I’d never once heard her dwell on the disappointments. Instead she seemed to find small pleasures everywhere.
As I chewed on the gooey popcorn, looking out at the lake, calm and turquoise now, I tried to recall a more contented moment.
Tom Donilon walked in to brief me on a developing situation involving an issue I’d never been asked about during the campaign. “Pirates?” “Pirates, Mr. President,” Jones said. “Off the coast of Somalia. They boarded a cargo ship captained by an American and appear to be holding the crew hostage.
Finally, I wanted to tell a more personal story that might inspire young people considering a life in public service; how my career in politics really started with a search for a place to fit in. A way to explain the different strands of my mixed up heritage and how it was only by hitching my wagon to something larger than myself that I was ultimately able to locate a community and purpose for my life.
Through them, I discovered a community of faith – that it was okay to doubt, to question, and still reach for something beyond the here and now.
In uncertain times, Mr. President,” the prime minister said, “the call of religious and ethnic solidarity can be intoxicating. And it’s not so hard for politicians to exploit that, in India or anywhere else.
It had been more than a month since Donald Trump had inserted himself into the national political dialogue. My advisors and I had assumed that, having milked it for all it was worth, the media would gradually tire of his obsession with my birth. And yet, like algae in a stagnant pond, the number of stories on his conspiratorial musings proliferated with each passing week.
What is a family? Is it just a genetic chain, parents and offspring, people like me? Or is it a social construct, an economic unit, optimal for child rearing and divisions of labor? Or is it something else entirely: a store of shared memories, say? An ambit of love? A reach across the void?
I suffered rejections and insults often enough to stop fearing them. In other words, I grew up – and got my sense of humor back.
We didn’t just love each other and make each other laugh and share the same basic values – there was symmetry there, the way we complemented each other. We could have each other’s back, guard each other’s blind spots. We could be a team. Of course, that was another way of saying we were very different, in experience and in temperament.
Hope and change were a luxury, folks seemed to be telling us, exotic imports that would wilt in the heat.
I took to circling unfamiliar words to look up in the dictionary, although I was less scrupulous about decoding pronunciations – deep into my twenties I would know the meaning of words I couldn’t pronounce. There was no system to this, no rhyme or pattern. I was like a young tinkerer in my parents’ garage, gathering up old cathode-ray tubes and bolts and loose wires, not sure what I’d do with any of it, but convinced it would prove handy once I figured out the nature of my calling.
I mean dumb choices in the wake of considerable deliberation: those times when you identify a real problem in your life, analyze it, and then with utter confidence come up with precisely the wrong answer.
I’d long believed that the more perspectives around a table, the better an organization performed, and I took pride in the fact that we’d recruited the most diverse cabinet in history.
As a CIA deputy director in the 1980s, Gates had helped oversee the arming of the Afghan mujahideen in their fight against the Soviet occupation of their country. The experience of watching that loosely organized insurgency bleed the mighty Red Army into retreat – only to have elements of that same insurgency later evolve into al-Qaeda – had made Gates mindful of the unintended consequences that could result from rash actions.
Politics doesn’t have to be what people think it is. It can be something more.
I knew that in order to accomplish that, I needed to use language that spoke to all Americans and propose policies that touched everyone – a topflight education for every child, quality healthcare for every American. I needed to embrace white people as allies rather than impediments to change, and to couch the African American struggle in terms of a broader struggle for a fair, just, and generous society.
You ready for me, Wen?” I called out, watching the Chinese leader’s face drop in surprise. I then walked around the table to shake each of their hands. “Gentlemen! I’ve been looking everywhere for you. How about we see if we can do a deal?” Before anybody could object, I grabbed an empty chair and sat down. Across the table, Wen and Singh remained impassive, while Lula and Zuma looked sheepishly down at the papers in front of them.
But what McConnell lacked in charisma or interest in policy he more than made up for in discipline, shrewdness, and shamelessness – all of which he employed in the single-minded and dispassionate pursuit of power.
The inspiration our campaign was providing, the sight of so many young people newly invested in their ability to make change, the bringing together of Americans across racial and socio-economic lines – it was the realization of everything I’d once dreamed might be possible in politics, and it made me proud. But the continuing elevation of me as a symbol ran contrary to my organizer’s instincts, that sense that change involves “we” and not “me”.