The Road To The White House: The Primaries

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

(CBS)  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.