6

Now we have two things to celebrate on the Fourth…

Now we have two things to celebrate on the Fourth of July!” Barack declared as he cradled his infant daughter in his arms for the first time. Obstetrician Anita Blanchard, who also happened to be the wife of Barack’s close pal Martin Nesbitt, was thrilled that the delivery had gone so smoothly—particularly in light of the fact that Michelle had had such difficulty conceiving.

Barack and Michelle named their first child Malia Ann, a nod to both her grandmothers. Malia is the Hawaiian equivalent of “Mary,” the closest they could come to Marian, and Ann after Barack’s mom.

Elated, he kissed his wife and left her to rest in her private room at the University of Chicago Medical Center maternity ward. It was only as he was driving back to see her a few hours later that he realized he was empty-handed. Frantic, he pulled over at the Hyde Park Shopping Center on Fifty-fifth and Lake Park Avenue and dashed into Joyce’s Hallmark card shop.

He walked up and down the aisles for a few minutes before finally approaching the store’s owner, Joyce Feuer, and throwing up his hands. “My wife has just had a baby,” Barack said, “and I’m visiting her and our incredible daughter in the hospital, and I have absolutely no clue as to what to bring her. Flowers? A card?”

An old hand at such things, Joyce and her sales staff quickly whipped up a gift bag that included pink balloons, a card for Mom, and a plush teddy bear. She congratulated Barack as he grabbed the bag, turned, and bolted out the door. “Even for a first-time father,” said the salesclerk, “he was just over the moon with joy.”

There were plenty of reasons for Barack and Michelle to celebrate Malia’s July Fourth arrival, not the least of which was the simple fact that Daddy was actually on hand to enjoy it. During the summer, he was able to stay in Chicago because the State Senate was not in session. Nor did he have to teach any classes or spend long hours attending meetings, preparing his lectures, and grading papers. Michelle was also free; she had taken maternity leave and would not be returning to her job at the university until September.

For three months, they reveled in the joys of young parenthood. They sang to her, rocked her, burped her, dangled keys above her head to get her attention, took countless snapshots (“So many we started to wonder if we were damaging her eyes,” he said), and showed her off to anybody who happened to be in the vicinity. Because Dad was a night owl and Mom was an early bird, she turned in even earlier than usual and he stayed up until 2 A.M. heating up bottles, changing diapers, and rocking Malia to sleep. Barack would later remember this period in their lives as “magical.”

The magic, however, ended with the summer. Once again, Barack was in Springfield four days a week—sometimes more. They hired a babysitter to take care of Malia so that Michelle could return to work, but when she returned home from the office each night, she faced the job of caring for Malia alone.

The tensions that had been simmering in their marriage ever since he was elected to the State Senate were now boiling over. The phone calls between them were becoming less frequent and more terse. She scolded him for spending so much time in Springfield—where he did not have to cope with 1 A.M. bottle feedings, changing diapers, laundry, housekeeping, and—most important—a mind-numbing lack of adult conversation and companionship. “Politics,” she went so far as to tell a local reporter who asked about her husband’s nascent political career, “is a waste of time.”

More to the point, Michelle viewed Barack’s State Senate career as a costly waste of time. “She still didn’t really understand,” Dan Shomon said, “why he was not at a law firm, where he could be making seven hundred thousand or eight hundred thousand a year or a million or two, and why he was lowering himself to the state legislature.” Observed Abner Mikva, “They were poor as church mice, and she was one very unhappy mouse.”

Nevertheless, with a babysitter caring for Malia during the day, Michelle was free to put in her usual eight hours at the university. There, she managed to repeat the success she had had at Public Allies. By pushing undergraduates to go outside their comfort level and volunteer in the community, she started the process of breaking down walls of resentment that had built up over decades.

But when she came home to Malia and no Barack, Michelle felt “very much alone. It was hard to suddenly be by yourself with a baby,” she said, “and frankly I was angry.”

It wasn’t much better during the few days a week Barack did manage to spend in Chicago. Back to his old schedule, he was either teaching or out at meetings giving the kind of heartfelt speeches that had made Michelle love him in the first place. Only now, Barack’s social consciousness no longer seemed so endearing.

Michelle shared her frustrations with her brother, who had given up his career on Wall Street to coach the basketball team at Brown University, and with her mother. They had little success trying to calm her down. “Michelle is really upset with Barack,” Marian Robinson confided to an old family friend, “and you know she’s not shy about telling him off.”

Barack acknowledged his shortcomings. “I leave my socks around,” he conceded. “I’ll hang my pants on the door. I leave newspapers lying around. But she lets me know when I’m not acting right.”

For the most part, he felt he was being treated unfairly. “Whenever I could, I pitched in,” he later wrote. “All I asked for in return was a little tenderness.” Instead, when he got home he would find Post-it notes (PLEASE PICK UP AFTER YOURSELF—YOU LEFT YOUR UNDERWEAR ON THE FLOOR AGAIN!) and endless lists of chores to do and errands to run.

“I remember the lists,” Shomon said. “ Okay, Barack, you’re going to do grocery shopping two times a week. You’re to pick up Malia. You’re going to do blah, blah, blah, and you’re responsible for blah, blah, blah.’ So he had his assignments, and he never questioned her, never bitched about it.”

Occasionally, Barack struck back with a reminder that she had racked up more than her share of parking tickets, but for the most part he just asked her to be patient. He was still finding his way as a politician, he reminded her, and things would improve once he’d settled into the job. “After all,” he said, “it isn’t as if I’m out carousing with the boys every night…. As far as I was concerned, she had nothing to complain about.”

For Michelle, the final straw came with Barack’s decision to challenge incumbent Democratic U.S. Congressman Bobby Rush for his party’s nomination. The former Black Panther, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) member, and Stokely Carmichael follower had just been trounced by Richard Daley in Chicago’s mayoral primary, and Barack interpreted that defeat as meaning that Rush was vulnerable.

“You are so wrong,” Michelle would later say she told her husband. As a daughter of the South Side, she knew just how popular Rush was with the voters in his district, regardless of how he played citywide. Barack was still inexorably linked in the minds of South Side voters with the University of Chicago and Hyde Park’s academic elite. “There is just no way,” she warned him, “that you are going to beat Bobby Rush.”

“Michelle put up no pretense of being happy with my decision,” he later wrote. “Leaning down to kiss Michelle good-bye in the morning, all I would get was a peck on the cheek.”

“Michelle was not a happy camper,” said Barack’s friend and fellow Senator Denny Jacobs. “She felt he was wasting his time in Springfield, but she also felt that running for Congress just wasn’t worth the trouble. There are plenty of Congressmen. If he was going to be in politics at all, she wanted him to aim higher.” For his part, Jacobs also pushed his friend to seek higher office. “As far as you’re concerned,” he told Barack, “it’s either up—or out.”

Barack wouldn’t listen to Michelle, or to advisers who also warned that he faced real resentment from voters for even daring to challenge the popular incumbent. “The accusations were that Obama was sent here and owned by the Jews,” said Obama campaign worker Al Kindle, “that he was here to steal the black vote…that he didn’t know the black experience…. It was quite deafening.” Added Denny Jacobs’s son Mike, also a State Senator and an acquaintance of Barack’s, “He had to put up with a lot—being called an Uncle Tom was the least of it. But it just rolled off his back.”

Barack fueled this perception with remarks that were viewed by many as overtly condescending. “I gave up a career,” he reminded voters during one stump speech, “with a high-priced law firm to run for office.”

In terms of connecting on a grassroots level, the best thing Barack had going for him was Michelle. Black voters had no qualms about asking right off the bat whether Barack’s wife was white or black. “Whenever we told them he married a black woman who was born and raised on the South Side,” said a campaign worker, “you would see a whole different attitude.”

Michelle joked with voters about her bona fides (“You don’t get any blacker than me”), but privately she was angry that Barack was being viewed with suspicion. “I’ve really had it with that stuff,” she said. “When you think of all that he’s done for the community, it’s just insulting.”

Still, Barack was unable to distance himself from the notion that he somehow wasn’t black enough to represent Rush’s South Side district. It didn’t help that Barrack’s speaking style was decidedly professorial. When he first heard his friend speak at a black church, Abner Mikva was “completely dismayed. Barrack had always appealed to the Hyde Park crowd—the eggheads—and here he was talking to a bunch of African American church ladies as if they were his law students. Frankly, it didn’t make any sense to me. I was shocked.” Eventually, Michelle would manage to convince her husband to loosen up in front of black audiences. “The single most important factor in getting Barrack to change his way of speaking in front of black audiences was Michelle,” Mikva said. “If it hadn’t been for her, Barrack would never have connected with this core constituency—and he never would have gone beyond the State Senate.”

Unfortunately for Barrack, this essential transformation from pedant to folksy orator would not take place until after the congressional campaign. In the meantime, his campaign suffered another blow when Rush’s twenty-nine-year-old son, Huey, was shot and killed. Voters were hard-pressed not to sympathize with Rush—a feeling that only intensified when, toward the end of the campaign, Rush’s father also died. Even Barack’s old South Side friends like Loretta Augustin-Herron knew he was in trouble. “Bobby Rush had suffered so many tragedies that everybody felt very sorry for him,” she said. “We are a very tight-knit community. We don’t turn our backs on our own.”

When Barack knuckled under to pressure from Michelle and refused to return from his annual family vacation in Hawaii to vote for gun control legislation, Rush held a press conference to excoriate him. Then, in the final week of the campaign, President Bill Clinton did a series of spots on black radio endorsing Rush. “I’m President Clinton,” he announced, “urging you to send Bobby Rush back to Congress where he can continue his fight to prepare our children for the twenty-first century. Illinois and America need Bobby Rush in Congress.” At that point, said Obama supporter Toni Preckwinkle, “it was hopeless.”

Barack lost by a staggering two-to-one margin. Back at the Ramada Inn Lakeshore, where Barack had launched his political career just five years earlier, Michelle stood by her husband’s side while he made his concession speech. “I’ve got to make assessments,” he told the crowd, “about where we go from here. We need a new style of politics to deal with the issues that are important to the people. What’s not clear to me is whether I should do that as an elected official, or by influencing government in ways that actually improve people’s lives.”

For the first time in his life, Barack tasted defeat. He took it hard. So did Michelle. “Michelle is great,” said a Springfield colleague, “at ‘I-told-you-so’s.’”

Ebullient in victory, Barack was incapable of disguising his disappointment in the face of his first loss. “I am very competitive, but nothing like Barack,” Michelle said. “He is a terrible loser. It really gnaws away at him.” Barack spent the next few weeks, he later said, “licking [his] wounds, and trying hard to figure out what went wrong—and what [he] could have done differently.”

Barack had been warned by Jesse Jackson that the shooting death of Rush’s son was a “game changer,” but Jeremiah Wright told Barack that it was only part of the reason he went down to crushing defeat. The reverend told him that he had jumped the gun, that he hadn’t taken the time to line up enough party leaders to support him. “You were,” he said, “kind of out there on your own.”

That fall, Michelle learned that she was pregnant for a second time. As happy as they undoubtedly were, the news merely reinforced Michelle’s concern about the family’s finances. Even though they were taking home combined salaries of $250,000, for some reason it was not enough for them to pay their bills and keep up with payments on their student loans. Occasionally they were, Barack conceded, “short at the end of the month”—falling behind on various payments and using credit cards to stay afloat.

Michelle worried that, if Barack continued to chase his political dreams at the expense of his family’s finances, they were headed for bankruptcy. “Calm down,” he would tell her. “Things are going to be fine. You worry too much.” Barack believed that differences in both their upbringing and their “wiring” accounted for the fact that she was rife with worry while he remained unfazed. “I don’t get as tensed or stressed,” he pointed out. “I’m more comfortable with uncertainty and risk.”

Michelle needed more than just soothing words from her husband. She pleaded with Barack to think more seriously about making what she called “serious money.”

Instead, he returned to Springfield determined to win over those Democrats who had been reluctant to support him in the past. Chastened, Barack appeared at his first poker game after being trounced by Bobby Rush and, before anyone else could speak, looked around the table, shook his head, and confessed, “I know, I know.” Disarmed by this mea culpa, Barack’s colleagues roared with laughter.

In the coming months, Barack turned down a chance to run for Illinois State Attorney General because he did not want to subject Michelle to another grueling campaign schedule so soon after his ill-fated congressional run. But he spent more time than ever in Springfield, shoring up alliances that would prove valuable in the future.

Of these, none was more important than Barack’s budding personal relationship with the party’s crusty, gravel-voiced Senate leader, Emil Jones. A contemporary of Michelle’s father, Jones had also grown up in the Robinsons’ old neighborhood and worked in Chicago’s sanitation department. His father, like Fraser Robinson, had been a Democratic precinct captain, and Jones had cut his teeth on South Side politics. Building his own organization from the bottom up, Jones was a force to be reckoned with—and after twenty-seven years in Springfield, was poised to take over the Senate once control of the legislature returned to the Democrats.

Even though Jones had supported Bobby Rush, he and Barack remained more than just close allies and friends. Although for years Barack often spoke of Jeremiah Wright as a father figure, he praised Jones as his “political godfather.” After he heard that, Jones began using the theme from the film The Godfather as his cell phone ring tone. “I am blessed to be his godfather,” Jones told a reporter at one point during this period, “and he feels like a son to me.”

With himself strategically positioned in Springfield as Emil Jones’s protégé, Barack also carefully tended to his Chicago connections. Already serving on both the Woods Fund board and the board of the billion-dollar Chicago-based Joyce Foundation, Barack now added the prestigious Saguaro Seminar to his list of obligations. Tackling the amorphous question of how to build “social capital” by getting people more involved in their communities, Barack was joined at the weekend seminars by the diverse likes of Christian conservative Ralph Reed and George Stephanopoulos.

During these meetings—carved from what little time he had to spend with his family—Barack could not conceal his naked political ambition from the other, better-known participants. According to Saguaro founder Robert Putnam, the Harvard professor who wrote Bowling Alone, Obama spoke so openly about his plans for higher office that they began teasing him. “So we were in the midst of one of our intensive discussions about civic engagement,” Barack’s former Harvard Law professor Martha Minow recalled, “and after one of these discussions, ranging across the political sectors, he did this tour de force summary. We just said, ‘When are you running for President?’ It became a joke. We started to nickname him ‘governor.’”

It was no joke for Michelle. The Obamas’ second child was born on June 10, 2001, and once again family friend Anita Blanchard was the attending obstetrician. This time, Barack carried Malia into the room and introduced her to her gurgling baby sister, Natasha. From this day forward, they would call her, simply, Sasha.

Even though the Senate had once again recessed for the summer and Barack was able to spend more time with his family, Michelle was becoming increasingly agitated. “It was hard,” she said. “I was struggling with figuring out how I was going to make it work for me.”

Sasha’s terrifying meningitis scare in September of 2001 brought them closer together emotionally than they had been in years. The horrors of 9/11 continued to make it easier to keep things in perspective. “In the grand scheme of things,” Michelle admitted, “our problems didn’t seem to amount to much.”

Incredibly, September 12, 2001, was business as usual in Springfield, where victorious Democrats gathered in the Stratton Office Building to redraw their legislative districts. Their goal was to give themselves a demographic advantage over their Republican opponents. “It was like nothing had happened,” said John Corrigan, an Obama strategist and the man responsible for redrawing the districts of all incumbent Democrats. “Everybody came in and all they cared about was their districts.”

Barack was not among them; he had attended to this task months earlier, sitting with Corrigan at a computer screen and carefully redrawing his district to include as many influential constituents as possible. “The exposure he would have to some of the folks on the boards of the museums and CEOs of some of the companies that he would now represent,” Corrigan said, “would certainly help him in the long run.”

Barack, already mindful of a larger responsibility to history, was hard at work at home in the Hole, writing his own position paper on the 9/11 attacks. “We will have to make sure, despite our rage,” he wrote in the September 19 issue of the Hyde Park Herald,“that any U.S. military action takes into account the lives of innocent civilians abroad. We will have to be unwavering in opposing bigotry or discrimination directed against neighbors and friends of Middle Eastern descent. Finally, we will have to devote far more attention to the monumental task of raising the hopes and prospects of embittered children across the globe.”

For a time, it looked as if the 9/11 attacks might also carry with them the seeds of Barack’s political ruin. “My God, Michelle,” he told his wife. “They’re saying Osama Bin Laden planned the attacks. Osama. Jesus…”

Barack valued Michelle’s opinion above all others, in part because, unlike many of his other friends, she pulled no punches. “She’s blunt,” he explained, “so she can tell me things that maybe other people are afraid to tell me.”

In this case, she was not about to reassure him. When she had first heard Barack’s name, she thought it sounded “weird and off-putting.” The similarity between his name and that of a hated international terrorist could not, she told him, be “a good thing.”

Just days after 9/11, Barack went ahead and had a long-ago scheduled lunch with a leading media consultant for Democratic candidates, Eric Adelstein. Both men had been thinking that Barack should consider making a run for statewide office—maybe the U.S. Senate—but now, in Adelstein’s words, the “political dynamics” had changed. “Hell of a thing, isn’t it?” he told Barack as he held up the front page of the Chicago Tribune with Osama Bin Laden’s picture on it. “Really bad luck. You can’t change your name, of course. Voters are suspicious of that kind of thing.”

Barack considered the possibility that, at age forty, he was stopped in his tracks. He looked with envy at younger politicians who, simply by virtue of their names, faced a more promising future.

When Michelle called, near tears, to say that their babysitter had quit to return to nursing, Barack tried to reassure her. “Michelle’s thinking to herself, ‘What am I going to do?’” Barack remembered, “because she had depended so heavily on this person to kind of hold it together. And she was, frankly, mad at me. Because she felt as if she was all alone in this process.”

Barack knew that as long as he stayed in politics the demands on his wife and young daughters would only get worse. Perhaps it was time, he thought, to finally focus on his family—to get that job in the private sector that would finance the cost of child care, private school tuition, and, eventually, college.

It was around this time that he was interviewed for a three-hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year job running the Joyce Foundation, where he had been a board member for seven years. Barack nearly bolted at the last minute; he simply did not want the job.

“What is wrong with you?” Dan Shomon asked when Barack told him how he felt. “This is a dream. You can build up money, build up relationships, and run again.” Michelle’s reaction to the news was one of quiet resignation. She knew all too well that her husband, despite his recent doubts about ever being able to overcome the Osama-Obama curse, was far too ambitious to quit as a mere State Senator.

Barack was no longer certain that his name would keep him from higher office. He had been making inquiries of his powerful, well-connected friends in Chicago—chief among them Mayor Daley—and he was convinced that Illinois’s incumbent Republican Senator, Peter Fitzgerald, was vulnerable.

The Dartmouth-educated scion of a wealthy banking family, Fitzgerald had unseated one-term Senator Carol Moseley Braun in 1998. He repeatedly ran afoul of his own party’s leadership on a wide range of issues, including the authorization of federal funds to build an Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield and the fifteen-billion-dollar post-9/11 airline bailout. Fitzgerald was, in fact, the only U.S. Senator to vote against the bailout.

Because of his maverick, go-it-alone stance both in Washington and in Illinois, Fitzgerald’s approval ratings were approaching record lows. GOP leaders were threatening to put up candidates to challenge him in the primaries. Barack was convinced that Carol Moseley Braun’s Senate seat could be reclaimed for the Democrats in 2004—and that he was just the man to do it.

“I want to be a Senator,” Barack told his friend and Michelle’s former boss Newton Minow.

“But you are a Senator,” Minow replied.

“I mean a U.S. Senator,” Barack said.

Minow didn’t take much convincing. “Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once described Franklin Roosevelt as having ‘a first-class temperament and a second-class intellect,’” Minow said. “Barack has a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect. It was a very, very, very long shot. But I told him to go for it.”

Few others were as encouraging. Marty Nesbitt, Valerie Jarrett, Jeremiah Wright, most of his poker-playing friends in Springfield—even the heavy-hitting fund-raisers, academics, foundation board member types, and Lakefront liberals who for years had been kidding him about running for President—seemed taken aback by his chutzpah. A few, including Nesbitt, actually laughed in his face.

Gradually, however, he managed to persuade them that he could mount an effective campaign—provided he could find a way to raise ten million dollars. With that kind of backing, which he believed he could raise from the well-heeled friends he had cultivated for years, he insisted, “I guarantee you I will win.”

There were those, even among his supporters, who felt the former president of the Harvard Law Review might not be enough of a street fighter to win a knock-down, drag-out U.S. Senate race. “I’ve seen a lot of tough guys get knocked down and stay down,” Denny Jacobs said. “I’ll take the resilient guy who gets knocked down and gets right back up. It’s going to be the hardest thing in the world to defeat Barack Obama. He just keeps getting right back up.”

While nearly everyone thought Barack was at best a long shot (“I remember thinking he had a snowball’s chance in hell,” Toni Preckwinkle said), several friends appealed to him to reconsider for strictly personal reasons. Dan Shomon knew that Barack already felt “tremendous guilt” over not spending more time with his children. “It burns a small hole in his heart,” he said, “every night when he is not with them.”

“You will destroy your marriage,” another friend told him. “Look what you’ve put Michelle through already. She is really pissed off at you as it is. Don’t do this.”

Barack turned steely. “I’ve made up my mind,” he said. “I’m running.”

He would, of course, be far more diplomatic when broaching the subject with his wife. “Politics has been a huge strain on you,” he told Michelle, “but I really think there is a strong possibility that I can win this race…if you are willing to go with me on this ride, and if it doesn’t work out, then I will step out of politics.”

Michelle studied his face. “Just this one last time,” he pleaded. “I think I can do this…. Just give me one more shot. It’ll either be up—or out.”

At this point, Michelle was primarily concerned with one thing: “How are we going to make it—I mean, financially?” she asked. They were still deeply in debt—in part due to his failed congressional race two years earlier. If he lost, that debt would deepen. In the unlikely event that he won, then they would have two residences to maintain—one in Chicago and one in the nation’s capital. “It’s just killing us,” she told him. “How will you afford all this?”

“I guess,” Barack replied matter-of-factly, “I’ll just have to write another book.”

Michelle, aware that his first book had taken Barack five years to write and wound up selling a modest ten thousand copies, shook her head in disbelief. “Oh, another book…. Snake eyes there…yeah, you just go ahead write that book, Jack.”

Then Michelle collected her thoughts and sighed. “Okay,” she said. “Whatever.”

Barack looked at her quizzically. “Okay?” he asked.

“Yeah, we’ll figure it out,” she said with a shrug. “We’re not hurting. Go ahead.” Barack waited for the inevitable zinger. “And,” she said, grinning, “maybe you’ll lose.”

Michelle had, in fact, found a way to come to terms with the “huge strains” Barack’s political ambition had taken on their marriage. “This was the epiphany,” she later recalled. “I am sitting here with a new baby, angry, tired, and out of shape. The baby is up for that four o’clock feeding and my husband is lying there, sleeping.” It was then that she realized if she simply left the condo at 4:30 A.M. and went to the gym for her workout, Barack would have “no choice but to get up.”

The first time she disappeared after Sasha’s 4 A.M. feeding, Barack didn’t notice until 8 A.M., when he finally stumbled out of bed and realized he’d been left in charge of the kids. From that point on, whenever Barack was in town, Michelle tiptoed out of the apartment before sunrise, headed for a workout with her personal trainer. “I would get home from the gym, and the girls would be up and fed,” she recalled. “That was something I had to do for me.”

It was then that Michelle made the conscious decision that she would be the one to adjust to the circumstances he created—and not vice versa. “The big thing I figured out was that I was pushing to make Barack be something I wanted him to be for me,” she explained. “I believed that if only he were around more often, everything would be better. So I was depending on him to make me happy. Except it didn’t have anything to do with him. I needed support. I didn’t necessarily need it from Barack.”

Michelle decided to approach the problems in her marriage the way she would approach the problems she faced daily at work. “I had to change,” she said. “So how do I stop being mad at him and start problem solving, and cobble together the resources? I also had to admit that I needed space and I needed time. And the more time that I could get to myself, the less stress I felt.”

Her husband was more than happy to oblige, giving the nod to hiring a full-time live-in housekeeper. Michelle also took her mother up on her long-standing offer to help her take care of Malia and Sasha.

No longer quite as stressed-out as she had been, Michelle felt free to consider yet another job switch. When University of Chicago Hospitals President Michael Riordan offered her a job as executive director of community affairs, she showed up with Sasha in a car-seat carrier and breast-fed her in the ladies’ room. “It was probably the most unique interview I’ve ever had,” Riordan conceded.

With a starting salary of around $110,000, Michelle set out to accomplish at the University of Chicago Hospitals what she had accomplished at the main campus and, before that, at Public Allies. She wanted to build bridges between the medical center’s staff and the surrounding neighborhood. Toward that end, she placed volunteers from the hospital in the community, and volunteers from the community in the hospital.

Periodically, Michelle would visit South Side health clinics, sometimes with Sasha in tow, and simply ask the administrators, “What do you need?” Within a matter of days, a volunteer from the hospital would show up and pitch in. “She was getting down with us…. She really wanted us to tell her right then and right there, how can I help?” said Berneice Mills-Thomas, who runs several health care centers in Chicago. “We’d never really seen that before.”

Michelle’s superiors were no less impressed. “I have seen her in a meeting with the board of trustees giving a presentation,” said her boss, Susan Sher. “I have seen her with angry patients and community residents. I have seen her talking down a two-year-old in the middle of a temper tantrum. She can handle them all.”

Now that Michelle had given him the green light to run for the U.S. Senate, Barack set out to collect as many IOUs as he could from party leaders. Part of his strategy was to get squarely behind his party’s nominee for Governor. Barack backed Illinois’s African American attorney general, Roland Burris. But when Burris lost to mop-topped Congressman Rod Blagojevich—thanks largely to the machinations of Blagojevich’s powerful alderman father-in-law—Barack joined Blagojevich’s inner circle of advisers. According to then-Congressman Rahm Emanuel, he and Barack “participated in a small group that met weekly when Rod was running for Governor. We basically laid out the general election, Barack and I and two other advisers.”

On June 27, 2002, Barack appeared on a local TV news show to push Blagojevich’s candidacy. “Right now, my main focus is to make sure that we elect Rod Blagojevich as Governor, we—”

“You working hard for Rod?” host Jeff Berkowitz interrupted.

“You betcha,” Barack answered.

“Hot Rod?”

“That’s exactly right,” Barack shot back.

When Blagojevich became Governor in November of 2002, Barack was one of the first people he thanked. Behind the scenes, Blagojevich was in awe of his new political ally—not because of Barack’s vision, but because of his political savvy. He was particularly impressed with the finesse Barack had displayed in gerrymandering his district. “Barack is a classy guy,” he told a member of his staff, “but beneath it all he’s a real street fighter. He knows how to work the system…. You’d never guess it to look at him.”

Along with his new friend and colleague Rahm Emanuel, Barack was emerging as something of a political mastermind. “He thinks strategically,” Emanuel observed. “He sees the big picture.”

As a campaigner, however, Barack needed work. The measured, intellectual approach that had gone over so well with his fellow academics and foundation board members had been no match for Bobby Rush’s earthy, booming delivery.

Once again, he could count on Michelle to tell him the truth. “You take too long to answer questions,” she told him, “and sometimes you just sound snooty, like you’re talking down to your audience. If you’re going to get through to people in the community, then you’ve got to speak their language.” She suggested he emulate the most effective speaker they knew—Jeremiah Wright.

On September 16, 2001—the first Sunday after 9/11—millions of Americans went to church to share their grief and pray for the victims and their families. At Trinity United Church, Wright offered a very different take on the terrorist attacks that had taken nearly three thousand American lives. “We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon,” he thundered, “and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s chickens,” Wright said, jabbing the air with his finger, “are coming home to roost.”

That day, Barack and Michelle were at home caring for Sasha, who was still recovering from viral meningitis. But they were hardly surprised when they learned of Wright’s incendiary remarks a few days later. The reverend’s rants against so-called American imperialism, especially as it related to Palestine, Southeast Asia, and Africa, were standard fare at Trinity United.

“Michelle and Barack were there practically every Sunday, with Malia and Sasha,” said one longtime church member. “Nobody walked out when Reverend Wright was saying those things—they were cheering.” The Obamas were also apparently enthusiastic participants in the tradition of call-and-response that is the hallmark of black churches throughout the United States.

Barack carefully studied Wright’s oratorical flourishes, as well as his gestures and his pacing. He employed all these devices, liberally sprinkled with down-home aphorisms and gritty street vernacular, when addressing predominantly black audiences.

“There’s going to be a certain rhythm you feel from the audience,” he told reporter David Mendell. “An all-black audience is going to respond in a different way. They are not going to just sit there.”

Barack tried out his new, more laid-back, more rhythmic and idiom-filled style in the same South Side churches and meeting halls where, just three years earlier, he had been putting his audiences to sleep. He began every speech with the same nod of gratitude to his mentor and revered father figure: “I bring you greetings from my pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.” It was the same greeting Michelle would use when, in future campaigns, she spoke at churches on behalf of her husband.

Between speeches, Barack and Michelle focused on raising the ten million dollars that would, Barack insisted, make him an unbeatable candidate. Since Marty Nesbitt owed the existence of his airport parking empire to one of the richest women in the country, Penny Pritzker, Barack asked Nesbitt if he would set up a meeting.

A granddaughter of Hyatt Hotel founder Abram Nicholas Pritzker (as well as onetime chairman of Superior Bank, which was closed by federal regulators because of the subprime mortgage crisis in 2001), Penny Pritzker shared in a family fortune estimated at over twenty billion dollars. She had met Barack and Michelle socially but was by no means convinced that he was a viable candidate for the U.S. Senate. Still, that August she invited Barack, Michelle, and the girls up to the Pritzkers’ sprawling lakefront summer “cottage” about fifty miles outside Chicago.

When they arrived, Obama sauntered coolly up the front steps, slipped off his black sunglasses, took Pritzker’s hand, and leaned down to kiss her on the cheek. At that moment, it seemed unlikely that the billionairess would deny him the support he sought.

Pritzker and her husband, Bryan Traubert, were equally impressed with Michelle and their attractive, well-behaved offspring. After the Obamas departed for Chicago, Pritzker and Traubert went for a run and spent the whole time talking about Barack. In the end, they concluded that while he might lack a thorough knowledge of some important issues, he was so confident and so persuasive that he might just pull it off. “Michelle was also an enormous part of the equation,” Pritzker said. It was right after their weekend meeting with Barack and Michelle, Pritzker said, that she decided she would support “them.”

Once Barack was anointed by the Pritzkers, one major contributor after another fell into line. Playboy Enterprises Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Christie Hefner, daughter of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, came on board after Barack’s friend Bettylu Saltzman brought him to meet the “Ladies Who Lunch”—nineteen well-to-do Chicago women with an interest in backing liberal candidates and causes. Christie then introduced him to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, and to TV producer Norman Lear, who in turn put Barack in touch with his powerful entertainment industry friends in Los Angeles and New York.

Suddenly, money was no longer a problem. Throughout 2002, the biggest obstacle to Barack recapturing Carol Moseley Braun’s old Senate seat was Carol Moseley Braun. The former Senator toyed with the idea of running herself, and Barack knew that he stood no chance of getting his party’s nomination if she entered the race.

Frustrated that he could not announce his candidacy as long as Braun vacillated, Barack decided to attend the annual Conference of the Congressional Black Caucus in Washington. Michelle encouraged the trip; perhaps, she said, he could garner support from some of the bigger names in Congress.

What he discovered was something quite different. When he returned, he was so shaken by what he had encountered that he felt obliged to tell his pastor. Wright had attended the Black Caucus weekends before, so he was well aware of what went on there. Barack, Wright told writer Manya Brachear, “had gone down there to get support and found out it was just a meat market. He had people say, “If you want to count on me, come on to my room. I don’t care if you’re married. I am not asking you to leave your wife—just come on.” All the women hitting on him. He was like, in shock. He’s there on a serious agenda, talking about running for the United States Senate. They’re talking about giving him some pussy.”

Wright looked at Barack in amazement. “Barack, c’mon, man. Come on!” the reverend said. “It’s just a nonstop party, all the booze you want, all the booty you want. That’s all it is.” According to Wright, Barack went to meet Washington’s African American Congressmen and Congresswomen “with this altruistic agenda, trying to get some support. He comes back shattered. I thought to myself, ‘Does he have a rude awakening coming his way.”

While he waited impatiently for Moseley Braun to make up her mind, Barack was invited in October of 2002 to speak at a rally against U.S. military involvement in Iraq. The invasion of Iraq would not take place until the following March, but Barack was already lining up with others in his party to oppose it. While future presidential hopefuls like Senators John Kerry and Hillary Clinton would be persuaded that only U.S. military action could prevent Saddam Hussein from unleashing his “weapons of mass destruction,” Barack thought otherwise.

As he was poised to run for the Senate, he had to think long and hard about whether this was a gamble worth taking. Sentiment in the country was running two-to-one in favor of a U.S. invasion of Iraq, and President George W. Bush’s approval ratings were at 65 percent.

Once again, he turned to Michelle for advice. She had nodded in agreement when Jeremiah Wright preached that young black men were being used as fodder for “another unjust war.” She also knew that that message resonated with South Side voters.

Besides, she reminded her husband, the very people he was counting on to fund his campaign were the ones that had invited him to speak at the rally.

“Let me begin by saying that although this has been billed as an antiwar rally,” he told the crowd, “I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances. The Civil War was one of the bloodiest in history, and yet it was only through the crucible of the sword, the sacrifice of multitudes, that we could begin to perfect this union…. I don’t oppose all wars. My grandfather signed up for a war after Pearl Harbor was bombed…. What I am opposed to is a dumb war…a rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.”

The speech would serve Barack well as the American public gradually soured on the war; he would be one of the few leaders of either party who could claim he opposed the invasion from the beginning. At the time, however, he wasn’t so sure his stance would pay off politically. “What if,” he asked Michelle, “it turns out like the Persian Gulf War and everybody comes home a hero?”

“It won’t,” she told him. “And even if it did,” she went on, “you’ve got to say what you believe.”

By this point, Barack had managed to persuade one of Chicago’s top campaign strategists to join his team. A longtime pal of Clinton-adviser-turned-Congressman Rahm Emanuel and one of Mayor Daley’s most trusted advisers, the endearingly disheveled, mustachioed David Axelrod was a seasoned practitioner of Chicago’s take-no-prisoners brand of politics.

At the same time, Axelrod fancied himself a “progressive,” and it was that same streak of practicality mixed with idealism in Barack that most appealed to him. For her part, Michelle viewed all Chicago politicos with no small degree of suspicion—and Axelrod was no exception. “Barack,” she would tell her husband repeatedly, “this is not a noble business.”

Periodically, Michelle still found herself harboring doubts about the wisdom of Barack’s decision to pursue a life in politics—and what it was costing her family in terms of financial security. When he called home from the campaign trail ecstatic about the response he was getting from crowds, the response he got from Michelle was frosty at best.

“They’re drinking the juice,” he told her immediately after delivering one of his rafter-rattling speeches. “I feel like I’m inspiring people.”

“You don’t even have enough money,” she shot back, “to drink your own juice.”

As he did every December, Barack took the family to Hawaii for Christmas. Still stymied by Moseley Braun’s indecision, he told Toot that maybe this was the end of his political career. But on Christmas Eve, things changed. Instead of trying to regain her Senate seat, Moseley Braun, who was even more cocky than Barack, announced that she was making a run for the White House.

It was just the first of several breaks—some lucky, some calculated—that would go Barack’s way in the coming months. In April of 2003, Republican incumbent Peter Fitzgerald announced that he was relinquishing his seat for family reasons. “I thought I could beat him, and still think I could have beaten him,” Barack later said. “But the fact that he did not end up running, obviously, left the field wide open.”

That same month, Jeremiah Wright was delivering one of his most incendiary sermons to date. “The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law, and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America,’” he bellowed as church members shouted “amen” in reply. “No, no, no, God damn America—that’s in the Bible, for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.”

For Barack, who according to several church members was present at Trinity United with Michelle and the girls when Wright gave his infamous “God Damn America” sermon, such comments were hardly surprising. It was the kind of over-the-top rhetoric that Wright had indulged in for years. Moreover, downstaters and white liberal voters who had already succumbed to Barack’s considerable charms would remain unaware of his ties to Wright, and there was essentially no chance that Wright’s sermons would ever be covered in Chicago’s mainstream press.

Now that the Democrats had finally wrested control of the State Senate from the Republicans, Barack approached his political godfather with a proposition. “You’re now the Senate President,” he told Emil Jones. “You have a lot of power.”

“I do?” Jones replied coyly.

“Yes.”

Jones continued to play along. “Tell me,” he said, “what kind of power I have.”

“You have the power to make a U.S. Senator,” Barack said.

“I do?”

“You do,” Barack answered with a nod.

“If I’ve got that kind of power,” Jones said, “do you have anyone in mind?”

“Yeah,” Barack answered brightly. “Me!”

Over the coming months, Jones ushered through several pieces of legislation crafted by Barack and aimed squarely at his core African American constituency. Among them: a bill that increased the number of poor children covered by Illinois’s health insurance program, a law that forced the videotaping of criminal confessions, and, in response to complaints by African American motorists of being harassed for “driving while black,” a law that required police to collect data on the race of every driver they pulled over as a way to monitor racial profiling.

Just as important, Jones’s backing meant that other Democratic Party heavyweights—most notably Mayor Daley—would refrain from endorsing any other candidates in the primary. (Because Barack was so instrumental in getting Blagojevich elected, the Governor was one of his earliest and most enthusiastic supporters.) And while Barack sold himself as an antimachine politician, at the same time he took Michelle’s advice and privately approached not only Daley but Daley’s brother Michael asking for their support if he won the primary. “Barack had some chameleon in him,” Mike Jacobs observed. “He’ll be what he has to be to garner support, but in the end you get the sense that he’ll try to do the right thing.”

In addition to his political savvy, David Axelrod would soon provide Obama with some valuable ammunition for use against his most formidable Democratic adversary. Before he was hired by Barack, Axelrod was being wooed by Blair Hull, a flamboyant Las Vegas cardplayer who had turned his skills into a fortune on Wall Street. Hull had sold his company to Goldman Sachs for more than half a billion dollars, and was now willing to spend whatever it took to get elected to the U.S. Senate. He wanted Axelrod on board—at any price.

As tempting as the offer was, Axelrod never felt comfortable with the idea of taking on Hull as a client. Over the course of several meetings the previous year, Axelrod had learned some disturbing things about Hull—namely, that the court records from his third divorce had been sealed because of allegations of spousal abuse. Axelrod warned Hull that this information would somehow be leaked during the campaign and doom his chances of ever being elected.

Once Axelrod was on board with Barack, he shared what he knew with his new boss and with Michelle. All three agreed that, even though Hull’s media blitzkrieg had made him the Democratic front-runner, it was only a matter of time before the contents of Hull’s sealed divorce records would be leaked, sinking Hull’s candidacy. In the meantime, Hull would draw votes away from the other Democrat in the race, the popular state comptroller Dan Hynes.

With Barack’s main rival in the primaries self-destructing, the other candidates in the race—all white—spent most of their time attacking each other. “Nobody,” said a media adviser to one of the candidates, “wanted to risk looking racist by slamming the only black candidate in the race. And Obama didn’t seem like much of a threat, anyway.”

Barack’s team, meanwhile, was delighted that none of the other candidates were forced to drop out. “As long as they’re competing for the same middle-class white votes,” one adviser said, “that leaves the rest for us.” This divide-and-conquer strategy, predicated on the belief that the minorities, white liberals, and some downstaters would vote for Barack, would be key to the success of the Obama campaign.

If he was going to stitch together this kind of coalition, Barack “needed to be in about ten places at once,” an adviser pointed out. To help ease the burden, a reluctant Michelle agreed to stand in for her husband at a few fund-raisers and rallies. Occasionally, she introduced him—a task that, increasingly, she seemed to relish. “I am tired,” she told an enthusiastic crowd packed into a South Side church, “of just giving the political process over to the privileged. To the wealthy. To people with the right daddy.”

Michelle spoke passionately to anyone who would listen about her husband’s qualifications, but she was determined that he not let her words go to his head. As he headed out the door to a candidates’ forum one Saturday morning, Michelle stopped him in his tracks. “Where do you think you’re going?” she asked. “Oohhh, no. You’ve been gone all week, and I’ve got stuff to do today, and you’re taking the kids.”

When Barack arrived at the forum with Malia and Sasha in tow, his opponents, said Dan Hynes, “felt a little sorry for the guy…. There he was, trying to herd these two little kids, and they’re knocking things over and taking pamphlets and throwing them. And here he is trying to be this dignified Senate candidate.”

By the spring of 2004, Barack, who had been holding back on his campaign ads, was ready to unleash a barrage of TV commercials. But when Axelrod proudly unveiled the campaign’s new slogan, Barack was decidedly underwhelmed.

“ Yes we can?’ ‘Yes we can?’” he said between drags on a cigarette. “I don’t like it. Come on…I’d like a slogan that actually means something.”

But Axelrod argued forcefully for the “Yes We Can” message. It was catchy, inspirational; it conveyed a sense of optimism, of hope. And most important, like any great advertising slogan, it was almost annoyingly simple and to the point—like “Where’s the beef?” or “Head On!”

“Yeah, but I don’t want to talk down to people,” Barack objected. “ Yes we can.’ Yes we can what? What does it mean?” Unswayed by the arguments of Axelrod and his media experts, Barack told his staff to come up with another. “‘ Yes we can,’” he said, “just seems childish to me.”

Axelrod would not budge, so Barack tried it out on Michelle. She had always resented the fact that in the black community she had to “dumb down” so that her South Side friends wouldn’t think she’d turned her back on them. Michelle understood Barack’s initial objections to “Yes We Can.” But she also knew on a gut level that the phrase would resonate in Chicago’s black neighborhoods. Jesse Jackson, who had thrown his support to Barack, agreed. And when Barack tried the phrase out on Jeremiah Wright, the reverend shouted it to the rafters as if he were at the climax of one of his hell-raising sermons: “Yes…we…can.”

In the end, Michelle’s was the deciding vote. “I like it,” she said, trying it out again and again, each time with a different inflection. “The brothers and sisters will get it, Barack.”

“I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s so corny…”

Michelle grew impatient. “I am telling you,” she said, “it will work. Trust me.”

In the end, Barack deferred to Michelle, as he always did when it came to what would appeal to African American voters. “Okay,” he told her at one meeting. “You know more about that sort of thing than I do.”

As he looked over the rest of the field, Barack realized that, more than ever, much of his appeal as a candidate hung on his squeaky-clean image. He fostered the image of himself as a devoted family man and as a clean-cut fitness fanatic who worked out daily (“like a gladiator,” said Robert Gibbs), ran, and played basketball whenever he could—despite the fact that, following a number of minor injuries on the court, Michelle was now pressuring her husband to give up basketball for something “less punishing for a man your age—you know, like golf.”

That Barack veritably glowed with health belied the fact that he smoked—a lot. Like Jackie Onassis, who despite a life lived in front of the cameras was almost never photographed indulging her lifelong smoking habit, Barack went to great lengths to conceal his smoking from the public. He did so, he explained to one reporter, who agreed not to write about his smoking habit, because he believed it would cost him votes. People who smoked, he said, were “no longer cool. People think you lack personal discipline if you smoke.”

Driven to and from campaign stops in a chauffeured black SUV, he would hunker down in the back of the car and sneak a few drags while he talked on his cell phone. As the SUV sped along the highway, he rolled down the window and tossed out one glowing cigarette butt after another. In the side door pocket, where he also stashed a dog-eared copy of the Bible for quick reference, Barack kept gum and Binaca to mask the smell on his breath.

Barack, who preferred Marlboros, felt free to smoke at home—although Michelle occasionally railed against him for exposing their daughters to secondhand smoke—in closed-door meetings with his staff, on the chartered plane that he used to barnstorm the state. But as the pace of the campaign quickened and the stress mounted, he found himself becoming increasingly testy—particularly when he was unable to duck out of sight for a cigarette.

“Having to hide it is killing him,” Michelle conceded to a coworker, adding that he seemed to be spending “half the time” looking for a stairwell or an alleyway where he could light up without being spotted by a reporter or a photographer.

In the closing weeks of the campaign, the “Yes We Can” spots Barack had so vehemently opposed turned him into a statewide media star. Giggling girls and middle-aged women alike mobbed him on the street. Even the wife of one of his opponents looked like a smitten schoolgirl when he leaned in to kiss her on the cheek after a candidates’ debate. Meanwhile, volunteers—again overwhelmingly female—were flocking to the campaign. “People call it drinking the juice,” Dan Shomon said. “People start drinking the Obama juice. You can’t find enough for them to do.”

Michelle had always been aware that her husband was attractive to the opposite sex, and that his long absences from home had given him ample opportunity to be unfaithful. But, unlike many of his fellow politicians, Barack had never been linked with other women. “He’s never given me reason to doubt him,” she told her friends more than once. “Not once.”

Now that women were mobbing him on the street, even pushing Michelle out of the way to get to him, she began to confide to a few close friends that it was all getting to be “a real pain in the ass.” According to a college friend, Michelle joked that she wasn’t going to let all the adulation “ go to his head.” But you could tell it wasn’t entirely a laughing matter to her. They have a trusting relationship—he’s a totally devoted husband and father—but no wife wants to see other women pawing her man.”

Eventually, Michelle would resign herself to the fact that Barack would attract his share of political groupies. When asked if she worried that Barack might someday cheat on her, Michelle did not hesitate to answer. Obviously, she had given the issue plenty of thought. “First of all,” she said, “I can’t control someone else’s behavior. I’m not worried about some woman pushing up on my husband. With fidelity—with Barack and me—if somebody can come between us, we didn’t have much to begin with.”

Those who knew them took Michelle’s laid-back answer with a grain of salt. “He has a huge ego, but he loves his girls too much to ever put his marriage in jeopardy,” said one adviser. Valerie Jarrett agreed that Barack had always been more than a little intimidated by Michelle. In their marriage, Jarrett observed, “there is a subtle element of fear on his part, which is good.”

On primary night in March, everyone waited at the Pritzker-owned Hyatt Regency Hotel for election results to roll in. As Barack posed for photos with Malia and Sasha, Michelle assured everyone that her preternaturally calm husband was “really pretty excited” that he had won a staggering 53 percent of the vote in a four-way race. “They like you!” she told him, in a takeoff on Sally Field’s famous Oscar speech. “They really like you!” Then, when he finally stepped onstage to address his cheering supporters, Barack delivered the kind of rafter-ringing stem-winder they had come to expect.

Behind the scenes, however, Barack was battling feelings of melancholy. Now that he was stepping onto the national stage, he knew he would be spending even less time with his family. He broke down on several occasions when he started talking about the girls. “God,” he admitted after one emotional moment, “I’m starting to remind myself of my mom.”

In a dramatic turnabout, Michelle now reassured Barack that whatever sacrifices he made were well worth it—that as a U.S. Senator he would have the opportunity to influence the lives of millions. She also promised that she would do “whatever we have to do” to make sure that he would get to spend plenty of time with Malia and Sasha.

First, he had to win the general election. The Republicans had fielded a formidable candidate in Jack Ryan, an articulate, movie-star handsome, Dartmouth-educated millionaire who had actually left Wall Street to become an inner-city high school teacher. Ryan was also a moderate with strong support outside Chicago, and early polls indicated he stood a good chance of eking out a narrow victory over Barack.

Once again, fortune would smile on Barack. In the wake of Blair Hull’s troubles with sealed divorce records, the press quickly took note of the fact that Ryan had divorced TV star Jeri (Star Trek: Voyager, Boston Public, Boston Legal) Ryan, and that portions of those records were also sealed. The Chicago Tribune sued to have the files opened.

Barack was campaigning downstate in mid-June 2004 when a Los Angeles court ordered Ryan’s divorce records unsealed. In sworn affidavits taken while the couple vied for custody of their young son, Jeri Ryan had accused her husband of taking her to sex clubs in New York and Paris where he demanded that she have sex with him in front of strangers. Ryan “wanted me to have sex with him there with another couple watching,” his ex-wife claimed. “I refused…. I was very upset.”

Michelle was as dumbfounded as her husband. “Are you seeing this?” he asked when he called in from the road.

“I know, I know,” she replied. “Crazy stuff. Can you believe this is happening again?”

Barack and Michelle were both amazed that Ryan had run in the first place. “What was he thinking?” he mused. “I mean, he must have known it would get out.”

Michelle agreed with David Axelrod and Barack’s other advisers that right now Barack should take the high road and say nothing. It was only a matter of time, they believed, before Ryan would be forced by his own party to bow out of the race.

They were right. Ryan pulled out of the race on June 25, 2004. Once again, before the contest could begin in earnest, Barack’s main opponent had fallen victim to a sordid sex scandal. “You really have got to wonder,” he said to Michelle, “why these guys get into a race like this when they must know it’s going to bite them in the ass.”

Now there was speculation that the Republicans would field a high-profile candidate with instant name recognition—someone like former Chicago Bears coach turned TV personality Mike Ditka. When she heard Ditka’s name mentioned, Michelle, who appreciated just how much Chicagoans loved their hometown sports heroes, grimaced. “He could be trouble,” she murmured.

With Republicans holding a 51 to 48 edge in the U.S. Senate, the Democrats needed something to help their young candidate capture the Illinois seat. As the Democratic National Convention approached that July, Axelrod, Obama communications director Robert Gibbs, Pritzker, Abner Mikva, and virtually dozens of other well-connected party members were urging officials to pick Barack to give the keynote address. Their argument: that like such keynote speakers as Texas Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, New York Governor Mario Cuomo, and Texas Governor Ann Richards, Barack knew how to fire up a crowd.

The man who would make the ultimate decision—presumptive presidential nominee John Kerry—had seen that quality in Barack firsthand. Barack had appeared in June at a fund-raiser for the Massachusetts Senator, and later at a factory where the two men discussed on-the-job training programs with workers. Both times Kerry, who realized that others perceived him as stiff and humorless, was impressed with how effortlessly Barack worked the crowd. Nor did it hurt that Barack was a fellow Harvard graduate and had taken an early stand against the war in Iraq.

As he was driving from Springfield to Chicago, Barack got the call from Kerry’s campaign manager, Mary Beth Cahill. Clicking off his cell phone, he quickly called Axelrod with the news that he had been picked to deliver the keynote address. It was, the two men agreed, a “game changer.”

When he hung up the phone, Barack leaned back in his seat. “I guess,” he said to his driver, Mike Signator, “this is pretty big.”

“You could say that,” Signator agreed.

No sooner had Barack told Michelle that he was the convention’s keynote speaker than she was sharing the news with relatives and friends. Although Barack’s staff sent him previous keynote addresses by Jordan, Cuomo, Richards, and others, Michelle knew that Barack’s speech would have a tone of its own. “They were great speakers,” she said, “but Barack is unique.”

Still juggling his duties as a State Senator with the rigors of a U.S. Senate campaign, Barack organized his thoughts in the car as he drove back and forth between Chicago and the Illinois capital. Then, sitting in a hotel room in Springfield, he spent hours crafting the speech on yellow legal pads in his distinctively loopy, left-handed scrawl. Later the inveterate night owl would return to the Obamas’ Chicago condo and retire to the Hole, where he stayed up until 2 A.M. transcribing the handwritten copy onto his computer.

Barack made endless revisions to the speech, which he then e-mailed to staffers at virtually any time of the day or night. The Kerry staff also had a hand in editing the address, but Michelle, who was being shown drafts as the process proceeded, urged her husband to resist their changes. “Stick to your guns,” she told him. “You’re the only one who knows what’s right for you.”

When Kerry’s people excised the line “I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper,” Michelle and Barack’s staff insisted that it be put back in. “Are they kidding?” she asked, knowing that black audiences had gone wild every time Barack had uttered those words in the past. “That stays, definitely.”

More than fifteen thousand reporters were in Boston to cover the Democratic National Convention, and a sizable chunk of them descended on Barack when he arrived in town. Without ever having uttered a word on the national stage, he was already a media star, squeezing dozens of radio and print interviews in between appearances on NBC’s Meet the Press, CBS’s Face the Nation, and ABC’s Nightline.

Michelle was unimpressed. “All of this is very flattering,” she told a reporter, “but he will not get a big head. We have a six-year-old and a three-year-old who couldn’t care less about all of this, and he comes home to that every night.”

In reality, Michelle worried that her husband was being pulled in too many directions. On Tuesday, July 27—the day of his keynote address—Barack was looking haggard as he practiced the speech, surrounded by Axelrod, Gibbs, and a dozen other aides. Although he had whittled it down to his allotted time of seventeen minutes, leaving out much of his own history so he would have time to sing the praises of the candidate, his aides were still eager to put in their two cents.

There were added pressures: Barack had never addressed a crowd as large as this (five thousand delegates on the floor at Boston’s Fleet Center and, even though it was not being broadcast at prime time, a cable TV audience of millions). Nor had he ever used a teleprompter. And, after talking to so many reporters since his arrival in Boston, Barack now had a seriously sore throat.

The rehearsals took on a more urgent tone as the appointed time for the keynote address approached. At one point during one of these practice sessions, Barack grew visibly angry as he was peppered with suggestions for last-minute changes. “We were spending intense sessions tinkering with wording and commas,” said a senior member of Obama’s team. “It was pretty tense, because everybody was picking at Barack and making suggestions. He was getting a little irate.”

To say the least. Mr. Unflappable gazed in amazement at Axelrod and the others. “Why the hell are you bringing this up now?” Barack demanded, shaking his head.

It was then that he locked eyes with Michelle, who had been sitting calmly, watching him and digesting what the others had to say. “She was kind of handling both him as well as some of the speech,” the staff member said. “She was listening intently and, without being overly directive, was somebody that he could glance over to, almost a telepathic kind of relationship. He was clearly looking to her for her reaction.”

“So,” Barack asked after yet another run-through, “what do you think?”

“I think,” she said with a wry smile, “that you’re not going to embarrass the family.”

Unless, she added, he didn’t change his tie. Although Michelle often pointed out with some irritation in her voice that Barack “is thin so he looks good in everything,” she decried his lack of fashion sense. “He just doesn’t care about clothes,” she observed. “Buy him a black shirt for Christmas and he is a happy man.”

Now that he was to appear before a national audience for the first time, she gave him one last once-over. The dark suit was perfectly acceptable, but not the rust-colored tie with the geometric patterns. “Now that,” she said, pointing to his communications director’s new powder blue tie, “is very nice.”

That afternoon Barack, looking particularly handsome in his new powder blue tie, attracted a crowd as he and Marty Nesbitt walked down the street toward the Fleet Center. “This crowd was building behind us,” Nesbitt said, “like it was Tiger Woods at the Masters.”

Nesbitt was astonished at his friend’s overnight fame—and even more surprised at how none of the attention seemed to faze the Illinois State Senator.

“Barack, man,” Nesbitt told him, “you’re like a rock star.”

“Yeah,” Barack replied without missing a beat, “if you think it’s bad today, wait until tomorrow.”

Nesbitt paused for a moment as Barack quickened his step. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“My speech,” Barack replied with a wink, “is pretty good.”

Michelle had faith in the speech, but even more so in the man who was giving it. She told Axelrod and the others that she had total confidence that Barack, whose skills as an orator had grown exponentially over the past few years, would make history with his keynote address. What concerned her that night wasn’t the prospect of failure but the likelihood of success—and how it might transform her little family forever. In an unguarded moment, she shared her doubts with the others. “I’m just kind of worried,” Michelle said wistfully, “that things will never be normal again, you know?”

I’m the badass wife who is sort of keeping it real.

—Michelle

If I ever thought this was ruining my family, I wouldn’t do it.

—Barack

I always told Michelle to step out of her comfort zone in life. But I never thought she was going to step this far out.

—Marian Robinson

No, no, no. I would never cheat. Michelle would kick my butt.

—Barack

My sister doesn’t suffer any fools. If there was any foolishness to him, they wouldn’t be married right now.

—Craig Robinson