The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama

Michelle a circle of support—from her mother, brother, other family, and friends—that could help her manage the prolonged absences my job would require. So for the three nights a week that I spent in Washington, I rented a small one-bedroom apartment near Georgetown Law School, in a high-rise between Capitol Hill and downtown.
At first, I tried to embrace my newfound solitude, forcing myself to remember the pleasures of bachelorhood—gathering take-out menus from every restaurant in the neighborhood, watching basketball or reading late into the night, hitting the gym for a midnight workout, leaving dishes in the sink and not making my bed. But it was no use; after thirteen years of marriage, I found myself to be fully domesticated, soft and helpless. My first morning in Washington, I realized I’d forgotten to buy a shower curtain and had to scrunch up against the shower wall in order to avoid flooding the bathroom floor. The next night, watching the game and having a beer, I fell asleep at halftime, and woke up on the couch two hours later with a bad crick in my neck. Take- out food didn’t taste so good anymore; the silence irked me. I found myself calling home repeatedly, just to listen to my daughters’ voices, aching for the warmth of their hugs and the sweet smell of their skin.
“Hey, sweetie!”
“Hey, Daddy.”
“What’s happening?”
“Since you called before?”
“Yeah.”
“Nothing. You wanna talk to Mommy?”
There were a handful of senators who also had young families, and whenever we met we would compare notes on the pros and cons of moving to Washington, as well as the difficulty in protecting family time from overzealous staff. But most of my new colleagues were considerably older—the average age was sixty—and so as I made the rounds to their offices, their advice usually related to the business of the Senate. They explained to me the advantages of various committee assignments and the temperaments of various committee chairmen. They offered suggestions on how to organize staff, whom to talk to for extra office space, and how to manage constituent requests. Most of the advice I found useful; occasionally it was contradictory. But among Democrats at least, my meetings would end with one consistent recommendation: As soon as possible, they said, I should schedule a meeting with Senator Byrd—not only as a matter of senatorial courtesy, but also because Senator Byrd’s senior position on the Appropriations Committee and general stature in the Senate gave him considerable clout.
At eighty-seven years old, Senator Robert C. Byrd was not simply the dean of the Senate; he had come to be seen as the very embodiment of the Senate, a living, breathing fragment of history. Raised by his aunt and uncle in the hardscrabble coal- mining towns of West Virginia, he possessed a native talent that allowed him to recite long passages of poetry from memory and play the fiddle with impressive skill. Unable to afford college tuition, he worked as a meat cutter, a produce salesman, and a welder on battleships during World War II. When he returned to West Virginia after the war, he won a seat in the state legislature, and he was elected to Congress in 1952.
In 1958, he made the jump to the Senate, and during the course of forty-seven years he had held just about every office available—including six years as majority leader and six years as minority leader. All the while he maintained the populist impulse that led him to focus on delivering tangible benefits to the men and women back home: black lung benefits and union protections for miners; roads and buildings and electrification projects for desperately poor communities. In ten years of night courses while serving in Congress he had earned his law degree, and his grasp of Senate rules was legendary. Eventually, he had written a four-volume history of the Senate that reflected not just scholarship and discipline but also an unsurpassed love of the institution