Obama's Inner Circle Shares Inside Story

When Barack Obama began thinking of running for president two years ago, he turned to a small inner circle of political advisors from his 2004 Senate campaign. Like Obama, they were talented, laid back and idealistic with limited exposure on the national stage.

But with the candidate's help, they orchestrated what some consider one of the most improbable and effective campaigns in American political history. They took a little-known senator with a foreign sounding name and almost no national experience and got him elected as the 44th president of the United States. They did it by recruiting and vesting millions of volunteers in the outcome, by raising more money than any campaign in history, and by largely ignoring that their candidate happed to be a black man.

Who was Obama talking about and how did they do it? Ninety minutes after the speech ended, 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft sat down with them in a Chicago hotel suite. It was 1.a.m. Wednesday and the reality of it all was just beginning to sink in.

"We just left Grant Park. What are you feeling'?" Kroft asked.

"Little numb. A little tired. A little overwhelmed," David Axelrod, Obama's chief strategist and political alter ego, replied.

The group also included David Plouffe, the camera shy campaign manager and field general who made it all happen. "Yeah. I mean, it's been a 22-month road, and a lotta twists and turns. But you know, I think he filled the stage tonight," Plouffe told Kroft.

There was senior aide Robert Gibbs, who was always at Obama's side, his former and future press secretary. "And it was fun to watch all the people come out who've been part of the campaign. And…," Gibbs rasped, clearing his throat.

He told Kroft he lost his voice "within the last few hours."

And finally Anita Dunn, a relative newcomer who handled communications, research and policy.

The only person missing from the brain trust was the candidate himself.

How big a role did he play in this campaign?

"Well, no one had a bigger role, you know. The great thing about our campaign was we didn't have a lotta discussion about what our message was or what he wanted to do," Plouffe said. "From the beginning, he knew exactly what he wanted to say. And it's one of the reasons we were successful. A lotta campaigns will spend hours every day wondering about how to change their message. And he was pretty clear about what he wanted to say, where he wanted to take the country, and either people would accept it or they wouldn't."

It began 22 months ago on a frigid day in Springfield, Ill., almost it seemed on an impulse. There was no money and no real organization - only a vast untapped reservoir of disaffected voters and potential volunteers.

"This campaign can't only be about me. It must be about us. It must be about what we can do together," Sen. Obama said in the February 2007 Springfield speech.

Axelrod recalled, "When we started the campaign, we met around a table like this. And there was just a handful of us. You know, we started with nothing. And Barack said to us, 'I want this to be a grassroots campaign. I wanna reinvigorate our democracy. First of all I think that's the only way we can win and secondly I want to rekindle some idealism that together we can get things done in this country,"

Asked if they seriously thought Obama had a shot, Plouffe told Kroft, "We thought he had a shot. I actually think we knew what big underdogs we were. And he got into this in a very unusual way. Most people plan this from years. They spend a lotta time in Iowa and New Hampshire planning for it. We got into this very unconventionally."

"We planned for days days…," Axelrod joked.

"For days," Plouffe replied, laughing. "And in many respects, that made it challenging. But I think we were better for it. Because we were more agile. We were not afraid to take risks. And we didn't have the stifling pressure of expectations."

"My fundamental concern for him wasn't whether he had the capacity, 'cause I think he's the smartest guy that I've ever worked with or known," Axelrod said.

"But it was whether he had that pathological drive to be president. You know, so often, what defines presidential candidates is this need to be president, to define themselves. He didn't have that. And, you know, we told him, 'You're gonna have to find some other way to motivate yourself.' And he did, which was what he could do as president."

"There were just so many people, reporters, pundits, everybody, who said that, 'You're not gonna be able to elect a black man president of the United States. It's just not gonna happen right now.' Obviously, that had to be part of your equation in planning this campaign," Kroft remarked.

"No, honestly you had to take a leap of faith in the beginning that the people we get by race. And I think the number of meetings we had about race was zero," Plouffe told Kroft.

"Zero. We had to believe in the beginning that he would be a strong enough candidate that people of every background and race would be for him."

"The only time we got involved in a discussion of race was when people asked us about it. It was a fascination of the news media," Axelrod added.

"But you must have had some meetings on it during the Jeremiah Wright affair," Kroft probed.

Axelrod said the Jeremiah Wright affair was probably a pivotal moment in the whole campaign. "You know, pandemonium erupted in the political community. And there was this sense that we were in crisis."

The video taped rantings of Obama's former pastor brought the issue that the Obama campaign had long sought to avoid center stage, and took them all by surprise.

"And I think we'd all acknowledged that we should've been aware of some of these tapes were available. We didn't review all of the tapes of Jeremiah Wright as we should have," Axelrod said. "And as a result we were kind of caught flat-footed on some of these tapes. But you know we should have recognized that once that happened, that race is such a fascination of the political community that it would take off as it did. And it did."

"That was a terrible weekend," Dunn remembered. "The excerpts were endlessly looped on television."

"Yeah, and the only one who was calm was Obama," Axelrod added. The candidate called his aides and told them he wanted them to clear some time on his schedule.

"And he said, 'You know what? I'm gonna make a speech about race and talk about Jeremiah Wright and the perspective of the larger issue.' And he said, 'And either people will accept it or I won't be president of the United States. But at least I'll have said what I think needs to be said,'" Axelrod remembered.

Gibbs said there wasn't a discussion.

"If there had been a discussion, we've often joked, probably most of the people in the campaign would've advised against it," Dunn added.

"The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country - a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past," Obama said in his March 2008 speech on race.

"You know, it was a moment of real leadership. I think when he gave that race speech in Philadelphia, people saw a president," Plouffe said.

Obama's appeal, his message of change and a rapidly failing economy eventually helped mute concerns about race. And the enormity of Obama's grassroots field organization began to overwhelm the opposition.

It raised more $600 million, much of it from small contributors over the Internet and it recruited an army of volunteers from all walks of life - young and old, Democrats, Independents, and Republicans. And the campaign ventured beyond traditional Democratic strongholds into Republican territory.

"I also think we competed everywhere. There wasn't a state we didn't go to; regardless of its size that we didn't compete in. Caucus states and primary states," Gibbs said.

"And I think you look at that map tonight, and there are states that are blue, because of the effort that we put in a long, long time ago. And built a grassroots effort up, starting on day one. And we were ridiculed at times, for people coming out, and having crowds that were excited to see our candidate. I'm pretty sure they're not ridiculing us tonight," he added.

"We went around in June and July and people said, 'Well, what's your general election strategy?' And we laid it out. Said here are the 18 states we think are going to be battlegrounds. And Indiana and North Carolina were on there. And absolutely no one took it seriously," Dunn said.

"Particularly the McCain campaign. David's mantra for the general election was that we were gonna enlarge the playing field. And that we weren't gonna run the same campaigns that had been run in the past where it all came down to just one state, you know, at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning," she added.

Asked how they won states like North Carolina and Indiana, Plouffe told Kroft, "Well, first of all, we believed we could. I mean, I think part of it is not being afraid to venture out and try win in what has been considered hostile territory. But we also had these volunteers. And without them, the idea of winning North Carolina and Indiana would be a bridge too far. And our campaign was the art of the possible because of these millions of people out there. You know, if we decided we wanted to go register 500,000 people in a state, we could because of them."

That is exactly what they did in North Carolina, where race did matter when it came to registering huge numbers of minority voters. Plouffe called it growing the electorate, and it changed the political map. In Indiana, the number of Obama field offices, staffed mostly by volunteers, outnumbered the McCain campaign 44 to none.

They used Internet sites like Facebook and Twitter to engage young voters. They canvassed neighborhoods street by street, identifying supporters and entering the information into a central database. It helped them determine who had voted early and who might need a ride to the polls on Election Day.

"I mean, our field operations and our targeting and all of that stuff was done with a level of sophistication that exceeded anything that had been done before," Axelrod said. "It was a marvel to watch. The bells and whistles that people are kind of shaking their heads at in wonderment were a direct result of David Plouffe."

"We've all worked in campaigns a lot and volunteerism in politics is a dying thing. And to see this many people getting involved, giving $25, manning phone banks, becoming neighborhood team captains, you know, hasn't been seen in a very long time. And I hope that that is the legacy of this campaign," Plouffe said.

"You ran an incredibly effective and disciplined campaign. Maybe the most effective, I mean, certainly one of the most effective presidential campaigns that's ever been run. There's no in-fighting. No real leaks. Almost no turnover. How did you manage that? Even the Republicans were in awe. Even your opponents couldn't believe it. How did you manage it?" Kroft asked.

"Well, it starts with the candidate. He is someone who his motto is 'no drama.' That doesn't mean that we don't express opinions strongly, but that we're all a unit. And once we make a decision, we stick with it. We don't revisit it. He stays very calm, doesn't get too high, doesn't get too low. Treats people well. So when the leader is setting that example everyone follows," Plouffe said.

"We believed in him, and we believed in the cause. And we believed in each other. And by the end of this thing, over two years, you forge relationships. And we're like a family," Axelrod said. "I mean, the hardest thing about this is that it's ended now. I said it's like the end of the movie M*A*S*H. You know, the war's over. We're all going home. And we wanna go home. But, on the other hand, it's sort of a bit of melancholy because we've come to love each other and believe in each other. And we know that this will never be the same that we went through this experience and it was a singular experience and it'll never be the same."

Produced by L. Franklin Devine, Michael Radutzky and Andy Court