Obama maintained focus

During the hot Chicago summer, with polling data showing his campaign lagging and the national media fixated on an "inevitable nominee," advisers to Barack Obama divided into warring factions.

Angry that their candidate was nearly 30 points behind Hillary Rodham Clinton in national polling, some supporters worried the fundraising would soon follow. Some wanted a confrontational strategy drawing sharp contrasts with the front-runner. Still others wanted the candidate to take a mini-vacation and rest up for the final months of battle.

But Obama and his inner circle decided to stay focused on their original battle plan: lay the groundwork in the early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, push an aggressive message for change but one of unity and not harsh rhetorical attacks, according to interviews with advisers, fundraisers and supporters.

"The natural reminder here is O.J. [Simpson] - how does an African American candidate attack a white woman?" said Representative Jesse L. Jackson Jr., Democrat-Illinois, a fellow Chicagoan whose father ran twice for president in the 1980s but was never as close as Obama is now to securing the Democratic nomination.

With a win in the Iowa caucuses Thursday night, Obama shook conventional wisdom to its political core, preaching "post-partisan" comity and becoming the first African American candidate in either party to win the first-in-the-nation balloting. Obama went into a state of 3 million people, just 2.5 per cent of whom are black, and cleaned up, topping Clinton and former vice presidential nominee John Edwards by more than eight percentage points.

"A young, 46-year-old black man, with a black family, before an all-white crowd, hailing his victory - that's a remarkable image," said Representative Artur Davis, Democrat-Alabama, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus and an Obama supporter.

To be sure, Clinton has the organisational and financial strength to come back and beat Obama.

Beating what many considered as the Clinton machine was never assumed in the Obama camp. How, they asked, were they to promote a black candidate with little political experience against the most recognisable female politician?

No outright attacks

During "somewhat contentious" talks in the summer, some Obama advisers argued that they should hit Clinton with strong contrasts, according to Jackson, who was in the camp advising that such a strategy could cause a backlash in Iowa. Instead, the candidate ignored the national polls while his campaign built an infrastructure of staffers and foot soldiers inside Iowa that outnumbered the opposition. Obama did take some jabs at Clinton, over foreign policy and her waffling on such issues as Iran, Social Security and driver's licenses for illegal immigration. But the Obama camp avoided outright attacks over the airwaves, like those that dominated the closing weeks of the Republican campaign.

For the young, talented African Americans who have stayed close to Obama since Harvard Law School, the senator's success is not all that surprising. They say they always believed he would be propelled to great heights. But even as they watched him become the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, even as they raised money for his political runs in Illinois, they did not imagine him on a presidential stage.

But in November 2006, when the freshmen senator convened his closest confidants to plot out a White House run, they saw in Hillary the most formidable Democratic political machine in memory.

His speech in 2004 at the Democratic National Convention in Boston had propelled Obama to the national political stage. But Nicole Lamb-Hale, another law school contemporary, remembered trying to maintain the blistering fundraising pace last summer in the face of what seemed like a Clinton juggernaut. Lamb-Hale, now a lawyer in Detroit, begged potential donors not to look at national polls, which seemed to show Clinton with an impregnable lead. The polls in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina were much closer, she said, over and over again.

Obama, however, always had a secret strength, what former Senate majority leader Thomas Daschle, Democrat-S.D., called a "new fundraising entourage". The outsider from the streets of Chicago had the muscle of a member of the Harvard elite. Harvard Law School brought him allies not only in the world of law but in the highest echelons of Wall Street and major US corporations.

"It's a powerful network. You send an email, you usually get a response," Lamb-Hale said.