Every now and then, someone publishes something that gives us a glimpse at the president behind the headlines.
Michiko Kakutani, reviewing Richard Wolffe’s new book, Renegade: The Making of a President, writes in the NY Times that, according to Wolffe, Obama seemed to have serious doubts about running for president:
Winning would mean leaving behind the life he’d built with Michelle in Chicago — where he enjoyed the ordinary pleasures of hanging out with his two daughters and flopping on the couch to watch ESPN with friends — and becoming the most observed of all observers in that shiny bubble that is the White House. “I don’t really need to do this,” Senator Obama told David Axelrod in 2006, “because being Barack Obama turns out is a pretty good gig.”
Last January, Michelle and the girls left for Washington a day early to prepare for the start of school, leaving the president-elect rattling around in their house in Chicago for a day. “He found it hard to say goodbye to their old life and space,” Mr. Wolffe writes. A friend of his daughter Malia “dropped off an album of photos of them together. As he flipped through the pages, sitting alone in his empty home, he cried.” The following day, he left for the capital to ready himself for his inauguration as the 44th president of the United States.
To a lesser extent, don’t we all struggle with this? Finding a way to balance career and volunteer service and family life, while continuing to nurture our own souls? And doesn’t it make us feel better, knowing that for Obama, on the eve of his inauguration, what he’d lost was more profound than what he’d gained?