The mood was anything but sombre. Eighteen thousand people left the cold and rain of a Chicago night and milled about inside the cavernous McCormick Place, waiting for Barack Obama. As a slide show of images from Obama’s Presidency was projected on giant screens, a succession of pointedly chosen songs, from Foo Fighters’ “My Hero” to Maxine Nightingale’s “Right Back Where We Started From,” played. Soon, Eddie Vedder and the Chicago Children’s Choir would take the stage to perform “People Have the Power.” And, like a Pearl Jam fan going to a show in 2016 wearing a concert T-shirt from 1991, attendees at President Obama’s farewell were not shy about demonstrating just how far back they went.
Dee Fox wore a button from 2008, with a picture of Barack and Michelle under the words “Our Next President and First Lady.” Above it, she had placed her oval “I Voted” sticker. She’d come from Texas, and had on an Obama T-shirt that said “Change We Can Believe In” on the front and “I’m Fired Up” on the back. Her nails were painted a metallic purple; her sneakers were glittery silver. Periodically, she stood on her chair to get a better look.
“I’m a retired schoolteacher,” she said. “I’ve had health care all my life. I didn’t vote for him because I needed any gifts.” She worked phone banks in 2012 and 2016, for Obama and then for Hillary Clinton. “A lot of people vote against their own interests,” she said, about this last election. “I read the Bible, and the word is very clear that you love your neighbor as yourself. And you’re saying you want to take health care away from your neighbor? People vote like you buy a lottery ticket. You know when the Powerball hits four hundred million dollars? You know you’re not going to win, but you take a chance.”
Wylene Patterson, a medical technologist at Evanston Hospital, lived in Obama’s district when he was a state senator. “I’d see him around Hyde Park,” she said. “He impressed me. He had his views, but didn’t always reveal his hand. He was cool.”
Patterson sat with her coat on her lap. She didn’t want to think about the 2016 election. “Coming up when I did, because I’m sixty-three, I have never, ever felt like I do now. On Election Night, I was in total denial. My mother died on the eighth, several years ago, and on the eighth was this election. I said, ‘You know, this day is jinxed.’ ”
Chris McDonald, an elegantly dressed retiree, worked phone banks for Obama in 2008 and 2012. “It was interesting to call places during his first run,” she said. “I got hung up on a lot. I heard the N-word a lot. With one woman, I said, ‘Well, Ma’am, I’m an N-word.’ Click.” She recalled, “I remember calling this one guy who had a farm. He said, ‘Well, what’s all the damned fuss about?’ And I said, ‘At least we can give this younger person a try.’ And he said, ‘Well, do you know him?’ And I said, ‘No, but I’ll give him a try.’ And so he told me all his concerns, and we talked about them, and I said, ‘Let’s just give this man a try.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you’re a nice gal, so I might just do that.’ ”
McDonald taught in Chicago public schools for thirty-two years, and saw Obama’s return as a needed balm for the city. “I’m so sick of people saying negative things about Chicago,” she said. But the prospect of reversing the progress of the past eight years rankled: “There’s a reason Mitch McConnell and all them did that dirty shit. Because they’re dirty people. People standing here have to get a hint, and not vote the same Congress and Senate back in. We can’t let the same damned people do the same damned thing. If we always do what we always did, we’ll always get what we always got.”
Veronica Thigpen was with her thirteen-year-old daughter, August, who wore a sweatshirt that said “PEACE LOVE SKATE.” (She’s a synchronized skater.) They had been to Springfield in 2007, when Obama announced his candidacy for the Presidency. August was three. They were at the Democratic National Convention in 2008, and at the Inauguration in 2009. Obama is the only President August has known. Of her younger impressions of him, she said, “I thought he controlled everything. Like he was the king of the world or something.”
August is in the seventh grade at the Lab School, which the Obama girls attended before they moved to D.C. “I used to play with them,” August said.
“She met them once,” Thigpen clarified.
“I definitely feel like I know him,” August said. “It’s going to be really different to not say ‘President Obama’ anymore.” ♦
