How Obama "went back to his game"

Two days after his damaging defeat in Pennsylvania last month, Sen. Barack Obama gathered his wife and senior campaign staff around the dining-room table of his Chicago home.

For two hours after dinner, Barack and Michelle Obama, campaign manager David Plouffe, message man David Axelrod, deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand, communications chiefs Robert Gibbs and Dan Pfeiffer, family friend and Chicago business heavyweight Valerie Jarrett and scheduling chief Alyssa Mastromonaco hashed over the campaign's history, looked at upcoming primaries and decided how the candidate would approach the coming two weeks. Obama wanted to get away from the sniping, including his own, and get back to the approachable, hopeful campaign of last winter's long sojourn in Iowa.

"It wasn't like, 'Let's have a discussion.' It was, 'One, two, three, four, here's what we're going to do,' " a staffer said. "When things don't go well, he doesn't yell and scream. He's very prescriptive. Everybody understands this isn't about having a discussion. He's got 99 percent of the voting shares. There's no point in taking a vote."

Implored by some Democratic strategists to go more negative, to blow away Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, his rival for the Democratic nomination, in North Carolina and finish her off in Indiana, Obama instead went "more intimate, less iconic," as one aide put it. There would be picnics, small gatherings, games of P-I-G in the backyards of basketball-crazy Indiana, his wife and two daughters in tow at times, a riff at the ready about his decision from the start to avoid the negative tit-for-tat campaigns of presidential elections past.

And it appears to have worked.

Obama won North Carolina in a blowout Tuesday night, more than enough for his campaign to crow that he is mathematically on his way to the nomination. And his narrow defeat in Indiana will make Clinton's delegate advantage there vanishingly small. By Tuesday night's end, Obama supporters were confident he had changed the story line of the Democratic race.

"He went back to his game, which is a positive, principled message," said Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Fla., one of Obama's liaisons with undecided superdelegates. "There was a narrative by some that he needed to engage in the same type of campaign that Senator Clinton was engaging in. But what Senator Obama proved tonight was, the first thing he is going to change about America is how an American candidate for president gets elected."

The campaign schedule will not get any easier: West Virginia and Kentucky primaries over the next two Tuesdays that have the makings of major Clinton victories; an Oregon contest whose results will be delayed as mail-in ballots are tallied, diminishing the positive effect for Obama; and finales in Puerto Rico, South Dakota and Montana next month that are unlikely to be resounding ratifications of his candidacy.

And questions about the breadth of Obama's appeal will linger, given his continuing difficulties among white voters, elderly Democrats, union households and rural towns.

But with Tuesday night's delegate wins and popular-vote totals, the Obama campaign predicted the race will be effectively over before those final contests on June 3.

By engaging Clinton in a heated debate about a summer suspension of the gasoline tax, Obama was able to shift the campaign discourse away from his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and use a real-world argument to underscore his contention that he would not embrace expedient, ineffective solutions to the nation's problems for cheap political effect.

Too much Wright stuff

In truth, no war plan survives contact with the enemy, and within 24 hours of his dining-room strategy session, Wright was on national television, his sudden return in a flurry of appearances a land mine that would explode with devastating force at the National Press Club on April 28. Obama's luxury campaign bus had just pulled out of Wilson, N.C., and was heading to Chapel Hill for one of his patented mega-rallies when the call came in on the candidate's cellphone.

Ashen-faced and visibly shaken, the senator from Illinois begged apologies to Rep. G.K. Butterfield, D-N.C., and retreated to the back of the bus.

Wright had gone "haywire," Axelrod, his message man, was telling him. At the press club that morning, with television cameras rolling, Obama's former pastor had reprised it all: the dark hints that the government had created the AIDS virus; the warm statements of support for Nation of Islam firebrand Louis Farrakhan; the biblical prophecy "as ye sow, so shall ye reap" to explain the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

A campaign that had stumbled out of Pennsylvania six days earlier was again thrown into crisis mode just as it was gaining momentum. That night, at Chapel Hill's genteel Carolina Inn, Obama pored over the transcripts of Wright's appearance, watched the ubiquitous replays on cable news, and jotted down the notes for an address that would come the following day — far too late for some voters, especially in Indiana, but perhaps enough to help salvage a win in North Carolina.

Obama has tended to be detached from day-to-day campaign operations. He attended only a handful of fundraising events between Jan. 1 and Super Tuesday on Feb. 5, and few since his losses in Texas and Ohio on March 4.

After Pennsylvania, Obama was determined to take control of the message. And he followed through — with breakfasts in union halls, a family-farm visit in Union Mills, Ind., a lunch of Subway sandwiches with the Fischers of Beech Grove, Ind. But his former pastor kept getting in his way.

Wright embodied nearly every doubt that any voter, friend or foe, had about Obama and his ability to be elected. He was the radical anti-messenger of the senator's once-dominant theme of race-blind, uplifting unity. As long as Obama carried Wright on his back, he could not return to the themes that had once propelled his campaign to a phenomenon.

Even before Wright's press-club appearance, Obama had been hitting presumptive GOP nominee John McCain for his proposal to temporarily suspend the 18-cent federal gas tax. When Clinton embraced the "gas-tax holiday," Obama's aides became convinced that a tailor-made issue had fallen into his lap, an issue that could change the subject.

Obama and Axelrod talked that Sunday and agreed that the gas-tax holiday was the perfect vehicle to reintroduce Obama as the responsible reformer who refused to pander, even with a presidential election on the line.

By the time he took the stage at an 18,000-person rally in Chapel Hill on Monday night, he had sketched out his basic argument. "Gas-tax holiday — sounds good. I'm sure it polls well." But he added, "That's just politics of the moment, politics to get you through the next election. We need better leadership than that."

"Let him do the talking"

Obama's opposition may have been high-minded, but it was risky for a candidate already struggling for working-class support. Campaign officials insist they did no polling on the issue before he staked out his stance, although it was tested heavily after the fact, in polls and focus groups. Campaign officials said the results from those surveys did not ring any alarms, although Obama began adding references to his $1,000 middle-class tax-cut proposal later in the week, to show voters he was offering a much better deal.

On Tuesday, Clinton aired her first ad that criticizes Obama for rejecting the gas-tax holiday, and Obama advisers began debating an appropriate response. Jim Margolis, the campaign's media strategist, was screening some generic footage he had shot of Obama on Monday — including the gas-tax riff that he introduced in Wilmington, and polished throughout the day.

"As soon as we all heard it, we thought, 'We can't do better than that,' " Axelrod said. "Let him do the talking."

The issue ignited quickly, and primary voters were not the only Democrats paying attention. Sen. Evan Bayh, Clinton's most effective Hoosier weapon, had been leaning hard on his state's four freshman House Democrats, urging them to stay out of the race until the voters had spoken — even though he was leading the Clinton charge. Obama aides were convinced that they would pick up the endorsement of Rep. Brad Ellsworth, a popular former sheriff from the expected Clinton stronghold around Evansville. But Ellsworth did not come through, nor did Rep. Joe Donnelly, whose Democrat-rich district stretches through the state's heartland, south from South Bend.

But Rep. Baron Hill, a southern Indianan from Clinton country, had been listening to the gas-tax debate closely. He spoke with each of his district's 20 Democratic county chairs. He was impressed by the surge of support among students at Indiana University, a fixture of his district. Most important, he spoke repeatedly with former Indiana Rep. Lee Hamilton, who co-chaired the Sept. 11 commission and is backing Obama.

Obama not only picked up Hill's endorsement, but also won Hoosier and former Democratic Party chairman Joe Andrew from Clinton's column, giving his Wright recovery a boost. Both superdelegates cited Obama's opposition to the tax holiday as a factor. Congressional leaders endorsed his position, and editorial boards hailed the Obama stance as principled and farsighted.

Not everyone was convinced it would work. Rep. Melvin Watt, D-N.C., an Obama supporter, said Monday that he was holding his breath.

Indeed, voters who chose a candidate in the three days before the Indiana primary broke decisively for Clinton, an indication that the gas-tax debate may have worked against Obama in the state.

What it certainly did was change the subject from Wright and patriotism back to policy.

By Sunday afternoon, the debate about Clinton's proposal had reached the kitchen tables of Indiana. Jody Coleman, a 33-year-old factory worker who lives in Elkhart, met Obama when he spent an afternoon knocking on doors in this working-class neighborhood, and the two had a long conversation about alternative energy sources. Coleman was unimpressed with Clinton's proposal. "What's it going to do for one day?" he said. "That's all it would help me."

But there were still minor concerns, large tactical arguments and small failures of organization that were looming larger as his big lead in North Carolina polls shriveled, and Indiana, a state his campaign once thought was his to lose, began looking lost. Some consultants thought Obama took exactly the wrong message from Pennsylvania, that the problem was not that he had gone negative but that he had not gone negative enough.

Then there were the organizational issues. In Robeson County, N.C., where as much as 40 percent of the population is Lumbee Indian, Lumbee tribal leaders had been waiting for two weeks to hear Obama's position on federal recognition of the tribe.

Bill Clinton and daughter Chelsea had already been to the county before Eureka Gilkey, Obama's North Carolina campaign director, called Watt to dispatch him to the impoverished area with a promise of support. He spent Sunday jumping from church to church, but, he conceded, "it appeared [Clinton aides] were sending surrogates with more gravitas."

To Obama aides and supporters, such hand-wringing makes no sense. The candidate emerged Tuesday night with his path to the nomination even clearer, and his refusal to go negative will ease the task of wooing Clinton voters into the Obama fold this summer.

Said Wexler: "This is not a split decision. This is a win-win result for Senator Obama. These results showed, and show, Obama can take a punch. In fact, he can take a barrage of punches and still present a principled position and win. That's something new in American politics."