Strategy Was Based On Winning Delegates, Not Battlegrounds

"Democrats are typically not that way. Usually, it's like herding cats," Jones said. "The Obama campaign is different. . . . Obama doesn't lose anyone's number."

The strategy's flaws would later be obvious. But the math could not be challenged. On Feb. 5, Obama won more delegates in Kansas and Idaho than Clinton won in New Jersey.

An internal spreadsheet after Super Tuesday drew a road map for going after the 1,435 pledged delegates up for grabs from Feb. 9 through June 3. Clinton would win the three biggest states in the stretch: Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania. But Obama would target a less conventional list: the District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina, as well as the Texas caucuses, a separate contest held at the end of the March 4 primary that allocated a third of the 193 pledged delegates awarded by the Lone Star State.

Clinton won the Texas primary -- but Obama won the caucus, and wound up with 99 state delegates, compared with Clinton's 94.

Some pundits saw Pennsylvania as Obama's possible undoing. Plouffe and his team saw it merely as another puzzle to crack. Clinton was popular across the state -- but delegates were apportioned based on turnout strength in previous elections, meaning that heavily Democratic districts were disproportionately valuable. The biggest Philadelphia district -- an Obama stronghold -- was three times as big as the Altoona district.

"Maybe Hillary will do better in popular vote, but because of the way the delegates are apportioned, she won't get a big delegate lead out of it," Berman predicted two weeks before the Pennsylvania primary.

Clinton won the state by nine points, but of the 158 pledged delegates up for grabs, her net gain was just 12. Of the 1,435 delegates available after Super Tuesday, the leaked spreadsheet foresaw a net pledged-delegate gain of 43 for Obama. He received 85, even before the Montana and South Dakota results were in.

The 'Danger Zone'

As the pledged-delegate count moved inexorably toward the winning number, Obama advisers worried about what they called the "danger zone." The fear was that a loss in Pennsylvania would be followed by big losses in Indiana, West Virginia, Kentucky and Puerto Rico, capped by revotes in Michigan and Florida that would push Clinton into an indisputable lead in the total popular vote, a clear lead in the polls and an avalanche of superdelegates pouring her way.

Officially, Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton said that Obama did visit both West Virginia and Kentucky but that "there were over 50 contests, and you've got to make choices on where you spend your time." But Obama aides had no illusions about the outcomes in those states. The demographics telegraphed Clinton's landslides there long before West Virginians and Kentuckians went to the polls. Obama virtually sat out the states because contesting them and then losing badly would have been far worse. To avoid the danger zone, two things had to happen: Obama would have to win Indiana to augment an expected victory that day in North Carolina, and Michigan and Florida could not be allowed to vote in June.

He did not win Indiana, but he got the next-best thing. A resounding victory in North Carolina dominated the news all night while the media waited for delayed returns to roll in from Gary, Ind. Obama's victory speech was televised. Clinton waited, and waited. By the time her narrow Hoosier State win was declared, any momentum she gained had disappeared.

"There are hard wins, and there are moral victories. This was both," Roemer said. "A lot of people thought after Ohio and Pennsylvania, Hillary Clinton would win by double digits. Indiana instead put a stop to the bleeding of the blue-collar problem."

Obama caught a break in Florida. When the Florida Democratic Party drafted a detailed plan for a revote, largely by mail, the entire Florida Democratic House delegation -- Clinton and Obama supporters alike -- recoiled, their memories of the 2000 election debacle still too fresh to risk it. Obama's Florida backers did not have to lift a finger.

Michigan was different. A revote was backed by the state's Democratic governor, Jennifer Granholm, and by the state's senior senator, Carl M. Levin. The campaign by Obama's supporters there was subtle. Legislative leaders said they needed Obama to sign off on the plan, but he demurred. Obama campaign lawyer Robert F. Bauer drafted a lengthy memo on March 19, raising a series of questions about the revote but stopping short of opposing it. Campaign aides then said they wanted to see what the legislature would do.

Meanwhile, two key Obama supporters, state Sens. Samuel Buzz Thomas III and Tupac A. Hunter, were finding every reason possible not to send Michiganders back to the polls, said Ballenger, of Inside Michigan Politics.

"The Obama camp never wanted a vote in Michigan," said a Michigan Democratic insider involved in the revote effort. "Let us be very real."

In short, Obama ran out the clock. When Michigan state senators adjourned March 21, they left Granholm's revote plan on the table. By the time the Democratic National Committee's Rules and Bylaws Committee decided on Florida and Michigan, they hardly mattered. Without revotes, Clinton could not indisputably claim their tallies for her national vote total. The torrent of superdelegates that some Obama advisers had feared would never come.

Staff writer Alec MacGillis and staff researchers Madonna Lebling and Alice Crites contributed to this report.