The Audacity of Hope

Epilogue
MY SWEARING IN to the U.S. Senate in January 2005 completed a process that
had begun the day I announced my candidacy two years earlier—the exchange of a
relatively anonymous life for a very public one.
To be sure, many things have remained constant. Our family still makes its home in
Chicago. I still go to the same Hyde Park barbershop to get my hair cut, Michelle and I
have the same friends over to our house as we did before the election, and our daughters
still run through the same playgrounds.
Still, there’s no doubt that the world has changed profoundly for me, in ways that I
don’t always care to admit. My words, my actions, my travel plans, and my tax returns
all end up in the morning papers or on the nightly news broadcast. My daughters have to
endure the interruptions of well-meaning strangers whenever their father takes them to
the zoo. Even outside of Chicago, it’s becoming harder to walk unnoticed through
airports.
As a rule, I find it difficult to take all this attention very seriously. After all, there are
days when I still walk out of the house with a suit jacket that doesn’t match my suit
pants. My thoughts are so much less tidy, my days so much less organized than the
image of me that now projects itself into the world, that it makes for occasional comic
moments. I remember the day before I was sworn in, my staff and I decided we should
hold a press conference in our office. At the time, I was ranked ninety-ninth in seniority,
and all the reporters were crammed into a tiny transition office in the basement of the
Dirksen Office Building, across the hall from the Senate supply store. It was my first
day in the building; I had not taken a single vote, had not introduced a single bill—
indeed I had not even sat down at my desk when a very earnest reporter raised his hand
and asked, “Senator Obama, what is your place in history?”
Even some of the other reporters had to laugh.
Some of the hyperbole can be traced back to my speech at the 2004 Democratic
Convention in Boston, the point at which I first gained national attention. In fact, the
process by which I was selected as the keynote speaker remains something of a mystery
to me. I had met John Kerry for the first time after the Illinois primary, when I spoke at
his fund-raiser and accompanied him to a campaign event highlighting the importance
of job-training programs. A few weeks later, we got word that the Kerry people wanted
me to speak at the convention, although it was not yet clear in what capacity. One
afternoon, as I drove back from Springfield to Chicago for an evening campaign event,
Kerry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill called to deliver the news. After I hung up, I
turned to my driver, Mike Signator.
“I guess this is pretty big,” I said.
Mike nodded. “You could say that.”
I had only been to one previous Democratic convention, the 2000 Convention in Los
Angeles. I hadn’t planned to attend that convention; I was just coming off my defeat in