Obama Sealed Win by Taking Biggest Risks, Making Fewest Errors

By Julianna Goldman and Michael Tackett
Nov. 5 (Bloomberg)-- Barack Obama played above the rim.

asr: Nice Obama Journey summary ..
He made the difficult look easy. A rookie in a field of veterans, he made the fewest mistakes. He stayed cool when others were impulsive. He took ownership of the word ``change'' and never relinquished it.

He leveraged technology as never before, rewriting the template for campaigns in the digital age. Obama, 47, ended up with millions of volunteers and more than $650 million, the political equivalent of all the money in the world.

In the process, he redrew the electoral map that had defined a generation of American presidential politics. He did what few politicians before him had done; he put people at ease about race. One measure: His last event of the campaign was in Virginia, once the heart of the Old Confederacy.

His was a triumph of vision, strategy and tactics.

President George W. Bush ``defined the election, so we made the case that you don't want the replacement, you want the remedy, and whoever was the sharpest departure from Bush would win,'' said David Axelrod, Obama's chief strategist.

Only a year ago, that seemed like fanciful thinking. Obama trailed Senator Hillary Clinton of New York badly. Few gave him a serious shot.

Last Nov. 10, that dynamic began to change when Obama and Clinton delivered back-to-back speeches at the Iowa Democratic Party's Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner. Obama drew raves from party activists, and followed it with a performance on the ``Meet the Press'' television program the next morning that also earned positive notices.

`Real Momentum'

``From that point, we had real momentum in Iowa and it didn't abate,'' Axelrod said.

To be sure, the campaign also made mistakes, from how it dealt with Obama's association with his controversial former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, to the candidate's comments about rural white voters being ``bitter.''

The larger problem for the Illinois senator, however, might be that he didn't adequately prepare the country for the extent of the problems that he will inherit as president.

He had no such issue winning over converts for his White House run. The campaign built broad and deep support among traditional Democrats -- with blacks a notable beachhead -- and among the young and independents. That enabled Obama to campaign in almost every state.

`We're All In'

``Strategically, nothing was more important than spreading the playing field,'' said David Plouffe, Obama's campaign manager. ``We wanted the most possible avenues to 270,'' he said, referring to the number of electoral votes needed for victory. ``We built very aggressive budgets and plans. We said from the get-go we're all in, and we're all in at a big number.''

While the mechanics of his campaign helped foster his historic victory, Obama's own brand of risk-taking years earlier forged his path to power.

The first important step toward winning his party's nomination came on Oct. 2, 2002, when he delivered a clear message in a little-publicized speech: He opposed the war in Iraq.

That set him apart from other major Democratic candidates and allowed him to build support among the party's liberal base.

He invited comparisons to Abraham Lincoln by announcing his candidacy at the Old State Capitol in Springfield on Feb. 10, 2007, and to John Kennedy by winning the endorsement of the late president's daughter, Caroline, and his brother, Edward, and by delivering his acceptance speech in an outdoor football stadium.

Audacious Proposition

When Obama made mistakes, he quickly recovered. Finally, when the financial crisis hit with a fury on Sept. 15 and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. filed for bankruptcy, Obama persuaded voters he could be the better steward of both prosperity and peace.

Running at all was an audacious proposition. Obama hadn't even completed his first Senate term and Clinton had created an aura of inevitability about her candidacy. Plouffe acknowledged that Obama would probably have lost to Clinton eight times out of 10 in other circumstances.

Obama countered Clinton's high-level strength with a grassroots organization that unleashed the political power of the Internet.

`The First Jolt'

His support was on display on Feb. 10, 2007, when an estimated 17,000 people showed up on a frigid Saturday morning in Springfield. The campaign then flew to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where 2,500 supporters were waiting.

``This was the first jolt that this was not a normal campaign,'' Axelrod said. ``He didn't have the opportunity to take the show on the road to Topeka,'' he said. ``He opened on Broadway on Day One with all the critics sitting on the front row.''

The signs were on the ground and on-line. Joe Rospars, new- media director of the Obama campaign, built a Web site in 10 days that he launched in the early morning hours of Feb. 10. Rospars said that within 24 hours 1,000 volunteer groups had started, a number that would grow to 20,000 with 2 million members.

By using social networking on barackobama.com, Facebook and MySpace, among other sites, Obama's campaign created online communities that helped get out the message, raise money and turn out the vote. By the campaign's calculation, their combined viewings on YouTube totaled almost 14 million hours.

No Sharp Elbows

Before that morning in Springfield, Obama gathered campaign staff to lay out goals. As recounted by Axelrod, Obama said: ``No. 1, this has to be a grassroots campaign. There is no other way a person like me can win. No. 2, I don't want any drama. We can rise and fall on this together. If I see people throwing sharp elbows or pointing fingers, you won't be here long. No. 3, this will be the hardest thing you ever did. It should also be joyful. It should be fun.'''

The power of Obama's fundraising became clear in March when official reports showed he had raised more than $25 million, including $8 million over the Internet, outpacing the Clinton organization, and vaulting him to the top tier of candidates.

``It was hard to imagine at the beginning of the campaign that somebody could raise more money than Hillary Clinton,'' said Howard Paster, an adviser to the Clinton campaign.

Looking for Traction

While Obama was successfully raising money, his campaign was looking for traction. ``In the summer of 2007, a lot of people were writing us off,'' Axelrod said. ``The message wasn't sharp and wasn't very inspired. And we were spending a lot of time in Iowa. Whenever we felt down, we went to Iowa.''

In the first candidate debates in 2007, Obama's performance was halting. He trailed Clinton in a Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll in October, 48 percent to 17 percent. ``There was a lot of hand-wringing and doubt,'' Axelrod said.

To build on the performance at the Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner, Obama also deployed Oprah Winfrey as a surrogate who campaigned for him in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

The day before the Iowa caucuses, a poll published in the Des Moines Register showed Obama with 7-point lead over Clinton and former Senator John Edwards, a margin that held up on caucus night and proved that white voters could embrace a black presidential candidate.

``With New Hampshire only five days away, we thought we would win as well,'' Axelrod said. ``We got a little careless.''

No Yelling

Clinton, 61, roared back with a victory in the Granite State. That night, Obama leaned against a wall and said to Axelrod, ``I guess this is going to go on a while.''

``He would never yell and scream,'' Axelrod said. ``He would say we screwed up, what did we learn? He never said you screwed up. It was always we screwed up.''

Support from black voters fuels any Democratic presidential candidate's victory and that was particularly true for Obama. His win in almost all-white Iowa proved to be the moment when black voters believed that Obama could win, and they sustained him throughout the primaries.

In no place was that support more critical than South Carolina. Bill Clinton, in particular, had a strong connection with black voters and working-class whites and he was working for his wife in South Carolina. The former president seemed to inject what Axelrod called ``the heavy cloud of race'' over the contest.

The day before the primary, it looked as if his efforts were working. On Friday, an NBC/Mason-Dixon Poll showed Obama had the support of only 10 percent of white voters in the state.

`Crossed This Rubicon'

There was no reason for worry. Obama won 81 percent of the African-American vote in a state where blacks made up more than 50 percent of the Democratic primary electorate.

``After that, the feeling was that we had crossed this Rubicon, the clouds had lifted,'' Axelrod said.

The next day Caroline Kennedy wrote an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times with the headline ``A President Like My Father.'' The day after that, Senator Edward Kennedy delivered his own backing in a speech at American University in Washington.

While he lost the biggest prizes -- California, New York and New Jersey -- on Super Tuesday, Obama then went on a run of 11 straight victories. Many of them were in small Western states that held caucuses, but the delegates they produced counted the same as those won anywhere.

Clinton bounced back with wins in Ohio and Texas on March 4, making the argument that Obama couldn't win big states or battleground states that any Democrat needed to capture in the general election.

Blowing $20 Million

Obama stayed cool. He told senior staff: ``I'm not yelling at you guys for blowing $20 million in two weeks,'' Axelrod recalled. ``I could've been yelling, but I am not.''

Potentially serious problems, though, were simmering. Tapes of fiery sermons from Wright, Obama's former pastor, had surfaced on the Internet, stoking racial animus and threatening to derail the campaign.

Obama decided to give a speech on race in Philadelphia on March 17 to put out the fire. Conservatives and liberals alike praised his words. ``I think if he hadn't given that speech people would have been left with questions,'' said Valerie Jarrett, a long-time friend and close campaign adviser.

Obama's address seemed to defuse the controversy, just as he was focusing on a much larger issue. On March 27, he gave a talk at Cooper Union in New York that received limited attention at the time. The topic: a coming financial crisis and what to do about it.

Another Fire

That speech allowed him to credibly tell voters in September that he had been warning about a market meltdown and proposing ways to deal with it.

Yet while the Wright controversy was being tamped down, another was brewing. A blogger for HuffingtonPost.com recorded Obama speaking at a fundraiser in San Francisco in which he said some rural, white voters were bitter and clung to guns and God, rather than embracing Democrats.

Clinton exploited those comments and pummeled Obama in Pennsylvania on April 22, winning by 10 percentage points.

As the campaign moved into the late spring, gasoline prices in the U.S. soared to almost $4 a gallon. Clinton, and Republican candidate John McCain, 72, each called for a gas-tax holiday over the summer to ease pain at the pump. Obama opposed it.

``The conventional wisdom in Washington was that this was a suicidal mistake,'' Axelrod said. ``But it was a way to connect with the essence of the campaign, a truth-telling, non-pander that his supporters expected.''

Race Is Over

The Obama campaign's internal polling in North Carolina and Indiana, the site of two forthcoming primaries, showed voters agreed with him.

Clinton's campaign was counting on winning Indiana easily. Instead, she won a 2-point victory and Obama won by 14 points in North Carolina. On NBC television that night, Tim Russert declared what other political professionals were thinking, namely that the race was over.

``At that point, I didn't know when it would end, but I knew how it would end,'' Axelrod said.

All the while, Plouffe was focused on the delegate count. By running up numbers early -- particularly in caucus states -- Obama was able to withstand Clinton's final charge. As if to validate the approach, it was a victory in Montana that put Obama over the top.

Joel Benenson, Obama's pollster, produced a survey toward the end of the primaries that carried the headline: ``The economy is the dominant issue in 2008.'' It also emphasized the need to ``stress McCain's similarities to Bush.''

Funding Advantage

On June 19, Obama announced a decision his campaign had reached months earlier, that he would bypass public funding for his campaign, becoming the first major-party candidate to opt out of the system since it was created after the Watergate scandal more than 30 years ago. He suffered short-term political damage for going back on his earlier assurance that he would take public money, but it enabled him to have almost a 2-to-1 financial advantage over McCain.

The power of money could be seen in both field operations and TV advertising. Plouffe said it also enabled the campaign to run multiple tiers of advertisements, positive, negative and reactive to any ads they wanted to rebut.

It meant they could tailor specific ads to states and even within states, along with radio advertisements to blanket a market. And it meant they had all the lubricant needed for the mechanics of voting -- registering voters, communicating with them and generating turnout.

Money Well Spent

``Money you spend in June is about five times as valuable as what you spend in the last week,'' said Jon Carson, the campaign's field director, referring to the value of building a campaign infrastructure in states like North Carolina and Indiana that proved to be unusually competitive in the fall.

``The long primary was a plus, tortuous as it was,'' Axelrod said. ``Given his newness, I think the American people wanted Obama to go through every conceivable hoop before they were willing to give him the keys to the car.''

At that point, the campaign mapped out keys to winning in the fall -- Obama's trip overseas, his selection of a running mate, the Democratic convention in Denver, and the candidate debates.

The overseas trip was a risk as Obama could have been seen as presumptuous. Instead, he was received as a world leader, attracting an estimated 200,000 people in Berlin for a speech. ``We were willing to pay the price in the short term for those who said it looks like a jaunt,'' Axelrod said.

Thrown `Off Stride'

In the U.S. there were immediate consequences. McCain painted Obama as a celebrity rather than a leader. ``That kind of threw us off stride,'' Axelrod said. ``Our reaction was too sharp. We started to downscale our events to the point that they were not presidential.''

They reversed field and started again having larger rallies. Then Obama chose Senator Joe Biden as his running mate, a safe choice in that Biden helped complete gaps in Obama's resume on foreign policy and burnished his credentials with working-class voters in places like Biden's boyhood home of Scranton, Pennsylvania.

At the Democratic convention in Denver, Obama's campaign decided to leave the arena for 70,000-seat Invesco Field for his acceptance speech. It was an unconventional choice, but the stadium was filled five hours before his address and as a television event it was judged a success.

Axelrod and Plouffe picked the venue, and relentlessly checked the weather forecast. ``That was a high-wire act,'' Axelrod said. ``Obama said, Are you sure?'' We said yes, and he said ``you will be there holding the umbrellas if it rains.''

Choked Up

The day before, in his hotel room, as Obama was working on his speech with Axelrod and other aides, the candidate came to a passage about Martin Luther King Jr. The typically cool Obama choked up and had to leave the room.

``He paused and cleared his throat and said ``it just hit me. This is really hard, and all these folks gave up so much to make this possible.''

There was little time for reflection. On Friday, McCain announced his surprise choice of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate, and the focus quickly shifted from Obama to the Republicans.

Said Axelrod: ``I walked up to the front of the plane and told Senator Obama that Palin was the choice, and he said, `that's very interesting.' Then I went up and told Senator Biden and he said, ``who is Sarah Palin?''

Palin Speech

They were soon to find out. Palin gave a speech the next week at the Republican convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, that electrified conservatives, and left pundits saying that the dynamic of the race had been changed.

The Obama campaign didn't see it that way. ``There were a lot of people who were saying we should go after her,'' Axelrod said. ``We thought, let's wait three weeks and see where we are.''

``Our reaction was that they undid everything they had done in the last six weeks about (Obama) being a celebrity and inexperienced,'' he said.

McCain's campaign then started to do huge rallies, and Obama's campaign decided to return to that format as well. ``It took experience off the table in a big way,'' Axelrod said. ``They were trying to become change candidates. We thought that was a terrible mistake.''

Though all presidential campaigns try to script a tight narrative, it is the uncontrollable events that often determine the outcome.

Credit Crunch

The nation's credit markets seized up and the stock market imploded, forcing a historic, $700 billion federal rescue package. And it all happened just days before the first scheduled debate between Obama and McCain.

Obama and McCain talked about issuing a joint statement about the crisis and Obama believed that McCain wanted to do that. Then McCain abruptly announced he was suspending his campaign and returning to Washington and asking that the debate be postponed.

Bush called Obama and asked him to return to the capital. Obama came back to Washington but said the debate should go forward.

Several of his advisers were concerned that he seemed to be forming too close a bond with the Bush administration by talking frequently to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and others, undermining the change message, according to a senior economic adviser. Some also wanted Obama to oppose the rescue package and feared that if McCain did that, he would be able to mount a populist charge. Obama rejected that advice.

Winning the Debates

Axelrod said the Obama campaign wanted the first debate to be about foreign policy, an area where McCain was perceived to be stronger. The campaign believes that Obama came out stronger after each debate, and post-debate polls support that contention.

``We all came to believe that this could be a race like 1980, when people wanted change, and our job was to show that Barack Obama didn't represent crazy change but change they could be comfortable with. The debates had the same effect'' for Obama ``that the debate did for Reagan,'' Axelrod said. ``People came away with a sense of reassurance that supporting us was not a crazy thing to do.''

``In terms of substance, the inspiration, Barack supplied that, but when it came to execution, what Axelrod and Plouffe did will be studied for a couple of generations,'' said Eric Holder, who headed Obama's vice presidential search team along with Caroline Kennedy. ``They have created essentially a template for what a presidential campaign is going to look like in the 21st century.''

Obama's Journey

For Obama, the journey to the presidency was two years in the making. After the midterm elections in 2006, he began to seriously consider a run.

In December 2006, he and his wife, Michelle, met with senior advisers and told them he would run. Axelrod recalled Michelle asking her husband: ```What do you think you can achieve?' He said two things: When you lift your hand and take the oath on Jan. 20, 2009, the world will look at us a lot differently, and two, a lot of kids around this country are going to say that they can do anything.''