Measured Response To Financial Crisis Sealed the Election

The campaign knew it was a risk nonetheless. The idea was to "get it out of the way early," one adviser said, then switch from foreign policy, a perceived strength for McCain, back to health care and economic issues soon afterward.

Some Obama supporters thought the trip could produce a modest bounce in the polls. Instead the numbers remained static, and the travel gave the McCain campaign an opening to mock the Democratic nominee as a megastar abroad but an empty vessel at home. In a television advertisement released in late July, McCain compared Obama to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears.

"He's the biggest celebrity in the world. But is he ready to lead?" the ad's narrator taunted. McCain, unable to bring Obama back down to his own level, hoped to push him even higher up into the clouds, to make him seem completely inaccessible.

While Obama's advisers were confident about the fundamental dynamics of the race, they found this line of attack worrisome. They saw it as a page from the extremely effective Republican playbook of the previous two campaigns, portraying the Democrat as an elitist and an outsider who did not share American values. After Obama left for his family vacation in Hawaii, several of his senior strategists convened to present ideas about the way forward.

Almost universally, they concluded that he must shift the focus of the campaign to the economy.

Relying on a stockpile of data gathered over the spring and summer, the strategists agreed that economic instability, driven by the subprime mortgage crisis, was likely to evolve into the dominant theme of the race. It had not been Obama's strong suit in the primaries: He had seemed to float above economic hardship, discussing it in the abstract, while Clinton reached working-class voters on a visceral level. His team recognized, by late summer, that it was their urgent mission to fix that.

In one August memo, Axelrod warned that it was essential to redirect the growing attacks on Obama's persona back toward the concerns of average voters.

"They are following the Mark Penn blueprint, hoping to paint Barack as both culturally alien and inexperienced -- a silver-tongued empty suit, embraced by Washington but undeserving of the position or celebrity he commands. (Like Britney and Paris)," Axelrod wrote in a four-page memo, referring to the former chief Clinton strategist. "A far left liberal, whose views on taxes, crime and other issues are out of sync with the American people. And a dogmatic Democrat, willing to put interest group politics ahead of the country's interests. (Drilling.)"

Axelrod continued: "Candidly, I think the Republicans have had some success in the last few weeks in making this a referendum on Barack, or, more accurately, their caricature of him. In the coming weeks, we must change that dynamic by using our campaigning, spots and Convention to burst that caricature and draw a sharp contrast on fundamental economic issues and values."

Joel Benenson, Obama's lead pollster, separately concluded in August that the campaign would need to target a slice of undecided voters deeply motivated by economic concerns. In a PowerPoint presentation, Benenson identified about one-quarter of the electorate as being "up for grabs" in the 18 battleground states, with 67 percent of them citing the economy as a top issue, far more than the 51 percent who named Iraq.

And it was possible to fuse the two. "Don't forget that Iraq is an economic issue," Benenson wrote.

He went on to make the case for taking a harder line against McCain -- listing areas of vulnerability, such as being "out of touch," that made undecided voters sour on the Republican when they learned about them, according to the campaign's research. That laid the groundwork for the moment weeks later when McCain struggled to answer a question about how many homes he had: The Obama campaign, sometimes split on whether to attack its rival, did not hesitate to pounce.