Obama's near-flawless run from start to finish

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 naïve; 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.

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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.

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