Barack Obama: The Road To The White House
60 Minutes and correspondent Steve Kroft began chronicling President-elect Barack Obama's road to the White House nearly two years ago, as the candidate declared his candidacy.
Over the course of the campaign, Kroft interviewed the long-shot candidate, his family and his closest advisors, for what turn out to be perhaps the biggest story in American political history.
See the candidate making sandwiches for his young daughters, the rising political superstar on the campaign trail, the confident candidate poised for victory, and the president-elect with his future first lady reflecting publicly for the first time on the fact that they will be the first African-American couple to occupy the White House.
When 60 Minutes went to Illinois in February 2007 to do a story on the young, charismatic senator, it wasn't because we thought he was going to be elected the 44th President of the United States.
Nobody thought that, but he was becoming a political phenomenon and there had never been a presidential candidate quite like him - his last name rhymed with Osama, his middle name was Hussein; racially he was half white and half black, and politically he was green.
It would have been easy to dismiss him if it were not for the fact that he was running second in the polls behind Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination. Watch/Read
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. Watch/Read
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. Watch/Read
After the victory celebration in Chicago's Grant Park, President-elect Obama disappeared for a few days to rest, spend some time with his family and begin organizing the transition.
But he emerged the following week with his wife Michelle and joined 60 Minutes in a Chicago hotel suite for their first post-election interview.
Watch/Read
Produced by L. Franklin Devine, Michael Radutzky, Tom Anderson and Jennifer MacDonald