By Adam Nagourney, Jim Rutenberg and Jeff Zeleny
updated 3:47 a.m. CT,Wed., Nov. 5, 2008
It was the third week of September, and Senator John McCain was speaking to a nearly empty convention center in Jacksonville, Fla. Lehman Brothers had collapsed that day, a harrowing indicator of the coming financial crisis and a reminder that the presidential campaign was turning into a referendum on which candidate could best address the nation's economic challenges.
On stage, Mr. McCain, of Arizona, was trying to show concern for the prospect of hardship but also optimism about the country's resilience.
"The fundamentals of the economy are strong," he said.
A thousand miles away, at Senator Barack Obama's campaign headquarters in Chicago, the aides who monitored Mr. McCain's every utterance knew immediately that they had just heard a potential turning point in a race that seemed to be tightening. They rushed out to tell Dan Pfeiffer, Mr. Obama's communications director, what Mr. McCain, the Republican candidate, had just said, knowing that his words could be used to portray him as out of touch.
"Shut up!" Mr. Pfeiffer said incredulously. "He said what?" Mr. Obama, who had just arrived at a rally in Colorado, hastily inserted the comments into his speech. And by nightfall, the Obama campaign had produced an advertisement that included video of Mr. McCain making the statement that would shadow him for the rest of the campaign.
Comment marked turning point
At the McCain campaign headquarters in Arlington, Va., at almost the same moment that morning, Mr. McCain's chief strategist, Steve Schmidt, looked stricken when his war room alerted him to the comment. Within 30 minutes, he was headed for a flight to Florida to join Mr. McCain as they began a frantic and ultimately unsuccessful effort to recover.
Mr. McCain's inartful phrase about the economy that day, and the responses of the two campaigns, fundamentally altered the dynamic of the race. But the episode also highlighted a deeper difference: the McCain campaign team often seemed to make missteps and lurch from moment to moment in search of a consistent strategy and message, while the disciplined and nimble Obama team marched through a presidential contest of historic intensity learning to exploit opponents' weaknesses and making remarkably few stumbles.
The story of Mr. Obama's journey to the pinnacle of American politics is the story of a campaign that was, even in the view of many rivals, almost flawless. But Mr. Obama and his aides believed from the outset that it would have to be nothing less than that if he was to overcome obstacles that sometimes in the drama of the year became easy to forget: that this was a black man with an unusual name and exotic past, someone dogged by a stubborn (and inaccurate) belief among some voters that he is a Muslim, who began plotting his presidential run less than two years after moving from the Illinois Legislature to the United States Senate.
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As Mr.Obama reminded Americans on Tuesday night in his victory speech, "I was never the likeliest candidate for the office."
Assembling a team, creating organization
The two captains of his effort, the disheveled David Axelrod, his close friend and political strategist, and the meticulous David Plouffe, the campaign manager, had never been on a team that had won a presidential nomination, much less a general election.
While two of the Democratic primary rivals - Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and John Edwards of North Carolina - as well as his eventual Republican opponent, Mr. McCain, had spent years planning for this race, Mr. Obama had no organization and no clear idea of what he was getting into.
He was so unfamiliar with the requirements of a national campaign that his aides drafted a set of mock schedules to show him the states where he would have to invest a lot of time. When Mr. Obama, the father of two young girls, asked if he could go home on weekends, his aides replied: Not if you want to win.
Yet after a somewhat lackluster start - it is hard now to appreciate how formidable a front-runner Mrs. Clinton appeared to be just a year ago - Mr. Obama and his team delivered. They developed a strategy to secure the nomination, and stuck with it even after setbacks.
They used the newest technology and old-fashioned organizing skills to harness the grass-roots enthusiasm his candidacy generated to help raise record sums of money and build a volunteer army to turn out the vote. They carefully researched how to handle the issue of race, and worked at making voters comfortable with the idea of putting a black family in the White House.
They rolled the dice at times, like when Mr. Obama confronted his association with his fiery former pastor by delivering a major speech on race. And they played it safe when they could, as in the selection of Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware as his running mate.
Core theme of change
Taking the tightly run Bush 2004 campaign as a model, Mr. Obama's campaign did not waver from its core theme of change. It tolerated no drama and did not endure a single staff shakeup, in contrast to the turmoil that marked the Clinton and McCain campaigns. Mr. Obama kept himself, and his team, on an even keel - a character trait that paid immense dividends in the closing stages, when his understated approach to the economic crisis came off to many voters as steady leadership.
"It was perfectly run; it made few mistakes," Mr. Schmidt, Mr. McCain's strategist, said of the Obama campaign. "And it took full advantage of an environment where the American people had turned on the incumbent president of the Republican Party and badly wanted change."
Mr. Obama, Mr. Schmidt continued, "was a once-in-a-generation orator. A good debater. And an eloquent message. He was the beneficiary of favorable media coverage. Ice-cold disciplined about the execution of his campaign message. He was an extremely formidable candidate."
But the Obama campaign did have its troubles. The original plan sketched out by Mr. Plouffe and Mr. Axelrod assumed winning Iowa would be a devastating blow to Mrs. Clinton that would lead to victory in New Hampshire. Instead, she won in that state, and the race dragged on for months.
What proved critical to Mr. Obama's campaign was the "Feb. 5 and Beyond Room" that Mr. Plouffe set up, an operation staffed by aides who focused only on the later primaries and caucuses. Mr. Obama built a small but insurmountable delegates lead over Mrs. Clinton, whose campaign was exhausted and flat-footed after failing to wrap up the nomination as she had expected on Super Tuesday.
Recalibrating the campaign
At times, the campaign had to recalibrate - adjusting the tone in taking on Mrs. Clinton, reconsidering its pledge about accepting public financing, figuring out how to deal with the surprise choice of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as the Republican vice-presidential nominee.
And the issue of race proved vexing. The campaign was blindsided when DVDs of the incendiary sermons of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., Mr. Obama's former pastor, emerged and threatened Mr. Obama's candidacy.
"That was one place where we dropped the ball," said Mr. Axelrod, his voice growing angry. The campaign's research operation had not known of the DVDs and was sent scrambling after they were broadcast. "The work just wasn't done."
The slip-up violated a key tenet of the campaign: to avoid discussions focused on race. From polling and interviews, the campaign concluded from the outset that it was imperative to define Mr. Obama's candidacy in terms that would transcend skin color.
"It would be difficult for an African-American to be elected president in this country," said Cornell Belcher, a pollster who worked for Mr. Obama's campaign and studies racial voting patterns. "However, it is not difficult for an extraordinary individual who happens to be African-American to be elected president."
Dispatching Clinton
It was early October 2007, and Mr. Obama had assembled a dozen staff members at a hideaway office near his Chicago headquarters. Things were not going well. Polls showed him trailing Mrs. Clinton by a significant margin, the candidate and his campaign seemed listless and Mrs. Clinton's campaign was being praised even by her rivals.
"Right now we are losing," he said. "And we have 90 days to turn it around."
Those next 90 days and beyond would play a vital part in the education of the man who would be president. At that meeting, Mr. Obama and his aides mapped out a day-by-day plan to reframe the race, to attack Mrs. Clinton as a politically disingenuous and divisive product of Washington, and himself as the "agent of change."
"If the election was about change, we needed to say why we more readily represented that than she did," Mr. Axelrod said. "They made our job easier by improbably positioning her as the consummate Washington insider."
Over the next month, Mr. Obama would appear on "Saturday Night Live" to address voter concerns that he was aloof and elite. He rolled out a middle-class tax cut to appeal to the voters Mrs. Clinton was courting. And he spoke at a Jefferson-Jackson dinner, which drew every prominent Democrat in Iowa. His address brought Iowa activists to their feet and would fill his field offices with volunteers.
Behind the intense focus on Iowa was Mr. Plouffe, known for his mathematic invocation of data in making decisions. When Mr. Obama decided to run for the presidency in November 2006, Mr. Plouffe and a half-dozen staff members began plotting out a strategy that centered on Iowa as crucial to defeating Mrs. Clinton in New Hampshire.
"We had to disrupt her early," Mr. Plouffe said. "If she had been able to prevent us from winning Iowa, she would have been the nominee."
Race was part of calculation
There was a less obvious calculation behind the focus on Iowa: race. A victory in an overwhelmingly white state like Iowa would remove the fears of black voters that Mr. Obama could never get elected president because whites would not vote for him.
"The biggest race problem we had to start was not with the white voters," Mr. Axelrod said, "but with African-American voters, a deep sense of skepticism that this might happen."
Mr. Obama got his victory in Iowa, but things did not go as planned in New Hampshire. Mr. Axelrod remembered the moment he realized Mrs. Clinton was back on the march: when she teared up in response to a supporter's warm words at a coffee shop. As Mr. Axelrod and Mr. Obama viewed the video of the episode as their campaign bus rumbled through New Hampshire, Mr. Axelrod realized that she had accomplished something Mr. Obama had not: presenting herself as a real person with real concerns to voters in a state that even then was anxious about the economy.
When aides delivered the disappointing New Hampshire results to Mr. Obama, he smiled. "Well," he said, "I guess this is going to go on for a while." Later, he conceded that he had been too confident after Iowa but said that the defeat would allow him to remake himself.
Unlike the Clinton campaign, the Obama team at least had a well-thought-out plan for how to proceed deeper into the primary season, mostly by concentrating on picking up delegates in red states and in states with caucuses where the Obama campaign's organizational strengths and financial advantage could be put to use.
Clinton prepared him for fight
Going head to head with Mrs. Clinton over such a long period of time would test Mr. Obama, and demonstrate that he had the fortitude to endure a hard fight. Mrs. Clinton opened up lines of critique that were later picked up by Mr. McCain: that Mr. Obama's stated openness to meeting with the leaders of rogue countries "without preconditions" was na%uFFFDve; that for all of his great oratory, he was not offering substance; and that he lacked the mettle and experience to lead a nation through crisis.
And as Mrs. Clinton found her voice as a heroine of the struggling working class, she tried to cast Mr. Obama as elite. At a fund-raiser in San Francisco, Mr. Obama had described some white working-class voters as "bitter," a characterization she used to suggest that her rival was out of touch with the values of ordinary Americans.
As a controversy grew about the incendiary remarks from Mr. Wright, Mr. Obama told his advisers that he wanted to deliver a major speech on race, something that they had talked him out of in the fall of 2007 for fear it would take away from his efforts to win over Iowa voters. His race speech in Philadelphia was viewed as a success, but weeks later the episode was revisited when the pastor spoke out again, forcing Mr. Obama to disavow him.
Little doubt about nomination
By spring, there was little doubt that Mr. Obama would win the nomination. Still, it was proving harder than he thought. His campaign made what his aides came to see as a tactical mistake: trying to win Ohio and Texas on March 4. He lost the popular votes in both, dispiriting defeats that Mrs. Clinton's advisers used to raise questions about his electability. Mr. Axelrod later said he wished they had focused only on Texas.
And seven weeks later, Mr. Obama lost again, in Pennsylvania, feeding low-level anxiety among some of his advisers that Mrs. Clinton could snatch the nomination away from him. Mr. Obama regretted allowing himself to get drawn into sharp combat with her, which polls showed was hurting his image. Mr. Obama did not think he was going to lose. But he assembled a meeting with aides to say he was afraid he was heading to a messy victory that would not help him going into a general election.
"I'll be the first to admit that I made my own mistakes in Pennsylvania," Mr. Obama said, according to a participant at the meeting at his Hyde Park house. "But I don't feel like we're finishing this thing out the way I want to finish it out."
He began taking a firmer hand in the running of the campaign, holding nightly calls with his staff. He resisted attacks on Mrs. Clinton when possible. His campaign instituted the 6 p.m. rule: no big rallies, which aides worried contributed to the criticism that he was distant, until after the early evening news.
Finally, days after the last states voted on June 3, Mrs. Clinton withdrew.
Defending himself
Heading into the general election campaign, Mr. Axelrod and an expanded team of advisers reviewed an inside poll identifying Mr. Obama's strengths and vulnerabilities.
Enthusiasm among black voters was so high, aides knewd, there was a chance that the campaign could help put into play states that no Democrat had won in decades: Indiana, North Carolina and Virginia.
But the advisers also saw some alarming findings. Doubts persisted among the unionized white workers in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, which Mr. Obama had lost during the primaries. He was underperforming among "up for grabs" working class voters.
The association with Mr. Wright, and a consistent stream of anonymous e-mail messages questioning his patriotism and background, had taken their toll. So had his comments in San Francisco.
"There were a lot of question marks about whether he had a genuine American outlook," said Steve Murphy, a late-joining member of the advertising unit who attended the meeting. "They just didn't know him: He came out of nowhere, his name is Barack Hussein Obama, his mom was an anthropologist, his father's a Kenyan; he spent time growing up in Indonesia. And remember, he was coming off of a couple of serious controversies from the primaries - Rev. Wright, guns and religion, 'bitter.' "
Perceptions that Mr. Obama was Muslim were persistent. Internal polling found that 12 percent to 15 percent of voters believed it, a finding reinforced by public surveys.
"I spoke up and joked, 'Well, yeah, he's a Sunni,' " Mr. Murphy said. "Nobody laughed; I mean, nobody. It was incredibly instructive to me, 'Hey, they're really worried.' "
Misconceptions about background
Black advisers and white advisers were to some extent split over how much race was at play in the finding. Mr. Murphy, for instance, said he did not believe the Muslim label was a stand-in for racial bias; Mr. Belcher suspected it might be, he said, but it was hard to determine through polling.
No matter the cause, Mr. Obama and his aides believed, they would need to toughen up their defenses and address the misconceptions about his background.
"On some level, we were like a balloon with a big idea and it was like a lot of pinpricks, and we were starting to sag," said Daniel Carol, who was brought in around that time who had worked in the famous 1992 Democratic war room. "We had lost ground for where a Democrat needed to be with working-class people, thanks to Hillary's effectiveness and the bitter thing."
And they knew the Republicans were going to play that much harder.
Mr. Obama dispatched a team of aides to Illinois to review his votes in the state Legislature, this time looking for cases where he had cast a vote that Mr. McCain could use to attack him.
Mr. Obama's aides described several categories of potential attack: Obama as "dashiki-wearing black nationalist"; "secret Muslim"; "anti-Israel"; and "a black man from crime-ridden Chicago who was too lenient on crime with dark associations."
"The theory was that they were going to try to make Barack Obama the other, and they had a bunch of different ways to do it," Mr. Carol said.
The Obama research team began digging into his Hyde Park associations, including William Ayers, the founder of the Weather Underground who had become a preoccupation on conservative blogs, and Mr. Wright. They also worked up potential advertisements against Mr. Obama that in some cases were tougher than anything Mr. McCain came up with.
Hungry for something new
In focus group testing with voters, aides found that the associations to people like Mr. Ayers, whose domestic terrorism group's targets included the Capitol and the Pentagon, were troublesome. But they also found that voters were so hungry for a candidate who promised something new that they would quickly accept the explanations Mr. Obama offered in his advertising.
One advertisement began with a shot of Mr. McCain saying Mr. Obama should not be held responsible for his longtime pastor's remarks, Mr. Axelrod said.
And his advertising team produced spots that directly addressed doubts about Mr. Obama's background and experience.
Through weeks of focus group testing and polling, Mr. Obama's advisers came to believe that the single best way to allay those concerns was to produce commercials in which he spoke directly into the camera.
"We found those concerns were less and less as he told his story and talked about what he wanted to do for the nation," said Jim Margolis, Mr. Obama's senior advertising strategist. "We saw that repeatedly."
As a black candidate with a background that voters would have found unusual no matter his race, Mr. Obama's aides wanted to keep those advertisements running almost constantly.
"He had to be an incredibly individuated figure," said Mr. Belcher, meaning, he said, that Mr. Obama - whose white grandparents appeared in many of his advertisements - should be seen as someone gifted enough to be president and who happened to be black.
But, to avoid making the election a referendum on him, rather than a choice between him and a challenger who is tied to the unpopular incumbent party, the campaign had to also run a constant stream of advertisements attacking Mr. McCain.
To do it all, and reach new supporters in traditionally Republican states, was going to take money, far more than the $84 million provided by the publicly supported campaign finance system.
A difficult call
Mr. Obama embarked on a politically risky move that his aides saw as worth the likely criticism: he would opt out of the system and raise money on his own.
Aides had been considering the move for about a year, even after Mr. Obama wrote "yes" on a questionnaire asking whether he would pledge to accept public financing if his opponent did, a commitment intended to underscore his promise to rid Washington of the influence of powerful interest groups.
Mr. Obama's strategists consider it one of their most important decisions. They had online fund-raising down to a science, and as tens of millions of dollars flowed in to the campaign, they were sent out to support field operations in 50 states and to pay for record amounts of advertising.
To Mr. McCain's frustration, Mr. Obama's decision to break his pledge did draw complaints, but it was also celebrated for underscoring how a new politician once tagged as na%uFFFDve had shown real savvy.
And he was showing it in other ways that went largely undetected: As his campaign ran glossy, positive advertisements against Mr. McCain on national television, it showed bruising, sometimes misleading ones on the radio and in local markets. While some spots highlighted Mr. Obama's teenage years with his white grandparents, another one running on black-oriented programs was using some of the most evocative images of the civil rights era to urge African-Americans to vote: those of marchers being power-hosed by the authorities, who were white.
But there were moments when the Obama campaign was outmaneuvered by its rival's on issues driving the election. Seizing on the pain of high gas prices, Mr. McCain found a welcome audience for his new support for offshore drilling. Mr. Obama refused for weeks to make a similar shift before reversing himself, virtually ceding the issue to the Republicans.
Not expecting Palin
And his team was not expecting Ms. Palin's appearance on the stage altogether.
Aides to Mr. Obama had done cursory research on the Alaska governor as her name bounced around as a possible McCain running mate in some conservative circles. But she dropped to the Obama campaign's list of third-tier possibilities after the indictment of Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, who had endorsed her run for governor.
That unpreparedness led to a rare, halting moment for Mr. Obama's campaign. Bill Burton, an Obama spokesman, released a statement the day of her announcement that read, "Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency." The statement opened the door to an examination of whether Mr. Obama, with less than three years in the Senate, had any more experience.
Mr. Obama's communications director, Robert Gibbs, said hours later that Mr. Obama had called her and told her "she would be a terrific candidate." But aides were distraught days later when Mr. Obama told the CNN anchor Anderson Cooper that his experience outstripped hers, lowering him to a back-and-forth over experience with the No. 2 candidate on the Republican ticket. Mr. Obama would not go there again.
For more than a week, Ms. Palin's star rose, along with Mr. McCain's poll numbers, as Mr. Obama's campaign seemed uncertain how to respond. Seeking to avoid the appearance of coming on too strong, the campaign stood by as she accused Mr. Obama of "palling around with terrorists." Democrats on Capitol Hill were as nervous as they had been all year.
Mr. Margolis, the advertising strategist, got an earful when he was dispatched to give a briefing at the weekly caucus of Senate Democratic leaders.
"I said, 'I'm just asking everybody to be patient for a couple of weeks,' and there was a groan that went through part of the room, and it was, 'Don't sit back and allow this race to get away from you guys,' " Mr. Margolis said.
Confusing voters on experience issue
As had been their way so often, Mr. Obama's aides did not change course because of the second-guessing. They were confident that with the selection of Ms. Palin, who had little national or international experience, Mr. McCain would ultimately confuse voters who for months had heard his argument that experience mattered most.
"I was trying to communicate pretty clearly that nobody was sitting back, but we believed that we had a strategy that was sound, that there was now real dissonance between the McCain message of August and the McCain message of September," Mr. Margolis said.
Indeed, as Ms. Palin began to suffer a variety of wounds - poor interview performances with Charlie Gibson of ABC and Katie Couric of CBS, a brutal impersonation by Tina Fey on "Saturday Night Live" - they kept their distance and let it play out.
But they let no charge go unanswered in Mr. McCain's television commercials, quickly producing responses to a barrage of attacks on a range of issues, including Mr. Obama's ties to Mr. Ayers.
But by then, Mr. Obama's financial advantage was drowning out most of what Mr. McCain was trying to say. Mr. Obama's campaign ran four advertisements to every one from Mr. McCain.
But Mr. McCain's spots were beginning to seem increasingly out of sync with the heightened public anxiety surrounding the financial crisis. The meltdown of the financial markets ultimately ended any hope of a comeback for Mr. McCain.
As Americans were increasingly worried about their futures, Mr. Obama's message of help for the middle class and promise of steady leadership was resonating with the white, working-class voters he had been seeking to win over for nearly two years. He managed to cast his rival as out of touch and erratic, and repeatedly linked him with what he portrayed as the devastating policies of the Bush administration.
Crossing the racial divide
In the end, it appeared to work, helping him cross the racial divide and build support in swing states and some of those Democrats had long surrendered to the Republicans.
Aides were seeing gains in previously red states like Virginia, and comfortable leads in swing states like Pennsylvania. But they were mindful of the complacency they had shown in New Hampshire. In the pouring rain that had delayed the World Series, Mr. Obama decided against canceling a rally in the last days of his campaign, to show that he was still working for the win.
In Mississippi, Stuart Stevens, a longtime political strategist who had worked for both Mr. McCain and Mitt Romney in the primaries, was surveying polling data for a Republican client. He was picking up on an unexpected shift for Mr. Obama, even among white voters. As he put it in an interview: If a house is on fire, the owner does not care what color the fireman is.
"He transcended race," Mr. Stevens said. "At the time of crisis, it became particularly irrelevant."
Back in Washington, Mr. Belcher, the pollster, was finding something similar. Mr. Obama was showing strength even among white voters Mr. Belcher had identified as having racial biases. It was a phenomenon captured in a photograph he shared last week of a homemade sign with the Confederate flag. It read: "Rednecks for Obama. Even we've had enough."
Patrick Healy contributed reporting.
This story, "Near-flawless run from start to finish is credited in victory," originally appeared in the New York Times.
Copyright %uFFFD 2008 The New York Times
