The Road To The White House: The Primaries

Steve Kroft Looks Back At Obama's Iowa Victory And The Tough Campaign Ahead

(CBS)  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.