"I have a lifetime of experience I will bring to the White House," Clinton declared on March 3. "Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience he will bring to the White House. And Senator Obama has a speech he made in 2002."

The Obamans sloughed off Clinton as a terminal patient raging against the dying of the light. But if Clinton found her voice in New Hampshire, in Texas and Ohio she discovered a new persona: the fighter, the populist, the resilient underdog. She started speaking clearly, forcefully, and empathetically to hard-pressed voters who felt her pain. And she reaped the rewards: a ten-point win in Ohio and a three-point victory in the Lone Star State's primary. Onstage that night in Columbus, Clinton began her speech with a refrain that would thematically mark the rest of her campaign: "For everyone here in Ohio and across America who's ever been counted out but refused to be knocked out, and for everyone who has stumbled but stood right back up, and for everyone who works hard and never gives up, this one is for you."

Once again, Clinton had pulled a rabbit from her hat. Once again, she'd raised questions about Obama. Why couldn't he win the big states that would matter most in the fall? Why did he have trouble connecting with working-cla.s.s voters? Why couldn't he close the deal?

Yet none of the doubts those questions raised was enough to alter the underlying dynamics or overriding mathematics of the race. For Obama to lose the nomination would require a magnum-force game changer. Something that might cause Democrats en ma.s.se to slam on the brakes and say whoa. Something that might lead the party to perceive Obama as Clinton saw him-as a "disaster in the making," as she put it.

Obama, with his epic self-confidence, couldn't imagine what that something could be. More than a year into the campaign, he had thwarted the efforts of his rivals to turn him into a parody. He was still Barack Obama. What he never guessed, though, was that the gravest threat he'd face-the threat now looming before him-wouldn't be posed by his enemies in the present. It would come instead from an old friend.

Chapter Thirteen.

Obama Agonistes.

THE OBAMAS ATE BREAKFAST in silence at their hotel in San Antonio the morning after Ohio and Texas. Their friends Jarrett and Whitaker tried to cheer them up, but it was no use. Bad vibes suffused the table.

Mich.e.l.le was especially out of sorts-which is to say, p.i.s.sed off. She'd been that way the night before, too, but her mood had worsened with the new dawn. She was tired, very tired, and she missed her girls. She was no campaign strategist, but she knew her husband's operation had poured $20 million into Texas and Ohio. And what had all that dinero yielded? Two big, fat losses. Mich.e.l.le felt she was wasting her time on the road, spending countless days away from home, and yet failing to help her husband. She was unhappy with her schedule. Unhappy with her stump speech. Just unhappy. On the flight home to Chicago, she plugged her iPod headphones into her ears and spoke to no one.

Checking out was no option for Barack, but he was just as displeased as Mich.e.l.le. He wanted the race against Hillary to be over. He still desperately needed some sleep.

But by failing to put Clinton out of her misery, Obama had all but guaranteed himself another three months of this h.e.l.l. A seven-week chasm stretched out before him until the Pennsylvania primary on April 22, which, given its older and whiter demographics, he was virtually certain to lose. Many of the contests after that would be no picnic, either; the calendar, which had been his friend in February, was now his enemy. Meanwhile, the press was starting to treat him as what he was: the front-runner. Obama didn't much like it. At a press availability two days earlier, when reporters nagged him about Tony Rezko, he'd whined, "C'mon, guys, I just answered, like, eight questions"-and then stalked off, cutting them short. For more than a month since South Carolina, Obama had been in the catbird seat. Now he braced for his turn in the barrel.

No amount of girding, however, could have prepared Obama for what he saw on his TV screen eight days later. On March 13, ABC News aired a story about his pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Using excerpts from videotapes of Wright's sermons that were for sale at his parish, Trinity United Church of Christ, the story painted a picture of a preacher unhinged. In one clip, Wright railed about the treatment of African Americans: "The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, pa.s.ses the three-strike law, and then wants us to sing 'G.o.d Bless America.' No, no, no! Not G.o.d bless America-G.o.dd.a.m.n America!" In another, he referred to America as the "U.S. of KKK A." In still another, from a sermon delivered after 9/11, Wright bellowed, "We bombed Hiroshima! We bombed Nagasaki! And we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans and now we are America!" In another, he referred to America as the "U.S. of KKK A." In still another, from a sermon delivered after 9/11, Wright bellowed, "We bombed Hiroshima! We bombed Nagasaki! And we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans and now we are indignant indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards!" Revolving on his heel, gazing heavenward, fluttering one hand in the air, Wright ominously concluded, "America's because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards!" Revolving on his heel, gazing heavenward, fluttering one hand in the air, Wright ominously concluded, "America's chickens chickens . . . are coming . . . are coming home home . . . to . . . to roost!' roost!'

As the story went metastatic the next day, Obama was traveling from Washington to Chicago, where he had a pair of ed-board interviews scheduled with the Windy City's two daily papers. He had been pushing for some time to sit down with the press and try to clear the air about his relationship with Rezko. The suits had resisted, but with the crooked developer on trial and the media pressing on the subject, Obama felt it was imperative. But now, on top of prepping for the interviews, he had to deal with the Wright imbroglio.

"All right, let's get down to business," Obama said as he walked into his campaign HQ. "We've got about two hours and we have a lot to do."

He took a seat in a conference room amid sheer pandemonium among his aides. One of them had drafted a statement on Wright to release to the Huffington Post. But Obama rejected it and, in about twenty minutes, dictated one of his own, which called Wright's sermons "inflammatory and appalling." When the suits said the statement would be a sufficient response, Obama overruled them, saying he wanted to go on TV that night. "They're going to be looping Reverend Wright all weekend; the public needs to see me, too," Obama said. Then he prepared for the Rezko ed boards, and aced them. His performance that day-calm, methodical, precise, and strategic-impressed his team immensely. Anita Dunn, the strategist who'd run Hopefund, had joined the campaign after Nevada. This is a guy I want in a foxhole with me This is a guy I want in a foxhole with me, she thought.

Beneath Obama's cool exterior, though, he was furious with his campaign for failing to unearth the Wright tapes before then. Obama had been a member of Trinity for twenty years. He knew Wright could be provocative, even incendiary. And so did much of the political community in Chicago. "This guy is going to be a big problem for Barack," Mayor Daley had warned his brother Bill, even before Obama launched his bid. The Rolling Stone Rolling Stone story that prompted the downgrading of Wright's role at the announcement in Springfield tossed up another red flag. But the campaign's research department had inexplicably failed to follow up. story that prompted the downgrading of Wright's role at the announcement in Springfield tossed up another red flag. But the campaign's research department had inexplicably failed to follow up.

Mich.e.l.le was even angrier than her husband, though the focus of her upset was elsewhere. From the moment she'd read the piece in Rolling Stone Rolling Stone, she was through with Reverend Wright, ready to quit the church. "That's enough of that," she told Jarrett. Her husband's panicked advisers approached her to find out basic details about the Obamas' membership at Trinity; they knew hardly anything. How often did the family go to church? Had they been present for any of the controversial sermons? Mich.e.l.le made it clear that she'd never much liked Wright. And that since the births of Malia and Sasha, in 1998 and 2001, the Obamas had rarely attended services.

Still, Obama had said that Wright "brought me to Jesus." He had declared himself a proud Christian. To admit that his religiosity was, in practice, limited, would have made Obama look craven at best, and like a liar at worst.

Obama's relationship to Wright and Trinity was, in fact, complicated. His initial attraction to the parson and his South Side ministry sprang from its commitment to the social gospel: the day care programs, the work with prisoners, the encouragement of HIV/AIDS testing-all the kinds of things that would have appealed to a young community organizer. Obama liked the admixture of working-cla.s.s and buppie congregants at the church. He was impressed by Wright's reputation as a biblical scholar and had been inspired by his oratory; he had lifted the t.i.tle of The Audacity of Hope The Audacity of Hope from one of Wright's sermons. And although Obama considered the words that were causing the current controversy beyond the pale, he well understood the context-generational, cultural, and social-by which Wright had come to the views that animated them. His ties to his pastor were neither mainly religious nor political. They were quasi-familial. "He's like your uncle who says things you profoundly disagree with," Obama told from one of Wright's sermons. And although Obama considered the words that were causing the current controversy beyond the pale, he well understood the context-generational, cultural, and social-by which Wright had come to the views that animated them. His ties to his pastor were neither mainly religious nor political. They were quasi-familial. "He's like your uncle who says things you profoundly disagree with," Obama told The Chicago Tribune The Chicago Tribune editorial board. "But he's still your uncle." editorial board. "But he's still your uncle."

The evening that Obama released his initial statement about Wright, he conferred with Jarrett, Nesbitt, and Whitaker, then phoned Axelrod. Obama told his strategist that he wanted to give a major address on race-and wanted to do it on Tuesday, just four days later. Given how personal the speech would be, Jon Favreau waited to hear from Obama before he started working on a draft. Obama was busy campaigning the next day and didn't reach him until late that night.

"This is tough," Obama said, "but I'm running for president, and this is what you do when you run for president. I want this to be a teaching moment."

The idea of doing a big race speech had been on Obama's mind for months. Back in the fall, he'd brought it up, but the suits were wary, not wanting to mess with his post-racial brand. He'd raised it again the day after Texas and Ohio, when the exit polls showed that Clinton had won the white vote in the Buckeye State by thirty points. Convinced that he would be the nominee, Obama wanted to start dealing with issues he was destined to confront in the general election, of which race was plainly one. The Wright fiasco had simply sped up the timetable on the speech, filling Obama with-to swipe a phrase-the fierce urgency of now.

Yet even with the Wright snippets playing endlessly on cable, and conservatives baying for Obama's head-demanding to know if he was a closet black radical, as anti-American as the man The New York Post The New York Post had dubbed the "minister of hate"-the suits were dubious. They feared the speech might make the problem worse, deepening instead of healing the gash that Wright had opened up in the belly of Obama's candidacy. "Do you guys understand, this could be it?" Axelrod said. "This could be the whole campaign." had dubbed the "minister of hate"-the suits were dubious. They feared the speech might make the problem worse, deepening instead of healing the gash that Wright had opened up in the belly of Obama's candidacy. "Do you guys understand, this could be it?" Axelrod said. "This could be the whole campaign."

But when Obama emailed the speech text to his senior staff on March 18, the morning of the address, Axelrod was blown away. "This is why you should be president," he emailed Obama back.

Standing at the lectern at the National Const.i.tution Center in Philadelphia, flanked by four American flags on either side of him, Obama delivered the remarks he'd t.i.tled "A More Perfect Union." The speech was candid, nuanced, and replete with context. It spoke to the resentments of both blacks and whites, tried to explain how they had arisen, what fueled them, why they were "grounded in legitimate concerns"-but then argued they had landed the country in a "racial stalemate" that had to be broken.

Obama denounced Wright's comments as "expressing a profoundly distorted view of our country," as "not only wrong but divisive-divisive at a time when we need unity." Yet Obama refused to cut his pastor loose. "I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community," he said. "I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother . . . who once confessed her fear of black men who pa.s.sed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

"The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made," Obama said. "But what we know, what we have seen, is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope-the audacity to hope-for what we can and must achieve tomorrow."

In the short term, politically, the speech was as effective as it was eloquent. It placed Obama on the elevated plane where he always thrived. It strummed the mystic chords of the media. It replaced the TV images of Wright fulminating with those of Obama soothing, synthesizing, and waxing hopeful.

Its longer-range effects were harder to gauge. Obama's refusal to disown Wright left him open to attacks from the right. Two days earlier, a video produced by conservative activists t.i.tled "Is Obama Wright?" had been posted to YouTube. It weaved together clips of Wright with other ephemera-shots of Obama at a campaign event without his hand over his heart during the national anthem, of him saying he wasn't inclined to wear an American flag lapel pin-to suggest that the senator was unpatriotic. It also featured footage of Mich.e.l.le, speaking at a recent rally in Wisconsin, saying, "For the first time in my adult lifetime, I'm really proud of my country."

To many Republicans, Obama had long appeared to be a tougher general election opponent than Clinton. But with Wright's emergence, that a.s.sessment was being revisited. The question was whether many Democrats were thinking the same thing-and what, if anything, the Clintonites could do to spur the party's synapses to start firing in that fashion.

HAROLD ICKES PROPOSED HIRING a private investigator to look into the connection between Obama and Wright. Ickes was famously liberal; he'd worked for Jesse Jackson. But he was also famously tough and he was at least half-serious about the PI. He was meeting with the Clintons and the Hillaryland high command one day in late March, trying to figure out how to handle the Wright story. Everyone was p.u.s.s.yfooting around the thing, and Ickes had finally had enough. "This guy has been sitting in the church for twenty f.u.c.king years," he said. "If you really want to take him down, let's take him f.u.c.king down."

The Clintons wanted to take Obama down, but they weren't sure that going after Wright was the way to do it. Some Hillarylanders thought holding a candidate responsible for the words of his minister was unfair. Others thought pushing the story risked touching the third rail that race had become in the campaign. Even Penn was an advocate of Hillary personally keeping a safe distance. But like Ickes, with whom he shared nothing but fierce mutual enmity, Penn believed the campaign should be searching for evidence that Obama had been present for one of Wright's screeds. "The tape will speak for itself" was Penn's position.

Hillary reconciled herself to the wisdom of exercising restraint on Wright. But she saw a maddening double standard in play yet again. "Just imagine, just for fun, if my pastor from Arkansas said the kind of things his pastor said," she held forth one day to her aides. "I'm just saying. Just imagine. This race would be over."

Instead-in spite of Texas and Ohio, in spite of Wright-super-delegates were still swarming to Obama. Since Iowa, he had picked up fifty-three endors.e.m.e.nts to Hillary's twelve. The flashiest of these was Bill Richardson, who signed on with Obama three days after his race speech. Richardson had been in bad odor with the Clintons since his deal with Obama in the Hawkeye State caucuses. Nevertheless, Bill Clinton had flown to Santa Fe to spend Super Bowl Sunday with Richardson and court him. Clinton swore up and down to his friends that Richardson had promised him five times he would at least refrain from endorsing Obama, even if he didn't back Hillary. Thus did Richardson, courtesy of James Carville, earn himself a new sobriquet in Clintonworld: Judas.

More disquieting to Hillary were the mounting calls for her to leave the race-the latest and loudest of which had emanated from Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy. But far from weakening her resolve, the suggestions that she quit only galvanized her commitment to stay in until the bitter end. They were trying to force her out, even though she still had a chance to win, and that struck her as mighty strange in light of Obama's weaknesses.

What Clinton failed to apprehend were the vulnerabilities that many Democrats continued to see in her, a number of which were on vivid display in the run-up to Pennsylvania. Cable was having a field day with a story that had become known as Snipergate. More than once on the trail, Hillary had described a trip she made to Bosnia as First Lady in 1996. In her telling, she arrived under sniper fire, racing across the tarmac with her head down. In late March, video surfaced of her being greeted at Tuzla airport by cheerful children, with Chelsea smiling beside her. The story reinforced every extant preconception about the Clintons' dodgy relationship with the truth.

Then, on April 4, Clinton was engulfed in yet another Hillaryland melodrama. The Wall Street Journal The Wall Street Journal reported that Penn, in his continuing role as CEO of Burson-Marsteller, had just met with the Colombian amba.s.sador in Washington to strategize about how to win pa.s.sage of a free trade deal with the United States-a pact that Hillary and the labor unions opposed. The resulting furor forced Clinton to demote Penn, elevating Wolfson and the pollster Geoff Garin to jointly fill the role that her chief strategist had occupied. reported that Penn, in his continuing role as CEO of Burson-Marsteller, had just met with the Colombian amba.s.sador in Washington to strategize about how to win pa.s.sage of a free trade deal with the United States-a pact that Hillary and the labor unions opposed. The resulting furor forced Clinton to demote Penn, elevating Wolfson and the pollster Geoff Garin to jointly fill the role that her chief strategist had occupied.

To the outside world, the Penn fracas was another sign of a Clinton campaign in chaos, and a d.a.m.ning one for a candidate running on experience and competence. Inside Hillaryland, however, the situation was seen as even more disturbing. In the eyes of many, the chief strategist had shown his true stripes: that his paramount client was always himself, his preponderant aim his own enrichment. What Penn had done was a firing offense, his continued presence in the building a demonstration of Hillary's insecurity.

Clinton, it seemed, couldn't catch a break-and then, out of nowhere, she got one. On April 11, less than two weeks before the primary, the Huffington Post put online audio of Obama speaking at a private fund-raiser in San Francisco. "You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for twenty-five years and nothing's replaced them," Obama told the group. "So it's not surprising then that [people there] get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Obama's "bitter/cling" comments seemed to be a heavenly gift to the Clintons. They billboarded a simple message about Obama that Hillary and Bill already believed was true: that he was, at bottom, a helpless and hopeless elitist. Unlike the Wright story, here was something the Clintons could push-and push it they did, immediately and furiously and with no fear of stumbling over racial trip wires. For the next ten days, Hillary would come at Obama guns blazing, armed with a line that, in the context of her new persona, was so well pitched and perfectly modulated that it almost sounded like poetry.

"Americans need a president that will stand up for them, not a president that looks down on them," she said.

THE FINAL DEMOCRATIC DEBATE of 2008 took place in Philadelphia on April 16. The event was being held in the same venue where Obama had given his race speech a month earlier, the National Const.i.tution Center. So there was a certain grim coincidence when, the day of the debate, Obama's BlackBerry buzzed with the news that Reverend Wright was planning to resurface. Obama was already in rotten spirits over everything that had happened in the past weeks. Now his worst nightmare was planning a comeback tour, complete with media interviews and public speeches. Terrific.

The debate, sponsored by ABC News, did nothing to elevate his mood. The first and second questions to Obama, from Charlie Gibson, were about "bitter/cling" and Wright. The third and fourth, from George Stephanopoulos, were also about the reverend. Next, by video, a voter from Latrobe, referencing the lapel pin controversy, challenged Obama: "I want to know if you believe in the American flag." Then Stephanopoulos asked about his a.s.sociation with William Ayers, a former member of the Weather Underground (a group that had bombed the Pentagon and the Capitol in the early seventies), who lived in Obama's neighborhood in Chicago and with whom he was said to be friendly.

Obama looked weary and defeated, as if he'd been beaten with a stick. He soldiered through his answers, calling the flag pin matter a "manufactured issue" and saying that inferring anything from his acquaintance with Ayers, "who engaged in detestable acts forty years ago, when I was eight years old . . . doesn't make much sense."

Hillary seemed to know a lot about Obama's ties to the erstwhile Weatherman; she noted in her reb.u.t.tal that the two men had served on a board together, citing dates and other details. Clinton's staff was surprised; Ayers hadn't been part of her prep. But Hillary had a number of friends-among them Sid Blumenthal, whose nickname was "Gra.s.sy Knoll"-regularly feeding her on the sly negative tidbits of dubious veracity about Obama. (In getting ready for that night, Hillary casually mentioned to her aides that she'd heard that Obama's mother was a communist.) Her advisers tried to prevent her from spouting such stuff in the debates. But every so often, she slipped something in.

After the face-off, Clinton was tickled pink over seeing Obama slammed so hard and on such earthy matters. Kibitzing in a hallway offstage, she told her aides, "I need you all to think about the best closing argument, what ads to go with, especially now with all this new material."

No brilliant closing argument would be required. Between "bitter/ cling" and Hillary's resurgence on the trail, where her fighter's stance grew even more p.r.o.nounced and effective, Clinton had Pennsylvania in her pocket. Six days later, she trotted to victory.

Obama took no comfort from the fact that the suits had told him all along he was foreordained to lose Pennsylvania. Hillary had killed him again among white voters, 63 to 37-and beaten him among every ideological cohort except the self-described "very liberal." More loudly than before, pundits were saying that Obama couldn't close the deal. Some were even starting to compare him to McGovern and Dukakis.

Obama flew out of Pennsylvania and scheduled a meeting with his team at his house for the next night. Enough is enough Enough is enough, he thought. The time for change had come.

AROUND FOUR O'CLOCK ON April 23, a few hours before the rest of his brain trust would arrive, Barack and Mich.e.l.le met with Jarrett and Rouse to get their read on the situation.

"I gotta tell you," Rouse said, "I'm a little uncomfortable having this conversation without Axe and Gibbs and Plouffe here."

"I don't know why," cracked Obama. "I talk to them all the time without you there."

It had been nine months since the Edley meeting spurred Obama to draw Rouse and Jarrett deeper into the campaign fold. Since then, he'd often expressed a desire to broaden the circle further, get more voices in the room, especially more female voices. But the suits would slow-walk him, and Obama wouldn't push it. As long as things were going fine, he was happy deferring to them, didn't mind the narrow pipeline. When things went badly, though, Obama would start making noise again-and things were certainly not tip-top now.

Rouse was all for more voices, but he saw a greater imperative. "You need to take more ownership of this campaign," he told Obama. You've got a great team here, you've got confidence in them, they've got your best interests at heart. But what it feels like to me is that they say, Here's our schedule for the week, here's our theme-and off you go. I think you're the best political mind we've got. You ought to be more engaged.

At seven, the rest of the brain trust arrived in Hyde Park. Attending by phone was Anita Dunn. Everyone could see from Obama's body language that he was tense. Instead of sitting back, relaxed, with his legs crossed as usual, he was hunched over his dining room table, his hands curled into fists, the trademark twinkle absent from his eyes.

Look, Obama said, I have not been my best the last two months. The "bitter" thing was a huge gaffe. I didn't perform well at the debate. My pastor was a big problem. But let's be honest, you guys haven't been your best, either. We're not going to lose the nomination. We've come too far. But we have a bunch of challenging states in front of us, and I don't want to limp across the finish line. I want to finish strong.

For the next five hours, Obama and his team chewed over what was wrong and how to fix it. Obama listened to everyone's ideas-and then told them how it was going to be. From then on, he said, the campaign would have a nightly conference call to run down what had happened that day and strategize about the next. The entire senior staff would be on the call. And Dunn, not Axelrod, would run it. Obama knew that many of his aides felt locked out of the loop by the suits, and were reluctant to disagree with them. He wanted that to end. He also wanted a nightly a.s.sessment of how they had fared in each twenty-four-hour news cycle. "We need to win every day," he said.

Before then, Obama had been fairly detached from the granular details of the daily back-and-forth-now he insisted on being up to his eyeb.a.l.l.s in them. He wanted to know which surrogates were going to be on television. To see talking points and message plans. To be consulted on paid media decisions. To prescreen every ad before it aired.

Then there was the matter of Mich.e.l.le. Since Ohio and Texas, her circ.u.mstances had only grown more trying. "Proud of my country" had turned her into something of a target; even John McCain's wife, Cindy, had taken a shot at her. ("I don't know about you, if you heard those words earlier," she said. "I am very very proud of my country.") Mich.e.l.le worried that she was hurting Barack's prospects, thought the campaign wasn't protecting her sufficiently, that it hadn't devised a real strategy for her. proud of my country.") Mich.e.l.le worried that she was hurting Barack's prospects, thought the campaign wasn't protecting her sufficiently, that it hadn't devised a real strategy for her.

That, too, was going to end, Obama said. He wanted to see a plan for Mich.e.l.le. And not just some ideas vomited verbally; he wanted to see paper.

How long all these changes would remain in place was unclear. "I may not need this forever," Obama said. But it was how they would be doing business at least through the next two contests-the primaries in Indiana and North Carolina on May 6.

Obama believed that winning them both would force Clinton from the race. North Carolina, with its large black vote and high concentrations of college students and knowledge workers, promised to be relatively easy. But Indiana would be a bear. Obama decreed that they would go b.a.l.l.s out to win the Hoosier State. Mich.e.l.le would do whatever the campaign planned for her. Their daughters would even hit the trail with them for the final weekend.

We're all d.a.m.n tired, Obama said. But we all need to get off our a.s.ses and end this thing, all right?

A fine plan, for sure-but there was a small wrinkle. The Jeremiah Wright comeback tour was about to begin.

OBAMA HAD TRIED TO call Wright before his race speech, but failed to reach him; the reverend had just retired from the church and set off on a ten-day cruise. Obama was aware that Wright was angry about what had happened around the announcement in Springfield and disgruntled over the candidate's words in Philadelphia. Somehow Obama needed to break through all the acrimony and misunderstanding.

The two men arranged a secret meeting at the reverend's Chicago home. Obama explained that he hadn't intended to criticize Wright in his race speech-far from it. Disowning him would have been the expedient play, but Obama had resisted. He had tried to place Wright in historical context, tried to help others understand where he was coming from. Obama treated Wright as an old friend, a former mentor. He tried to raise his consciousness about the magnitude of what Wright was jeopardizing: Obama's run for the presidency represented something far greater than either of them individually. But Wright didn't seem either persuaded or placated.

He listened to me, heard me out, Obama told Jarrett afterward. I had a chance to express my concerns. We'll see.

That Friday night, in an interview with Bill Moyers on PBS, Wright spoke softly as he defended himself and argued that the clips of his sermons had been deployed to paint a caricature of him. "I felt it was unfair," he said. "I felt it was unjust. I felt it was untrue. I felt those who were doing that were doing it for some very devious reasons." Moyers asked Wright about his reaction to Obama's race speech. "I do what I do; he does what politicians do," Wright said. "So that what happened in Philadelphia where he had to respond to the sound bites, he responded as a politician."

Most of Obama's advisers heaved a sigh of relief at the PBS interview-but Jarrett did not. She knew immediately that Wright's impugning of Obama's motives would wound her friend. And she was right.

"How could he say that about me?" Obama asked Jarrett. "He knows that's not true. He knows I wasn't being a politician."

Personally painful as the Moyers interview may have been for Obama, it was Wright's appearance at the National Press Club on the morning of April 28, three days later, that was politically imperiling. Posing and preening, pontificating, apostrophizing, and mugging for the cameras, Wright declined to retract his "chickens coming home to roost" comments about America's complicity in 9/11. Asked about AIDS, he brought up the Tuskegee experiment and said, "Based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything." Asked about Louis Farrakhan, he said, "He is one of the most important voices in the twentieth and twenty-first century." Asked about Obama, he repeated and sharpened his attacks on his parishioner as a typical politician, and then added that he'd told Obama, "If you get elected, November the fifth, I'm coming after you, because you'll be representing a government whose policies grind under people."

Campaigning in North Carolina, Obama hadn't watched the performance live, but Jarrett, by phone, told him it was bad. Very bad. On the tarmac in Wilmington, Obama, under pressure from reporters to offer a reaction, could summon only a wan rebuke for an offense he had not seen. "He does not speak for me," Obama said. "He does not speak for the campaign."

Later, on the campaign's new nightly conference call, his advisers paraphrased for him what Wright had said. But Jarrett urged him, "You've got to watch this for yourself. You have to look at him."

When Obama did, late that evening in his hotel room, he was stunned. The first Wright eruption had filled him with sadness at the sight of his pastor self-destructing. But the sequel made him angry and indignant. With his race speech, Obama had declined to throw Wright under the bus. Now Wright appeared to be h.e.l.l-bent on tossing Obama in front of a runaway train.

A press conference was arranged to follow a town hall meeting in Winston-Salem the next morning. A few minutes before Obama would walk out and face the waiting reporters, Gibbs found his boss in a men's room in a recess of the Joel Coliseum Annex, standing over the sink washing his hands, lost in thought.

Gibbs had traveled thousands of miles with Obama, seen him in almost every conceivable situation. Moments of stress. Moments of dolor. Moments of steely fury. But he had never encountered Obama in a moment of profound self-doubt. Even at the lowest moments of the campaign, nothing had shaken Obama's conviction that the country would see him in the way he wanted it to see him. See him as he saw himself. See him as he was. But Wright had stolen that certainty from Obama. His public image was up for grabs, along with the nomination.

"Do people really believe that I think that way?" Obama said softly. "Do people really believe that his views are my views? Why would people think that?"

Gibbs tried to rea.s.sure Obama, urged him to go out and say simply and forcefully that he found Wright offensive. Gibbs had no doubt what was at stake. The entire Obama enterprise had been based on the premise that Barack could transcend racial stereotypes, if not race itself. Now Wright-a stereotype of a stereotype-threatened to torpedo that underpinning. It was, both men agreed, the moment of maximum peril in the campaign. Obama touched Gibbs on the arm and said, "I know what I gotta do."

"The person that I saw yesterday was not the person that I met twenty years ago," he declared before the cameras. "His comments were not only divisive and destructive, but I believe that they end up giving comfort to those who prey on hate and I believe that they do not portray accurately the perspective of the black church. They certainly don't portray accurately my values and beliefs. And if Reverend Wright thinks that that's political posturing, as he put it, then he doesn't know me very well."

The next six days were brutal for Obama. His poll numbers took a hit in North Carolina and plummeted in Indiana, where the campaign now feared getting clobbered. He was campaigning harder than he ever had before. But Clinton was working just as hard, and was in a groove. At high school gyms, train depots, and fire stations, she turned in performances that were sharp, energetic, and laced through with antic, even madcap, populism-vowing to "go right at OPEC" over high gas prices, attacking Wall Street "money brokers" for their role in causing the recession. Her staff was bedraggled, shriveled; Hillary fairly glowed. "She's finally having fun," said one of her aides.

Obama was having no fun at all. He was consumed by visions of doom. First Texas and Ohio. Then Pennsylvania. Then Wright. Now the possibility of a drubbing in Indiana. Would the superdelegates start to think Obama was mortally wounded? That Clinton was correct that he was unelectable? Maybe we're not going to survive Maybe we're not going to survive, he thought.

On the night before the May 6 primaries, Obama was in Indianapolis for a ma.s.sive get-out-the-vote rally that included entertainment by Stevie Wonder. Twenty-one thousand people were there. Rain bucketed down from the skies all over them.

Jarrett, Nesbitt, and Whitaker had come from Chicago to lend Obama moral support. He needed it, Valerie thought. Her friend seemed despondent.

"I can't wait to call you Mr. President," Jarrett said, trying to buck him up after the rain-soaked rally.

"I don't know if I'm going to call you that, man," Nesbitt chimed in. "You're going to always just be Barack to me."

Obama laughed a little.

"Look, man," Nesbitt went on. "There's nothing you can do about Reverend Wright. He's a suicide politician. He had a plastic explosive strapped to his vest and he said, 'I'm blowing up everybody!'"

All of them started cracking up, mirthful tears streaming down their faces-until Axelrod walked in wearing an even more mournful expression than usual.

Bad news, he said. The polls don't look good. We're down twelve in Indiana, and it's tight in North Carolina.

"Get Axelrod out of here," Obama said, instantly deflating. "He's a downer."

A downer, and also wrong, it turned out-with enormous implications. The next day, Obama won North Carolina by a whopping fifteen points. And while Clinton carried Indiana, it was only by the barest of margins, a single percentage point.

From a stage in Indianapolis, Hillary made a halfhearted attempt to declare herself the victor of the night. "Not too long ago, my opponent made a prediction," Clinton intoned. "He said I would probably win Pennsylvania, he would win North Carolina, and Indiana would be the tie breaker. Well, tonight we've come from behind, we've broken the tie, and thanks to you, it's full speed on to the White House."

Not a soul believed her. Though Obama had failed to defeat Clinton in Indiana, he'd achieved several greater triumphs. He had beaten expectations. He had rea.s.sured the party that he wasn't irreparably damaged goods. And, not least, he had overcome his real nemesis-not Hillary Clinton, but Jeremiah Wright. Around midnight, Tim Russert appeared on MSNBC and summed up the meaning of Obama's trifecta unequivocally, with a single sentence that caused one set of hearts to flutter and another to stop beating: "We now know who the Democratic nominee is going to be and no one is going to dispute it."

Chapter Fourteen.