The Road To The White House: The Primaries

After an enthusiastic beginning, the Obama campaign seemed to hit a wall. Eight months after he announced his candidacy in Springfield and on the eve of the primaries, Obama still trailed Hillary Clinton by nearly 20 points in the national polls, and people were still predicting that she could wrap up the nomination by the middle of February.

Obama's performance in the early Democratic debates, in the fall of 2007, lacked inspiration. He seemed flat, professorial, and wonkish.

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The First Steps Of The Campaign
A Historic Victory
The Obamas On The Future

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The first real test would come in Iowa. The campaign knew from the beginning that to have a chance of winning the nomination, they would have to defeat Senator Clinton there and shatter the myth of her inevibility.

An extraordinary speech at the Iowa Democratic Party's Jefferson-Jackson Dinner made a huge impression on the state leaders and helped him recruit thousands of volunteers.

"Somebody stood up for me when it was risky. And because that somebody stood up, a few more stood up. And then a few thousand stood up. And then a few million stood up. And standing up, with courage and clear purpose, they somehow managed to change the world. That's why I'm running, Iowa," Obama said.

As they would do over and over again in the caucus states, Obama's staff simply out-organized and out-maneuvered the Clinton campaign, and he won a state that was 95 percent white by a comfortable margin. "They said this day would never come. But on this January night, at this defining moment in history, you have done what the cynics said we couldn't do," Obama said in his victory speech.

Obama's Iowa win had gotten everyone's attention. The strategy had paid off.

"I remember a conversation I had with Senator Obama in Boston, I think. And he told me that John F. Kennedy spent 60 days campaigning for president, and that he had spent 80 days in Iowa," Kroft told David Axelrod.

"Eighty-three, but who's counting?" Axelrod replied, laughing.

Axelrod acknowledged the win was huge. "It was everything."

David Plouffe was Obama's campaign manager and field general. "Almost everybody in the political community thought Senator Clinton was gonna be the nominee. And if she'd won Iowa, she would have been. But once we won Iowa, people think a second look, and it enabled us to really gather the head of steam we needed to go, pass through that gauntlet, you know, of primaries in January and February," he explained.

After Iowa, all sorts of things began to fall into place. The campaign began raising nearly a million dollars a day, much of it from small contributors. They hired a staff of 700 to complement hundreds of thousand of volunteers. The Iowa victory had helped convince blacks that Obama might actually have a chance. And he began to pick up key endorsements, like Senator Ted Kennedy and Caroline Kennedy.

One year after Obama's speech in Springfield, it was now a two-candidate race. Super Tuesday, with 22 states voting, had been the day that many thought Senator Clinton would lock up the nomination. But the real campaign was just beginning.

60 Minutes was at Obama's headquarters in Chicago with his chief strategist David Axelrod when the first exit polls began rolling in. Early exuberance was tempered somewhat by losses in California, Massachusetts and New Jersey.

Later that night, Kroft was invited to the candidate's hotel suite where he watched the returns with his family. Obama's thoughts about the results?

"Split decision. Which is what we thought," he told Kroft.

"You feel like you've got the momentum?" Kroft asked.

"You know, it seems like everywhere we go, the longer we are in this race the stronger we get," the senator replied.

Before the week was over, he would win three more states - Louisiana, Nebraska and Washington.

"I had to think about this long and hard at the beginning of this process and say, 'Are you deluding yourself?'" Obama remembered. "And I decided I might just be able to pull it off. And so a year a later, it turns out that the jury is still out. But we seem to be stirring things up pretty good."

Following Super Tuesday, Obama reeled off 10 straight victories, and built a substantial lead in delegates, but the contest was moving now to the big states now, like Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania, where Senator Clinton had the advantage. In Ohio, she had the support of a popular governor and the state party machinery, while Obama had to rely heavily on volunteers.

In Ohio, the issues were trade agreements and jobs. But in Chillicothe, people told 60 Minutes that both race and gender would be hidden factors in southern Ohio - that many blue collar workers here wouldn't vote for a woman, and others would never vote for a black. And Senator Obama had another problem: a malicious campaign against him, that surfaced in a number of the 60 Minutes interviews.

Asked who he was going to vote for, one man told Kroft, "I'm leaning towards Obama. There are a couple issues I'm not too clear on. …I'm hearin' he doesn't even know the National Anthem, you know. He wouldn't use the Holy Bible. He's got his own beliefs, got the Muslim beliefs. And couple issues that bothers me at heart."

"You know that's not true," Kroft said.

"No. I'm just… this is what I've been told," the man replied.

"One of the things that we found in southern Ohio, not widespread, but something that popped up on our radar screen all the time, people talking about it this idea that you're a Muslim," Kroft told Obama.

"Right. Did you correct them, Steve?" Obama asked.

"I did correct them," Kroft said.

Asked where this is coming from, Obama said, "You know, this has been a systematic e-mail smear campaign that's been goin' on since actually very early in this campaign. Clearly it is a deliberate effort by some group or somebody to generate this rumor. I have never been a Muslim, am not a Muslim. These e-mails are obviously not just offensive to me - somebody who's a devout Christian, who's been goin' to the same church for the last 20 years - but it's also offensive to Muslims. Because it plays into, obviously, a certain fear-mongering there."

As primary day drew near, a photo of Obama in ceremonial African tribal dress during a visit to Kenya was featured prominently on the Internet and attributed to someone in the Clinton campaign, but Senator Clinton disavowed any knowledge of it.

She told 60 Minutes she didn't believe Obama was a Muslim. "I mean, you know, there is no basis for that. I take him on the basis of what he says. And, you know, there isn't any reason to doubt that," Senator Clinton said.

"You said you take Senator Obama at his word he Muslim, you don't believe that?" Kroft continued. "No, no," Senator Clinton replied, "Why should I? There's nothing to base that on, as far as I know."

"It's just scurrilous?" Kroft asked.

Clinton responded, "Look, I have been the target of so many ridiculous rumors, that I have a great deal of sympathy for anybody who gets, you know, smeared with the kind of rumors that go on all the time."

Senator Clinton won in Ohio and eked out a victory in the Texas primary, but the question of race, which the Obama campaign had long sought to avoid, was about to move center stage in the run-up to the Pennsylvania primary.

The videotaped rantings of Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, looped endlessly on television, and the Internet produced the candidate's first crisis and a pivotal moment in the campaign.

"We didn't review all of the tapes of Jeremiah Wright as we should have," Axelrod remembered. "And as a result we were kind of caught flat-footed on some of these tapes."

Senior advisor Anita Dunn called a low point in the campaign. "That was a terrible weekend."

"Yeah, and the only one who was calm was Obama," Axelrod added.

The candidate called his aides and told 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.

"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 had 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 during the speech in Philadelphia.

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

In the end, Obama would lose Pennsylvania too, but victories in North Carolina, Mississippi, Oregon and Montana would give him an insurmountable lead in delegates for the Democratic presidential nomination. In early June, what once seemed impossible had become part of history.

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