WATERLOO, Iowa - As
Barack Obama announced his candidacy for president, a chartered American Airlines Boeing 757 sat portentously on the far edge of the tarmac at the Abraham Lincoln Capital Airport in Springfield, Illinois, waiting for the nascent campaign to take flight. The size of the aircraft presented yet more evidence of the sense of serious possibility that has attached itself to the Obama campaign.
The huge crowds bubbling over with goose-pimple enthusiasm that would show up in Iowa and Chicago in the 48 hours to follow would only serve to affirm that the black, freshman U.S. senator of mixed racial parentage had significantly altered the landscape of the 2008 presidential campaign.
But if the tone of the campaign is anything like the one set at the launch, the Obama campaign may do at least as much to alter the image of the black American family as it does to change the face of American politics.
The Obamas present a strikingly new vision of what a new American first family might look like, and that idea may be as powerful as any of the other issues coursing through the campaign.
As the aircraft lifted out of the snow-covered plains of central Illinois and headed for snow-covered plains of Iowa, a flight attendant welcomed passengers to the maiden flight of "Obama One." The candidate and his wife
Michelle wandered back into the cabin to chat with the media horde flying with him. He shook hands, answered questions. She said optimistically: "This is going to be fun. We are going to make this fun and interesting and exciting."
She has sometimes been a reluctant political spouse, so the question is how?
"The kids," she says, referring to the couple’s impossibly cute daughters,
eight-year-old Malia and five-year-old Sasha, who spent the weekend with their parents. "Their big thing today is that they saw Lincoln's hat," Michelle Obama said. She is the 43-year-old graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law, who joined a law firm where she met a young summer associate named Barack Obama, who sweet-talked her into having lunch and turned it into a marriage. Those who know her say she could be the Senator Obama in the family, and watching her calmly move through all the frenzy of the first campaign weekend, she could also be First Lady.
In a high school gymnasium jammed with people in Waterloo, Iowa, Obama introduced Michelle by telling them that she is the one person, "I would be genuinely be afraid to run against." After the town hall meeting, Obama is mobbed by people wanting autographs or inscription in copies of one of the senator's two bestselling books, 'Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance' and 'The Audacity of Hope: Reclaiming the American Dream.'
In the scrum someone holds up a copy of the most recent issue of 'Ebony' magazine which features the Obamas on the cover. The scene is striking because the hand is white.
It belonged to Neil Tucker a 28-year-old security specialist from Kansas City, who drove five-and-a-half hours to Waterloo to see the Obamas. He has both of Obama's books, and two copies of Ebony. He fights his way to the front of the throng and gets them signed by the senator, but he's not done. "Where's Michelle?" he says, "I got to get her; that would be so cool." He is so focused on finding her he is almost frantic. When he does, she too is surrounded and he began working his way to the front again.
"I love everything he stands for," says Tucker, mentioning a relatively obscure one: I like his stand on police interrogations." Obama was central to passing laws when he was in the Illinois State Senate that mandated that interrogations of suspects in capital murder cases must be videotaped to guard against forced confessions. He talked a lot about that and a lot of other issues and positions on his first campaign swing, but one of the most important things that Obama put on the table is his family, especially his wife.
On Sunday, he picked up the important endorsement of
Iowa State Attorney General Tom Miller. In the field house at Iowa State University in Ames, Miller introduces Obama as the smartest person to have gone to Harvard Law School in the last 25 years. When it was his turn to speak, Obama thanked Miller and a bunch of other people, but before he got too far into his remarks, he made this pronouncement: "The smartest person, I know who went to Harvard Law School in the last 25 years is my wife, Michelle.”
As he went on to talk about the war in Iraq, health care and the need for the development of more biofuels, Michelle Obama sat on the steps of the stage with Sasha clutched to her. At one point she undid and redid one of her daughter’s braids.
Miller urged the crowd to join the Obama campaign: "You'll never regret it, supporting this man," he said. "And imagine President Obama in the world as a leader."
Imagine, indeed, all of the Obamas on the world stage.
