The Road To The White House: Looking Ahead

When Barack Obama went to the Democratic convention assured of the nomination, he was about to make history as the first African-American presidential nominee of a major political party.

The question was, would the American people elect him? Hillary Clinton had helped heal Democratic divisions after a bitter primary fight. But Obama entered the convention locked in a dead heat with Republican opponent John McCain.

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The First Steps Of The Campaign
The Tough Primary Fight
The Obamas On The Future

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60 Minutes and correspondent Steve Kroft was waiting backstage just moments after the most improbable nominee, joined by his vice presidential choice Joe Biden, had given the biggest speech of his career.

Asked if he ever doubted the nomination was going to happen, Obama said, "Of course."

"When?" Kroft asked.

"Well, let's see. About a year ago we were down 30 in Iowa," Obama said, laughing. "Ya know, but I never doubted that it could happen. I never doubted that, if we were able to mobilize the energy that you saw in that stadium."

"All across the country," he added.

"I knew it was gonna happen before he did, I was running like the devil. I watched. I thought I was pretty good, but I watched. I watched, this guy just sort of grabbed the lightening, ya know, just grabbed it. And you could tell, Barack, I tell ya, my team knew, I knew in August," Biden recalled.

By the time Kroft and Obama continued the conversation the next day in Pittsburgh, the political landscape had already changed. Senator McCain had tried to steal the Democrat's thunder by announcing that Alaska Governor Sarah Palin would be his running mate

Asked what he thought of Palin, Obama told Kroft, "She seems to have a compelling life story. Obviously, she's a fine mother and an up-and-coming public servant. My sense is that she subscribes to John McCain's agenda."

"Does the fact that he chose as his vice president someone what has less experience than you take that weapon out of his arsenal?" Kroft asked.

"Well, you know, I think that's a good question to address to Senator McCain," Obama replied.

For Joe Biden, it wasn't a question of being unknown by the public, but rather of being too well known. He acknowledged in an interview with Kroft that he had put his foot in mouth from time to time in the past, and that he was confident everybody - including his running mate - was aware of it.

But Biden brought strengths too: foreign policy experience and a connection to the blue-collar workers in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania that Obama failed to win over during the primaries.

"You even tried bowling," Kroft remarked.

"Time out there a second," Obama said. "I've got to defend my bowling honor here. It is true that my bowling score left something to be desired. The reason I was there was to campaign. And we had great fun. But here's the bottom line: I wouldn't have been elected to the United States Senate out of Illinois, which is 12 percent African-American if I didn't have some broad appeal. So, the mythology that's developed that somehow I can't get those votes is refuted by the very fact that I'm sittin' in this chair."

A few weeks later, Kroft caught up with Obama campaigning in Elko, Nev., a heavily Republican mining town of 20,000 people in a remote corner of a state with only five electoral votes. It was not the kind of place you would expect to find a Democratic presidential candidate with 47 days left until the election, but this was Obama's third trip, hoping to scrounge a few thousand votes that might make the difference in carrying this battle ground state and put him in the White House.

"John McCain actually said that if he's president, he'll take on and I quote - the 'ole boys network' in Washington. The ole boys network. In the McCain campaign, that's called a staff meeting," Obama said during his speech in Elko.

By then McCain's campaign was in serious trouble: the emerging crisis on Wall Street had broken his post-convention momentum. The economy, Obama's strongest issue, was on everyone's mind, and Obama was doing his best to keep it there.

Obama acknowledged at the time that the Elko speech was one of the most aggressive speeches he had given in a while. Asked what changed, the senator told Kroft, "Well, partly, it's just, we're getting closer to the election. Partly, as you will recall, we, for several weeks, were putting up with a lot of silliness from the other side. Britney Spears ads, we were talking about lipstick and pigs and one of the things that we felt very strongly was that we had to make the contrast between John McCain's economic agenda and ours very clear."

That clarity was in part responsible for Obama's resurgence in the polls. McCain, saddled with the unpopularity of the Bush administration, and much less money to spend, would never regain the lead. But there were still questions about Obama's lack of executive experience.

Asked why he thought he'd be a good president, Obama said, "Well, I think that when you think about the challenges we face these are challenges that require us to look forward and not backwards."

"Why you? I mean, why do you think you would be a good president?" Kroft asked.

"Well, I was gonna get to that," Obama said. "I think both by training and disposition I understand where we need to take the country."

"But what is there specifically about you. You mentioned disposition. What skills and traits do you have that would make you a good president?" Kroft persisted.

"I am a practical person. But somebody who, I think, can cut through some very complicated problems and figure out the right course of action. Now, there's one other element that I think is important that we need in the presidency right now: and that is somebody who understands what it's like to struggle," Obama said.

On Election Day, Obama took states that Democrats hadn't carried in decades, including Indiana, North Carolina, Virginia and Nevada. And on an unseasonably warm and thoroughly historic November night, he appeared before hundreds of thousands of people in Chicago as president-elect of the United States.

Two hours after the speech, once and future spokesman Robert Gibbs, who had lost his voice that night, reflected on the campaign's strategy. "We competed everywhere," Gibbs said. "There wasn't a state we didn't go to. Regardless of its size, that we didn't think we could compete in. Caucus states and primary states."

"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," senior advisor Anita Dunn added.

"You ran an incredibly effective and disciplined campaign. How did you manage that? Even the Republicans were in awe," Kroft asked campaign manager David Plouffe.

"Well, it starts with the candidate. His motto is 'no drama,'" Plouffe said.

Asked how big a role Obama played in this campaign, Plouffe said, "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. 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 people would either accept it or they wouldn't."

Produced by L. Franklin Devine, Michael Radutzky, Tom Anderson and Jennifer MacDonald