Measured Response To Financial Crisis Sealed the Election

The tension over how and when to hit McCain surfaced repeatedly during the course of the primaries and then the general election, and was often seen by the staff as a split between Axelrod, the idealist and master of grand strategy, and Plouffe, the calculating tactician.

In a campaign that thrived on discipline, the disagreements were almost never publicly aired, but they existed behind closed doors, aides said. Axelrod, a soulful father figure inside the campaign, was seen as the one channeling Obama, with both adviser and candidate urging restraint and a focus on the issues.

Later, Obama's competitive instincts would kick in and he would urge going after McCain more aggressively -- a development that was met with a mixture of amusement and relief by aides who had been itching to get tougher all along. But that was not where he was in late summer.

Dozens of advertisements were created that never ran. One health-care ad was stripped of a line accusing McCain of supporting the "biggest middle-class tax increase in history" because it was too much of an exaggeration. Obama ultimately rejected the line himself, advisers said, replacing it with a more modest statement about taxing health benefits -- a reflex aides came to expect from a certain wing of the campaign.

"Plouffe has pretty harsh instincts. Axe doesn't always," one aide said, referring to Axelrod by his nickname. "Axe is protecting the brand," the aide said -- meaning Obama's personal brand as an extraordinary, above-the-fray figure running a "different kind of campaign."

Unfazed by Palin 'Hysteria'

On the Friday morning after Obama delivered his soaring convention address to 84,000 supporters at Invesco Field, Democrats awoke in Denver to the stunning report that McCain was about to announce an absolute unknown, Palin, as his running mate. Excitement from Obama's speech quickly turned to disbelief, then outrage, then panic. McCain had chosen a female vice presidential nominee, the first Republican ever to do so, in an effort to peel away female voters -- reopening the wound over Clinton that Democrats thought they had healed over the previous few days.

Only Obama's advisers were giddy about the choice.

Since early July, the campaign's researchers had met daily to discuss the list of possible Republican vice presidential choices, based on news accounts and their best guess at how McCain's mind might work.

Palin had been on the Obama short list for a few weeks, and then had been taken off when stories about her efforts to get her brother-in-law fired from the Alaska state police broke.

Dunn, the senior Obama adviser, had the unique perspective of having run a campaign against Palin two years earlier, as an adviser to Alaskan gubernatorial candidate Tony Knowles. She considered Palin a formidable and charismatic politician; she also had a grasp of Palin's thin record and her history on the "bridge to nowhere," and had sat through numerous Palin-Knowles debates.

That Palin expertise, shared by few in the country, would steady the Obama campaign at a moment when national Democrats embarked on what one adviser described as "two weeks of total hysteria" over the Alaska governor.

Dunn had the research staff stop putting so much energy into Palin, convinced that she could not pass the vetting process. "How was I to know that they weren't going to vet her?" she said.