Obama's near-flawless run from start to finish

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 knew, 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.

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