The Audacity To Win

Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards had a good run as third fiddle in the 2008 Democratic primaries. Though his chances of winning were next to nil after Iowa, he remained in the race and, as Plouffe tells it, attempted to use his position to make a backdoor run at Obama's VP slot. Obama rejected the idea without hesitation.

Obama eventually narrowed his veep search down to three experienced politicians, two from key swing states and another known for his foreign policy expertise. Though Obama had considered Hillary Clinton seriously, she did not make the final short list.

In Plouffe's account of the campaign, Obama was as skeptical as the next guy about Palin's fitness to be vice president, but he also felt attacking her would only be counterproductive. He believed the best route was to treat her candidacy coolly and let her weaknesses reveal themselves.

In his book, Plouffe acknowledges the campaign erred in doing little preliminary research on Wright and his penchant for provocation. When tapes of his old sermons began appearing on the cable news circuit, the campaign was caught off guard, allowing the issue to become a major controversy.

From the very beginning, Plouffe was determined that the Obama campaign not fall into a trap of relying on one or two battleground states for victory. He considered this a major flaw of the 2004 Kerry campaign, which had put all its chips on Ohio. Instead, the Obama team chose to put up a fight in less obvious battlegrounds like Indiana and Nebraska. And it paid off.

As someone who hadn't spent the bulk of his adult life in politics, Barack Obama was perhaps more wary than many of the toll it would take on his family life. Plouffe writes that he knew the campaign would never get off the ground if Michelle Obama was not fully on board.

The Obama campaign team knew from the outset that their chances for victory were slim and that they'd need to set themselves apart. An early test came months before the Iowa caucuses, when the bulk of the Democratic field agreed to a forum in Nevada, breaking an earlier pact. Though it would mean missing the first joint appearance between all the candidates, the Obama team chose to remain in Iowa and campaign on the ground. "Most first-time presidential candidates would have folded," Plouffe writes. "It speaks to Obama's discipline that he went along, as well as to his belief that we should try to run our campaign on our own terms."

Obama's loss in Texas dealt a significant, if temporary, blow to the campaign's morale. Though it did not fundamentally change the nature of the race as measured by delegates, winning the state would have likely closed out the race in early March. Instead, it would drag on into the summer.

With gas prices soaring in the summer of 2008, Hillary Clinton and John McCain strongly supported a temporary suspension of a federal tax on gasoline purchases. In a risky move, Obama made a nuanced case against the suspension on the grounds that it would create government shortfalls without providing substantial consumer relief – the position held by most economists. The move paid off, and polls showed voters more sympathetic to Obama.

Perhaps the most telling sign of how exceptional the 2008 presidential race was was the number of typically solid Republican states that Obama managed to carry. Obama won all of these, Virginia, part of Nebraska and came surprisingly close in states like Montana and Missouri.

Contrary to some media reports, Obama had actually considered Hillary Clinton quite seriously for his veep pick. Yet while he believed she would bring valuable experience and insight to the White House, he expressed concerns that drama from the Bill Clinton presidency might leak into the race. He ultimately decided picking Hillary was just too risky.

Conventional presidential campaign wisdom holds that both candidates need to fight tooth and nail for Ohio and Florida. But a tanking economy and deeply unpopular Republican president had affected the public mood, and many of the old rules could not be counted on. Though they wanted and thought they could get a bigger margin, their most cautious strategy was this: hold the 2004 Kerry states and flip Iowa and New Mexico, and the race is in the bag.