Measured Response To Financial Crisis Sealed the Election

The morning McCain announced Palin as his vice presidential pick, as Democrats scrambled for the right way to react to a woman they had barely heard of, Obama spokesman Bill Burton gave the campaign's first official response.

"I think the American people are pretty surprised to see that John McCain would pick someone to be a heartbeat away from the presidency who has zero foreign policy experience," Burton told Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC. "Just a couple years ago she was the mayor of a small town in Alaska."

Shortly afterward, the Obama campaign issued a second statement praising Palin as an "admirable person" and suggesting that they would not attack her. Obama himself seemed to repudiate Burton, saying that "campaigns start getting these hair triggers" at times.

In fact, according to campaign sources, Burton's comments had been approved by all of the campaign's senior staff members. It was not the first time the spokesman had been dispatched to say something over the edge, only to pull it back later -- part of the delicate art of advancing negative ideas about the GOP ticket without being accused of doing so.

When they successfully hit McCain hard without suffering any consequences, Obama aides considered it a success. It was worth noting, one adviser said with evident pride, that what Burton said on television that day "was the line of attack that the left took for the next month."

More fundamentally, the Palin selection removed a worry that Obama advisers had about their candidate's lack of seasoning: In a flash, they felt, McCain had thrown away his central rationale for being president, his experience. It would take several more weeks -- and Palin's devastating interview with CBS News anchor Katie Couric -- before Obama's internal data would show that McCain's running mate was dragging the Republican ticket down.

Yet it was the damage done to McCain by the financial disaster and then his response to it that had the most consequences. While Obama bore down on financial issues on the campaign trail, his rival cast about for a message -- initially saying the fundamentals of the economy were strong, then announcing plans to suspend his campaign, then dropping those plans. Obama's speechwriters combed the dictionary to come up with terms that would get at McCain's unsteadiness without directly calling him old or angry, aides said. They settled on "erratic."

"The American people were watching very closely," Axelrod said. "They saw two candidates deal with a crisis in real time, and McCain appeared halting and inconsistent, and Obama seemed very focused and secure."

Amid the sudden explosion of bad economic news, it seemed that the very thing that made Obama's candidacy historic -- the fact that he would be the nation's first black president -- remained unspoken. His candidacy was all about race in one sense: As the first African American nominee of a major party, he ran as the embodiment of American possibilities, with his personal story at the core of that message. But with the exception of one major speech, a few stray comments and answers to questions in interviews, Obama did not dwell on race. How he embraced the historic nature of his bid without seeming to hold a national referendum on race will be part of the campaign's legacy.

His strategists, most of them white, seemed allergic to the subject, dismissing questions about the "Bradley effect" -- the theory that white voters overstate their support for black candidates in polls -- and insisting race would be a nonstory in the end.

Under the radar, advisers kept an eye on potential trouble spots. One aide noted that the campaign had "kept Al Sharpton quiet," avoiding any potentially provocative comments from the reverend by having Valerie Jarrett, a close friend of Obama's, stay in close contact with him.

When a flap erupted last month over Rep. John Lewis's remarks comparing McCain to the 1960s segregationist George Wallace, the official response from the Obama campaign was to play down the comments. But behind the scenes, staff members hit the phones, first calling the Georgia Democrat to get his remarks revised, then calling members of the Congressional Black Caucus to make sure the situation did not escalate. "Our political team called every member of the CBC and said, 'Don't do that,' " an Obama official said.

Obama spoke to his campaign staff after another controversy in July, this one triggered by remarks he made at an event in Missouri. He had warned voters: "What they're going to try to do is make you scared of me: You know, he's not patriotic enough; he's got a funny name. You know, he doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills." When McCain advisers responded angrily that the Democrat was playing the race card, aides to Obama insisted, at first, that he had not been referring to race.

The candidate then rebuked his staff, telling them it was unacceptable "to pretend that it wasn't an issue," one senior adviser said. "No, you just confront it directly, you're honest, and you talk to people, and you move on," Obama told the staff, the adviser said.

A Winning Formula

McCain emerged from the debate season badly bruised, his campaign in disarray. Obama came out emboldened, back on the comfortable terrain of an issue -- the economy -- on which he had grown increasingly confident, both substantively and in terms of campaign politics.

He had reacted to the Wall Street implosion with the earnestness of a student (talking with Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. nearly every day) and his characteristic calm. His campaign had laid the groundwork for his economic embrace since summer, in part by taking the step, unusual for a Democrat, of a message blitz on taxes, preemptively arguing that Obama would lower most.

And they had put Obama in smaller settings, with his sleeves rolled up, talking to voters at picnics and barbecues, to convey the sense that he was "among people, and not above them," in Axelrod's words.

He had embraced the legendary Clinton message, "it's the economy, stupid," without fully embracing either Clinton. He had seamlessly woven it into a narrative all his own, making the economy the cornerstone of his argument that the country was on the wrong track and desperately needed change.

Six days before the election, Obama delivered his $3 million, 30-minute advertisement on seven television channels during prime time. "Earlier this year, we already knew our country was in trouble. . . . But then, a little over a month ago, the bottom fell out," he said, looking directly at the camera and speaking to an estimated 33 million viewers.

It was his closing argument, and it had evolved a long way from his initial rationale for getting into the race -- ending the war in Iraq and bringing about generational change. Lost on no one was how heavily the message borrowed from his greatest rivals, the Clintons, who had defined the economy as their bedrock issue, and the Democratic Party's, 16 years earlier. But it was Obama's now. And yesterday, after one of the longest and most captivating campaign seasons in history, it worked.