The Road To The White House: Victory

Steve Kroft On Obama's Historic Victory

(CBS)  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."