Barack Obama 2008 presidential primary campaign
On February 10, 2007, Barack Obama, the junior United States senator from Illinois, announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States in Springfield, Illinois. Obama announced his candidacy at the Old State Capitol building, where Abraham Lincoln had delivered his "House Divided" speech. Obama was the main challenger, along with John Edwards, to front-runner Hillary Clinton for much of 2007. He had only recently emerged as a national figure in Democratic politics, having delivered the DNC keynote address just three years prior and won his Senate election shortly thereafter.
Obama's initial victory in the Iowa caucus in January 2008 helped bring him to national prominence from a crowded field of Democratic challengers. Obama benefited from early support from prominent Democrats including Tom Daschle and Ted Kennedy, and his campaign began to trade a series of hard-fought state wins with Clinton through Super Tuesday, in which Obama had great success in large rural states and Clinton was nearly as dominant in high-population coastal areas. Obama continued to have success in small donor fundraising, and continued winning a greater number of contests than Clinton through April.
In early May, after Obama won the North Carolina primary and narrowly lost the Indiana primary, superdelegates began to endorse Obama in greater numbers. Obama's win in Oregon gave him an absolute majority of the pledged delegates. After a rush of support for Obama from superdelegates on June 3, 2008, the day of the final primary contests of Montana and South Dakota, Obama was estimated to surpass the 2,118 delegates required for the Democratic nomination. On June 7, 2008, Clinton formally ended her candidacy and endorsed Obama, making him the party's presumptive nominee.
On August 27, 2008, at the Democratic National Convention, the Democratic Party formally nominated Obama to run for the office of the President of the United States of America. Obama would go on to win the presidential election against Republican nominee John McCain.
Pre-announcement
A warmly received keynote address by Obama before the 2004 Democratic National Convention sparked expectations that he would run for the presidency. They intensified after both Obama's decisive victory in the race for senator and John Kerry's loss in the concurrent presidential election in November 2004, even though he told reporters then that "I can unequivocally say I will not be running for national office in four years."In September 2006, Obama was the featured speaker at Iowa Senator Tom Harkin's annual steak fry, a political event traditionally attended by presidential hopefuls in the lead-up to the Iowa caucuses.
In an October 2006 interview on the television program Meet the Press, the senator seemed to entertain the possibility of a 2008 presidential bid. Illinois Senator Richard Durbin and State Comptroller Daniel Hynes were early advocates for such a run.
Many people in the entertainment community expressed readiness to campaign for an Obama presidency, including celebrity television show host Oprah Winfrey, singer Macy Gray, rap artist Common, and film actors George Clooney, Halle Berry, and Will Smith.
In December 2006, Obama spoke at a New Hampshire event celebrating Democratic Party midterm election victories in the first-in-the-nation U.S. presidential primary state, drawing 1500 people.
Speaking at a Democratic National Committee meeting one week before the February announcement, Obama called for putting an end to negative campaigning. "This can't be about who digs up more skeletons on who, who makes the fewest slip-ups on the campaign trail," he said. "We owe it to the American people to do more than that."
Announcement of candidacy
On January 16, 2007, Obama announced via a video on his website that he had formed a presidential exploratory committee, and on February 10 he formally announced his candidacy with these words:Campaign staff and policy team
On January 14, 2007, the Chicago Tribune reported that Obama had begun assembling his 2008 presidential campaign team, to be headquartered in Chicago. His team included campaign manager David Plouffe and media consultant David Axelrod, who were partners at the Chicago-based political consulting firm AKP&D Message and Media. Communications director Robert Gibbs was previously press secretary for John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign. Penny Pritzker headed the campaign's finance team.Other members of the campaign staff included Deputy National Campaign Director Steve Hildebrand, New Media Director Joe Rospars, speechwriter Jon Favreau, national press secretary Bill Burton, traveling press secretary Dan Pfeiffer, policy development Cassandra Butts, finance director Julianna Smoot, research director Devorah Adler, and pollsters Paul Harstad and Cornell Belcher.
A number of Obama's top aides have backgrounds with former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, who left the Senate due to re-election defeat at the same time Obama was entering it.
Obama's economic advisors included chief Austan Goolsbee, who has worked with him since his U.S. Senate campaign, Paul Volcker, Warren Buffett, health economist David Cutler and Jeffrey Leibman. His foreign policy advisors included a core of nine people: Greg Craig, Richard Danzig, Scott Gration, Anthony Lake, Denis McDonough, Samantha Power, Ben Rhodes, Susan Rice, and Daniel Shapiro until March 2008 when Samantha Power stepped down. A larger group of 250 advisers is divided into subgroups of about 20 people, each focusing on a specific area or topic. His legal affairs advisors include Martha Minow, Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., Christopher Edley Jr., Eric Holder, and Cassandra Butts.
Among his field staff, Paul Tewes and Mitch Stewart led Obama's winning Iowa caucus campaign, and one or the other of them directed field operations in many other crucial states, including Nevada, Minnesota, Texas, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana.
Obama's campaign was notable for extensive use of a logo consisting of the letter O, with the center suggesting a sun rising over fields in the colors of the American flag. It was designed by a team at Chicago design firm Sender LLC.
Pre-primary campaign developments
First half 2007
In March 2007, the Obama campaign posted a question on Yahoo! Answers, entitled: "How can we engage more people in the democratic process?" which ultimately drew in over 17,000 responses. The same month, Obama traveled to Selma, Alabama, along with Hillary Clinton, coinciding with the 42nd anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches.Also in March 2007, Hillary 1984, a mashup of Apple's 1984 launch commercial for the Macintosh with footage of Hillary Clinton used in the place of Big Brother, went viral in the early stages of the race for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. The video was produced in support of Obama by Phil de Vellis, an employee of Blue State Digital, but was made without the knowledge of either Obama's campaign, or de Vellis' employer: de Vellis stated that he made the video in one afternoon at home using a Mac and some software. Political commentators including Carla Marinucci and Arianna Huffington, as well as de Vellis himself, suggested that the video demonstrated the way technology had created new opportunities for individuals to make an impact on politics.
On May 3, 2007, citing no specific threat but motivated by the large volume of hate mail directed at the candidate, Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff announced that the United States Secret Service would provide protection for the campaign, including bodyguards for Obama and other services/resources similar to those employed for the safety of the President of the United States, albeit on a proportionally smaller level. Normally, presidential candidates are not offered Secret Service protection until early February of election year; this was the earliest protection had ever been granted.
Second half 2007
On August 1 when making his foreign policy speech Obama created controversy by declaring that the United States must be willing to strike al Qaeda targets inside Pakistan, with or without the consent of the Pakistani government. He stated that if elected, "If we have actionable intelligence about high value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will." ABC News described the policy speech as "counterintuitive" and commented on how "one of the more liberal candidates in the race, is proposing a geopolitical posture that is more aggressive than that of President Bush" Obama ultimately followed through on this statement of policy four years later when, as President, he ordered the operation to enter Pakistan and kill Osama bin Laden.Image:ObamaSouthCarolina.jpg|thumb|Obama speaking at a rally in Conway, South Carolina on August 3, 2007.
After weeks of discourse surrounding the policy, Obama said there was "misreporting" of his comments, stating that, "I never called for an invasion of Pakistan or Afghanistan." He clarified that rather than a surge in the number of troops in Iraq, there needed to be a "diplomatic surge" and that if there were "actionable intelligence reports" showing al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, the U.S. troops as a last resort should enter and try to capture terrorists. That would happen, he added, only if "the Pakistani government was unable or unwilling" to go after the terrorists.
As Democratic debates took place during the summer, Obama received at best mixed notices for his efforts. Democratic strategist Bob Shrum said, "He slips into this tendency, which he probably learned as president of the Harvard Law Review, to overstate his premises before he states his position. In politics, you do the opposite of what you do in the Law Review—you state your position, then say your premises—if you ever get to them." Commentator Eleanor Clift said that, "Obama is almost too cerebral for the sound-bite world of modern politics, but that's part of his appeal."
During a campaign stop in October 2007, a reporter inquired as to why Obama had stopped wearing a lapel pin of the American flag, which he had started wearing after the September 11, 2001 attacks, and his response was that it had come to feel like "a substitute for true patriotism." This led to discussion on the cable news channels and was covered by satirists such as Stephen Colbert, who had an ongoing disagreement with the Fox & Friends assertion that "this is America, and if you want to be president of America, it might be behoove him to wear an American flag." Commentator Bill Maher, who was highly critical of such questions about Obama's patriotism and called it a "non-story" nonetheless referred to the incident as "he first genuine controversy of the presidential campaign."
In mid-late October 2007, Obama came under fire from the Human Rights Campaign and others for a South Carolina gospel music campaign tour that featured singer Donnie McClurkin, who states that he is ex-gay and that homosexuality is a "curse the intention of God." Obama said in response that, "I strongly believe that African Americans and the LGBT community must stand together in the fight for equal rights. And so I strongly disagree with Reverend McClurkin's views." While not replacing McClurkin, the campaign added a gay minister to the tour.
As fall 2007 continued, Obama fell further behind Clinton in national polls. In late October 2007, two months before the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, Obama began directly charging his top rival with failing to clearly state her political positions. This shift in approach attracted much media commentary; The New York Times' Adam Nagourney wrote that, "Obama has appeared to struggle from the start of this campaign with how to marry what he has promised to be a new approach to politics—free of the partisan bitterness that has marked presidential campaigns for so long—with what it takes to actually win a presidential race." In an early-anticipated October 30 Democratic debate at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Clinton suffered a poor debate performance under cross-examination from her Democratic rivals and the moderator. Obama's campaign was reinvigorated, and he began to climb again in the polls.
Campaigning in November 2007, Obama told The Washington Post that as the Democratic nominee he would draw more support from independent and Republican voters in the general election than Clinton. At Iowa's Jefferson-Jackson fundraising dinner Obama expanded the theme, saying that his presidency would "bring the country together in a new majority" to seek solutions to long-standing problems.
On November 21, Obama announced that Oprah Winfrey would be campaigning for him in the early primary states, setting off speculation that, although celebrity endorsements typically have little effect on voter opinions, Oprah's participation would supply Obama with a large, receptive audience. As word spread that Oprah's first appearance would be in Iowa, polls released in early December revealed Obama taking the lead in that decisive state. Then, on December 8, Oprah kicked off a three-state tour supporting Obama's campaign, where she drew record-setting crowds in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina and was described as "more cogent, more effective, more convincing" than anyone on the campaign trail. The Oprah-Obama tour dominated political news headlines and cast doubts over Clinton's ability to recover her recently lost lead in Iowa caucus polls.
Later in December, there was controversy regarding Obama's admissions of drug use as a teen. Obama first publicly acknowledged the issue in his 1995 book, Dreams from My Father. In the book, Obama said "Pot had helped, and booze. Maybe a little blow when you could afford it." The issue was revived on the campaign trail after a November 2007 speech at a New Hampshire high school. Obama told the students, "I've made some bad decisions that I've actually written about," noting that his "drinking and experimenting with drugs" accounted for a lot of "wasted time" in high school. Some, including Republican candidate Mitt Romney, criticized Obama for discussing these examples with students. Romney said that "in order to leave the best possible example for our kids, we're probably wisest not to talk about our own indiscretions in great detail." However, fellow GOP candidate Rudy Giuliani and Partnership for a Drug-Free America president Stephen J. Pasierb praised Obama's candor. "I respect his honesty," Giuliani said. Pasierb told CNN that "really the truth works best" when discussing drug use with kids. Bill Shaheen, the co-chairman of Clinton's campaign in New Hampshire, mentioned the drug use in a December 12 conference call with reporters. Shaheen said that if Obama were to win the nomination, Republicans would use Obama's admissions against him in a general election. He suggested that in such a scenario, Republicans would ask, "'When was the last time? Did you ever give drugs to anyone? Did you sell them to anyone?'" He added that such "Republican dirty tricks" would be difficult to overcome. The comments immediately caused controversy, and Shaheen resigned the next day. Clinton denounced the comments and personally apologized to Obama. Her spokesman said that she "made it clear that this kind of negative personal statement has no part in this campaign." Appearing on Hardball with Chris Matthews, Axelrod accused the Clinton campaign of giving a "wink and a nod" to negative tactics. He criticized Clinton's December 3 statement in which she signaled a more aggressive approach and called it the "fun part" of the campaign. Axelrod said that the signal should come "from the top" that the campaigns will not be waged "in the gutter."
When the close proximity of the first contests to the holidays prompted many candidates to release Christmas videos—allowing them to continue presenting their messages, but in more seasonal settings—Obama chose one that gave speaking parts to his wife and daughters and emphasized a message of thanks and unity.