A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [154]
“My mother lived a classic expatriate life, and there are aspects of that life that are very appealing,” Obama said, going on to characterize his mother’s life in a way that seemed perhaps to understate the depth and seriousness of her commitment to Indonesia. “Both my sister and I, I think, to one degree or another, wrestle with the fact that it’s fun to just take off and live in a new culture and meet interesting people and learn new languages and eat strange foods. You know, it’s a life full of adventure. So the appeal of that is very powerful to me. Now, the flip side of that is that you’re always a little bit of an outsider, you’re always a little bit of an observer. There’s an element of you’re not fully committed to this place and this thing. It’s not so much, I think, me rejecting what she did; I understood the appeal of it, and I still do. But it was a conscious choice, I think, on my part, that the idea of being a citizen of the world, but without any real anchor, had both its benefits but also its own limits.
“Either way, you were giving something up. And I chose to give up this other thing—partly because I’d gotten what my mother had provided when I was young, which was a lot of adventure and a great view of the world.”
Was there a moment during the campaign or the election, I wondered, when his mind turned to his mother—the person who had given him the values, the self-confidence, and the life story that became the foundation of his extraordinary political rise?
“I’m sure there were a number of moments,” he said. “But there was one. . . .”
It was January 3, 2008, the night of the Iowa caucuses, the first major step in the nominating process for the presidency.
“We had been thirty points down in the national polls,” he said. “Everybody was doubting that we could pull something off. And our whole theory in the Iowa caucuses was that we could create this whole new group of caucus-goers—people who hadn’t been involved in politics before, people who had become cynical and disaffected about politics. There were doubts, obviously, that an African-American candidate would get the votes in an overwhelmingly white state. And so, caucus night, you go to this caucus site and you see just these people sort of streaming in. And they’re all kinds of folks, right? Young, old, black, white, Hispanic—this is Des Moines.”
Obama began to chuckle at the memory of that night, his face breaking into a broad smile.
“There was one guy who looked like Gandalf,” he continued. “He had a staff. He had installed a little video monitor—I still don’t know how he did this—that looped one of my TV commercials on this thing. You know, had a long white beard and stuff? But the mood and the atmosphere was one of hope and this sense that we can overcome a lot of the old baggage. So it was a wonderful moment. At that point, we figured we were going to win that night.
“But I remember driving away from that caucus and thinking not, ‘Wouldn’t my mother be proud of me,’ but rather, ‘Wouldn’t she have enjoyed being in this caucus.’ It would have just felt like she was right at home. It was imbued with her spirit in a way that was very touching to me. I teared up at that point, in a way that I didn’t in most of the campaign. Because it just seemed to somehow capture something that she had given to me as a young person—and here it was manifest in a really big way. It seemed to vindicate what she had believed in and who she was.”
Could he say what it was about that evening that seemed so consistent with her spirit? I asked.
“It was a sense that beneath our surface differences, we’re all the same, and that there’s more good than bad in each of