How did Obama win? Look to Greek mythology

WASHINGTON -- To understand how Barack Obama won the presidential primary, you have to look at what he learned when he lost.

Obama defeated Hillary Rodham Clinton solidly in the Iowa caucuses in January, but five days later she beat him, painfully and unexpectedly, in New Hampshire. That loss showed him that toppling the royal family of Democratic politics would not come easily.

"I think this was meant to be," Obama said privately the next day, recalls adviser David Axelrod. "I think we were flying too close to the sun, like Icarus. When you're fighting for change, it's not supposed to be easy."

In Greek mythology, Icarus' father gives him wax wings that empower him to fly, but warns of the danger in soaring too high. Obama got similar warnings. When he arrived in Washington, Senate dean Robert Byrd cautioned him not to be in too much of a rush to leave for the White House.

But like Icarus, Obama wouldn't heed his elder's advice. Icarus would crash into the sea. Obama would learn from his own crash in New Hampshire and make history.

___

Obama got his first taste of the front-runner's curse in August, shortly after a poll put him at the head of the pack in Iowa. When candidates debated at Drake University, each was asked at the start whether Obama was ready to be president. He joked that riding the bumper cars at the Iowa State Fair had prepared him for their onslaught.

Someone should have told him to buckle up. The bumps were just starting.

Obama took heat for an ad-lib answer in an earlier debate. Asked whether he would meet with leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea to improve relations, he said: "I would."

His advisers winced. His rivals pounced, trying to turn the moment into a verdict on Obama's inexperience. Clinton called it "irresponsible and frankly naive."

Obama held a conference call with staff and ended any thoughts about softening his statement. "I'm right about this," Obama said. "And I'm ready to argue with anybody about it."

Obama used the position to weaken Clinton, saying her unwillingness to talk with foreign leaders showed she was just like President Bush.

___

Obama spent a week practicing a speech for the Iowa Democratic Party's big fundraising dinner, an event that drew party activists from around the state and media from around the world. Although he usually delivered big speeches from a TelePrompTer, aides with experience in Iowa told him he had to own this one. So he would work on committing it to memory each night in his hotel room after long days of campaigning.

He had the good fortune of speaking last, right after Clinton, and accused her of running a poll-driven campaign out of fear of what Republicans might say about her in a general election.

He brought down the house. Iowa's top political analyst, David Yepsen, called the speech a turning point, "a point where he laid down the marker and began closing on Clinton."

He had turned Clinton's biggest asset -- being a Clinton -- against her by painting her as sharing all her husband's worst traits.

Two months later, Iowa voted Obama the winner of its all-important caucus.

___

That win had special significance for the black candidate. It showed he could win in white America. It also showed that this time young people actually would cast ballots.

"Our entire strategy was predicated on slowing her down in Iowa," campaign manager David Plouffe said. "If she won Iowa or finished ahead of us in Iowa, she was going to be pretty hard to stop."

In Obama's victory speech, he gleefully responded to those who said he shouldn't reach for the sun.

"They said our sights were set too high," Obama said. "They said this country was too divided, too disillusioned to ever come together around a common purpose."

He didn't notice his wings were melting.

Said Axelrod: "We went on to New Hampshire and did a victory tour that plied ourselves into defeat."

___

Clinton had a miserable night in Iowa. She didn't even get second place -- that belonged to John Edwards, by a thin margin. Edwards calculated if he could help Obama put Clinton away in New Hampshire, he might have a chance.

The two men ganged up on Clinton during a debate in New Hampshire, and it backfired. Clinton complained they were piling on, then teared up before the cameras. She peeled back the icy caricature of the calculating Clinton and became a sympathetic human being.

Obama's impending defeat never could have been predicted by the crowds he was drawing. Entrance at every rally was shut down by fire marshals. Even more remarkable was that hordes of people who couldn't get in stood outside his events in the biting cold. He had to give two speeches at each stop -- one inside where he talked about his campaign in the context of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech and John F. Kennedy's quest to reach the moon, and another briefer address to the crowds outside.

"We did a lot of iconic rallies," Axelrod said. "She was campaigning much closer to the ground. There seemed to be more desire to her campaigning. And ultimately I think enough people thought if we were nominated, that if we won the New Hampshire primaries, the primaries would probably be over. And I'm not sure they thought that we had earned that."

___

The next contest, Nevada, was a narrow win for Clinton, but it highlighted an important fact that the Obama campaign would use effectively. The primary would be won by whoever got the majority of delegates, and Obama got more delegates out of Nevada because of a complicated formula for assigning delegates proportionately.

While Clinton pursued big states, Obama's campaign sent staff to the smaller states that she overlooked on Super Tuesday, places like Alaska, Idaho, Kansas and North Dakota.

"They basically ceded all the caucus states to us, which gave us a great advantage," Axelrod said.

She had predicted the race would be over by Super Tuesday, and she drained her resources on the big states. But the campaign didn't end -- they split the spoils, with her taking most of the large states and him picking up the smaller contests by large margins. Those small victories drove up his delegate count.

"The important thing about that day was when we realized that we could actually win more delegates than she," Axelrod said. "That was extremely important because there was no doubt that they thought they could snuff us out."

The Obama campaign had hoped for such an outcome and had campaigns up and running in the next contests while Clinton was left reeling. He won 11 contests in a row, a net gain of more than 200 delegates. She never recovered, even though she rebuilt her campaign and ran more evenly with Obama in the end. He was too far ahead in delegates, and she couldn't catch him.

___

Race became a flashpoint as the campaign went through South Carolina and Nevada, especially after Bill Clinton cast Obama's opposition to the Iraq war as "a fairy tale" and the former president continued to question the candidacy of his wife's rival. Bill Clinton, once widely revered by black voters, angered many when he seemed to diminish Obama's South Carolina triumph by noting that civil rights activist Jesse Jackson also had won the state.

The tension boiled over during a debate in Myrtle Beach, S.C., when Obama accused the former president of uttering a series of distortions to aid his wife's presidential effort.

"I'm here. He's not," she snapped.

"Well, I can't tell who I'm running against sometimes," Obama countered.

Pundits wondered whether Obama was losing his edge in South Carolina, but he defeated Clinton by a 2-1 margin.

"It was seen as a recoil to the tactics of the Clinton campaign," Plouffe said. "So it wasn't just how big we won but kind of why people thought we won that big that provided us more momentum coming out of South Carolina than we thought."

___

Race would re-emerge as the dominant issue in the spring, as videos of sermons about black and white America by Obama's longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, went viral. After initially remaining silent and thinking the story would blow over, Obama called Axelrod late on a Friday night and said he wanted to deliver a speech on race as soon as possible.

It was scheduled for Tuesday. After a long day of campaigning Saturday, Obama called speechwriter Jon Favreau and, as usual, said he wanted to offer an outline to get him started. But this time Obama dictated a lengthy first draft of the speech off the top of his head. A black-skinned man raised by a white family had spent a lifetime thinking about race relations and had some things to say.

Favreau made edits to Obama's dictation on Sunday, then the candidate stayed up perfecting the speech until 3 a.m. He went back to it Monday night after a full day of campaigning and e-mailed his final version to Axelrod and Favreau at 2 a.m. Tuesday.

"This is why you should be president," Axelrod e-mailed back.

Valerie Jarrett, a top adviser and longtime friend of the candidate, said Obama had a hard time seeing his former pastor become the target of a media storm. But in his low point, Obama focused on the speech.

"I think that was a very important moment," Jarrett said, "to have the calmness of mind to think about a very complicated issue and one which is touchy in America, and then find the words to describe it in a way that can give people who are frustrated or angry or just emotional, to give them this sense of calm."

The speech won widespread praise, but it didn't silence his former preacher. Wright went before the National Press Club and defended and escalated his most incendiary positions.

When Obama saw video of Wright's appearance, "he was pretty horrified by it," Axelrod said. The next day, after weeks of controversy, Obama finally completely disavowed the preacher.

___

The conventional wisdom that Clinton probably would win the Democratic presidential race put the focus on her, allowing Obama to grow without the harsh glare that is the front-runner's curse.

"We didn't have a dusty old playbook on the shelf about how we were going to run for president," Plouffe said. Obama was highly organized online, drawing supporters in droves who signed up to volunteer and give enough money in small amounts to out raise the storied Clinton fundraising organization.

Obama built his win ploddingly, on these series of small successes -- a few delegates here, a few dollars there. His plan to soar to the nomination after monumental wins in Iowa and New Hampshire didn't materialize.

It was a painful lesson, and one that he now sees as necessary.

"When you can show that you can bounce back from a setback, that adds some texture to you," Plouffe said. "And I think in this case it did for us. And I think as it turned out, this kind of race where we weren't on just this incredible rocket ride, there's been a lot of ups and downs, probably served us pretty well. You know, we've always been best when we're the feisty underdog."