S. warships delivered thousands of troops to assist in relief and reconstruction. According to newspaper reports, 65 percent of Indonesians surveyed said that this assistance had given them a more favorable view of the United States. I am not naive enough to believe that one episode in the wake of catastrophe can erase decades of mistrust.

But it’s a start.

The Audacity of Hope

Chapter Nine

Family

BY THE START of my second year in the Senate, my life had settled into a manageable rhythm. I would leave Chicago Monday night or early Tuesday morning, depending on the Senate’s voting schedule. Other than daily trips to the Senate gym and the rare lunch or dinner with a friend, the next three days would be consumed by a predictable series of tasks—committee markups, votes, caucus lunches, floor statements, speeches, photos with interns, evening fund-raisers, returning phone calls, writing correspondence, reviewing legislation, drafting op-eds, recording podcasts, receiving policy briefings, hosting constituent coffees, and attending an endless series of meetings. On Thursday afternoon, we would get word from the cloakroom as to when the last vote would be, and at the appointed hour I’d line up in the well of the Senate alongside my colleagues to cast my vote, before trotting down the Capitol steps in hopes of catching a flight that would get me home before the girls went to bed.

Despite the hectic schedule, I found the work fascinating, if occasionally frustrating. Contrary to popular perceptions, only about two dozen significant bills come up for a roll-call vote on the Senate floor every year, and almost none of those are sponsored by a member of the minority party. As a result, most of my major initiatives—the formation of public school innovation districts, a plan to help U.S. automakers pay for their retiree health-care costs in exchange for increased fuel economy standards, an expansion of the Pell Grant program to help low-income students meet rising college tuition costs—languished in committee.

On the other hand, thanks to great work by my staff, I managed to get a respectable number of amendments passed. We helped provide funds for homeless veterans. We provided tax credits to gas stations for installing E85 fuel pumps. We obtained funding to help the World Health Organization monitor and respond to a potential avian flu pandemic. We got an amendment out of the Senate eliminating no-bid contracts in the post-Katrina reconstruction, so more money would actually end up in the hands of the tragedy’s victims. None of these amendments would transform the country, but I took satisfaction in knowing that each of them helped some people in a modest way or nudged the law in a direction that might prove to be more economical, more responsible, or more just.

One day in February I found myself in particularly good spirits, having just completed a hearing on legislation that Dick Lugar and I were sponsoring aimed at restricting weapons proliferation and the black-market arms trade. Because Dick was not only the Senate’s leading expert on proliferation issues but also the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, prospects for the bill seemed promising. Wanting to share the good news, I called Michelle from my D.C. office and started explaining the significance of the bill—how shoulder-to-air missiles could threaten commercial air travel if they fell into the wrong hands, how small-arms stockpiles left over from the Cold War continued to feed conflict across the globe. Michelle cut me off.

“We have ants.”

“Huh?”

“I found ants in the kitchen. And in the bathroom upstairs.”

“Okay…”

“I need you to buy some ant traps on your way home tomorrow. I’d get them myself, but I’ve got to take the girls to their doctor’s appointment after school. Can you do that for me?”

“Right. Ant traps.”

“Ant traps. Don’t forget, okay, honey? And buy more than one. Listen, I need to go into a meeting. Love you.”

I hung up the receiver, wondering if Ted Kennedy or John McCain bought ant traps on the way home from work.

MOST PEOPLE WHO meet my wife quickly conclude that she is remarkable. They are right about this—she is smart, funny, and thoroughly charming. She is also very beautiful, although not in a way that men find intimidating or women find off-putting; it is the lived-in beauty of the mother and busy professional rather than the touched-up image we see on the cover of glossy magazines. Often, after hearing her speak at some function or working with her on a project, people will approach me and say something to the effect of “You know I think the world of you, Barack, but your wife…wow!” I nod, knowing that if I ever had to run against her for public office, she would beat me without much difficulty.

Fortunately for me, Michelle would never go into politics. “I don’t have the patience,” she says to people who ask. As is always the case, she is telling the truth.

I met Michelle in the summer of 1988, while we were both working at Sidley & Austin, a large corporate law firm based in Chicago. Although she is three years younger than me, Michelle was already a practicing lawyer, having attended Harvard Law straight out of college. I had just finished my first year at law school and had been hired as a summer associate.

It was a difficult, transitional period in my life. I had enrolled in law school after three years of work as a community organizer, and although I enjoyed my studies, I still harbored doubts about my decision. Privately, I worried that it represented the abandonment of my youthful ideals, a concession to the hard realities of money and power—the world as it is rather than the world as it should be.

The idea of working at a corporate law firm, so near and yet so far removed from the poor neighborhoods where my friends were still laboring, only worsened these fears. But with student loans rapidly mounting, I was in no position to turn down the three months of salary Sidley was offering. And so, having sublet the cheapest apartment I could find, having purchased the first three suits ever to appear in my closet and a new

pair of shoes that turned out to be a half size too small and would absolutely cripple me for the next nine weeks, I arrived at the firm one drizzly morning in early June and was directed to the office of the young attorney who’d been assigned to serve as my summer advisor.

I don’t remember the details of that first conversation with Michelle. I remember that she was tall—almost my height in heels—and lovely, with a friendly, professional manner that matched her tailored suit and blouse. She explained how work was assigned at the firm, the nature of the various practice groups, and how to log our billable hours. After showing me my office and giving me a tour of the library, she handed me off to one of the partners and told me that she would meet me for lunch.

Later Michelle would tell me that she had been pleasantly surprised when I walked into her office; the drugstore snapshot that I’d sent in for the firm directory made my nose look a little big (even more enormous than usual, she might say), and she had been skeptical when the secretaries who’d seen me during my interview told her I was cute: “I figured that they were just impressed with any black man with a suit and a job.” But if Michelle was impressed, she certainly didn’t tip her hand when we went to lunch. I did learn that she had grown up on the South Side, in a small bungalow just north of the neighborhoods where I had organized. Her father was a pump operator for the city; her mother had been a housewife until the kids were grown, and now worked as a secretary at a bank. She had attended Bryn Mawr Public Elementary School, gotten into Whitney Young Magnet School, and followed her brother to Princeton, where he had been a star on the basketball team. At Sidley she was part of the intellectual property group and specialized in entertainment law; at some point, she said, she might have to consider moving to Los Angeles or New York to pursue her career.

Oh, Michelle was full of plans that day, on the fast track, with no time, she told me, for distractions—especially men. But she knew how to laugh, brightly and easily, and I noticed she didn’t seem in too much of a hurry to get back to the office. And there was something else, a glimmer that danced across her round, dark eyes whenever I looked at her, the slightest hint of uncertainty, as if, deep inside, she knew how fragile things really were, and that if she ever let go, even for a moment, all her plans might quickly unravel. That touched me somehow, that trace of vulnerability. I wanted to know that part of her.

For the next several weeks, we saw each other every day, in the law library or the cafeteria or at one of the many outings that law firms organize for their summer associates to convince them that their life in the law will not be endless hours of poring through documents. She took me to one or two parties, tactfully overlooking my limited wardrobe, and even tried to set me up with a couple of her friends. Still, she refused to go out on a proper date. It wasn’t appropriate, she said, since she was my advisor.

“That’s a poor excuse,” I told her. “Come on, what advice are you giving me? You’re showing me how the copy machine works. You’re telling me what restaurants to try. I don’t think the partners will consider one date a serious breach of firm policy.”

She shook her head. “Sorry.”

“Okay, I’ll quit. How’s that? You’re my advisor. Tell me who I have to talk to.”

Eventually I wore her down. After a firm picnic, she drove me back to my apartment, and I offered to buy her an ice cream cone at the Baskin-Robbins across the street. We sat on the curb and ate our cones in the sticky afternoon heat, and I told her about working at Baskin-Robbins when I was a teenager and how it was hard to look cool in a brown apron and cap. She told me that for a span of two or three years as a child, she had refused to eat anything except peanut butter and jelly. I said that I’d like to meet her family. She said that she would like that.

I asked if I could kiss her. It tasted of chocolate.

We spent the rest of the summer together. I told her about organizing, and living in Indonesia, and what it was like to bodysurf. She told me about her childhood friends, and a trip to Paris she’d taken in high school, and her favorite Stevie Wonder songs.

But it wasn’t until I met Michelle’s family that I began to understand her. It turned out that visiting the Robinson household was like dropping in on the set of Leave It to Beaver. There was Frasier, the kindly, good-humored father, who never missed a day of work or any of his son’s ball games. There was Marian, the pretty, sensible mother who baked birthday cakes, kept order in the house, and had volunteered at school to make sure her children were behaving and that the teachers were doing what they were supposed to be doing. There was Craig, the basketball-star brother, tall and friendly and courteous and funny, working as an investment banker but dreaming of going into coaching someday. And there were uncles and aunts and cousins everywhere, stopping by to sit around the kitchen table and eat until they burst and tell wild stories and listen to Grandpa’s old jazz collection and laugh deep into the night.

All that was missing was the dog. Marian didn’t want a dog tearing up the house.

What made this vision of domestic bliss all the more impressive was the fact that the Robinsons had had to overcome hardships that one rarely saw on prime-time TV. There were the usual issues of race, of course: the limited opportunities available to Michelle’s parents growing up in Chicago during the fifties and sixties; the racial steering and panic peddling that had driven white families away from their neighborhood; the extra energy required from black parents to compensate for smaller incomes and more violent streets and underfunded playgrounds and indifferent schools.

But there was a more specific tragedy at the center of the Robinson household. At the age of thirty, in the prime of his life, Michelle’s father had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. For the next twenty-five years, as his condition steadily deteriorated, he had carried out his responsibilities to his family without a trace of self-pity, giving himself an extra hour every morning to get to work, struggling with every physical act from driving a car to buttoning his shirt, smiling and joking as he labored—at first with a limp and eventually with the aid of two canes, his balding head beading with sweat— across a field to watch his son play, or across the living room to give his daughter a kiss.

After we were married, Michelle would help me understand the hidden toll that her father’s illness had taken on her family; how heavy a burden Michelle’s mother had been forced to carry; how carefully circumscribed their lives together had been, with even the smallest outing carefully planned to avoid problems or awkwardness; how terrifyingly random life seemed beneath the smiles and laughter.

But back then I saw only the joy of the Robinson house. For someone like me, who had barely known his father, who had spent much of his life traveling from place to place, his bloodlines scattered to the four winds, the home that Frasier and Marian Robinson had built for themselves and their children stirred a longing for stability and a sense of place that I had not realized was there. Just as Michelle perhaps saw in me a life of adventure, risk, travel to exotic lands—a wider horizon than she had previously allowed herself.

Six months after Michelle and I met, her father died suddenly of complications after a kidney operation. I flew back to Chicago and stood at his gravesite, Michelle’s head on my shoulder. As the casket was lowered, I promised Frasier Robinson that I would take care of his girl. I realized that in some unspoken, still tentative way, she and I were already becoming a family.

THERE’S A LOT of talk these days about the decline of the American family. Social conservatives claim that the traditional family is under assault from Hollywood movies and gay pride parades. Liberals point to the economic factors—from stagnating wages to inadequate day care—that have put families under increasing duress. Our popular culture feeds the alarm, with tales of women consigned to permanent singlehood, men unwilling to make lasting commitments, and teens engaged in endless sexual escapades. Nothing seems settled, as it was in the past; our roles and relationships all feel up for grabs.