It was past midnight on Inauguration Day, after the balls and all of the other events had ended. It had been an exhilarating and exhausting day. Michelle and the kids headed to bed. Barack Obama, the new President, was still up. Right there with him were the people who for years had been such a big part of his life. He was with his friends. His time with them was the capstone of this personally profound and historically significant day.
Back when Obama was a state senator, the next wish on his list - becoming a United States senator - seemed highly unlikely to come true. (He had just lost an election.) But Barack thought he could do it, and he knew whom he had to persuade. He called his closest friend Valerie Jarrett, invited himself to her place, and asked her to invite his closest friends. That, in a way, is how Obama's ascension to the United States Senate, and then the Presidency, began.
Years later, as the Presidential primary season would drag on longer than anyone had anticipated, Obama's friends were concerned about him. Three of the closest among them - Jarrett, Martin Nesbitt, and Eric Whitaker - decided that one of them should try to be with him on the road as often as possible until the Democrats finally had a candidate.
Of course, what the Democrats also had was a winner. Between the day of the election and the day of the inauguration, meetings about policy, planning, and personnel piled up, one atop another atop still another. Psychologically, one of the most significant meetings, I suspect, was not about any of those matters. In early December, those three close friends met with Obama in Nesbitt's Chicago home to draft "an elaborate visiting schedule that will bring Hyde Park to Washington."
In those last days of the transition between President-Elect and just plain President, Barack and his family headed for a Hawaiian vacation. This wasn't an inward-looking, just-the-four (or five)-of-us sort of event. With them, once again, were those three closest friends - Valerie Jarrett (who is single - no ditching of single friends by the First Couple), Martin Nesbitt, Eric Whitaker, and their families.
The Obama friends did not attach themselves to him to bask in his reflected glory. Initially, Barack wasn't even the most eminent among them. Looking ahead, it is possible that Obama will eventually develop new and close friendships, but "newcomers are unlikely to replicate the intensity of this group's ties, formed over more than a decade by births and deaths, Scrabble games, barbecues and vacations, but also by shared beliefs about race, success and responsibility."
Friendship Writ Large
Barack and Michelle don't just attend to their own friends - they recognize the value of friends in other people's lives, too. When Michelle Obama gave the commencement address at UC Merced, she encouraged the graduates to
"think about the friends who never got the chance to go to college but were still invested in your success -- friends who talked you out of dropping out, friends who kept you out of trouble so that you could graduate on time, friends who forced you to study when you wanted to procrastinate."
The decision made by Michelle's mother, Marian Robinson, to move from her settled life in Chicago to join the First Family in the White House, was not an easy one. Among the people she would miss was one of her closest friends, Yvonne Davila, who has two daughters. So the three of them will visit. Said Davila of Barack and Michelle's attitude, "They've made it abundantly clear that we're welcome."
Sasha and Malia are also making new friends and keeping the old. Their Chicago friends visit, and so do the kids from their new school. Commenting about her kids' social schedule back in May, the First Lady quipped, "Slumber parties - we had about seven girls over, screaming and yelling."
Even the Closest of Friends Aren't the Same as Family - and Maybe that's a Good Thing
It is easy to be smitten by the First Family. They're smart, they're affectionate, they're fun. After decades of sober tomes and talk about the low rates of marriage among blacks - including, most recently, a segment on CNN's Black in America 2 - the picture of that close and happy family must seem all the more remarkable.
What's more impressive to me is the way that Obama practices friendship. It is not just among Blacks that the number of years that adults spend married has declined - it is a national, and even international trend. What is likely to become increasingly important in all of our lives is the place of friends. As the life story of Barack Obama illustrates, friendships do not have to compete with marriage or traditional family. They can stand right alongside both, enriching them, and giving them a break from carrying all of the emotional load.
Maybe friendship is beginning to garner greater recognition. This Sunday's cover story in the New York Times Magazine is about Valerie Jarrett, "the ultimate Obama insider."
Throughout the lengthy story, Jarrett is described repeatedly - both by Obama and the reporter - as "family," a "sibling," a "sister." These are the analogies we reach for first when we want to describe a friend who is especially close and dear. They are meant as high compliments. They are compliments. But they miss something important about friendship.
Friends are not siblings - not even the closest ones are. Siblings can become indifferent, hostile, or even estranged, but they are still siblings. Friends who feel so little warmth toward one another typically cease to be friends at all.
Obama's friends did not need to rearrange their lives to be with him during the grueling Presidential primaries - they chose to. Obama did not have to invite his friends to be there with him on Inauguration evening or on the last vacation he took before stepping into the most powerful position on the planet - he chose to.
Obama chose friendship. He values it. May that legacy live as long as all of his others.
