The Road To The White House: First Steps

When 60 Minutes went to Illinois nearly two years ago to do a story on a young, charismatic senator named Barack Obama, it wasn't because we thought he was going to be elected the 44th President of the United States.

Nobody thought that, but he was becoming a political phenomenon and there had never been a presidential candidate quite like him - his last name rhymed with Osama, his middle name was Hussein; racially he was half white and half black, and politically he was green.

It would have been easy to dismiss him if it were not for the fact that he was running second in the polls behind Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination. 60 Minutes and correspondent Steve Kroft wanted to find out what all the fuss was about.

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"Three years ago, you were a state legislator here in Springfield. What makes you think that you're qualified to be President of the United States?" Kroft asked.

"You know, I think we're in a moment of history where probably the most important thing we need to do is to bring the country together, and one of the skills that I bring to bear is being able to pull together the different strands of American life and focus on what we have in common," Obama replied.

The senator told Kroft he didn't have any doubts that he was ready. Asked where he got all this confidence, Obama joked, "My wife asks me that all the time."

As he gave 60 Minutes a tour of the historic building where Abraham Lincoln served in the legislature and delivered the "house divided" speech, there was much for Obama to be confident about. At age 45, he was one of only three black senators since reconstruction, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago, and the author of two best-selling books.

He was just audacious enough to invite comparisons to one of the few American presidents, who was elected with even less political experience than he had. "He grew into the presidency in ways that I think no body would have anticipated," Sen. Obama told Kroft, remarking on a Lincoln campaign banner that hangs in the building.

60 Minutes had first met him the week before at the winter meeting of the Democratic National Committee in Washington. It was in the parlance of politicos, a "cattle call," an opportunity for all ten Democratic presidential hopefuls to make their pitch to the movers and shakers.

Obama's reception was warm - what you might expect for a rising young star. But it was a tough room. Most of those in attendance were already committed to Senator Hillary Clinton or John Edwards, and Obama's candidacy was not yet taken seriously, at least by the party establishment.

But it was a much different story later that afternoon on the campus of George Mason University in the Virginia suburbs, where Obama held his first campaign rally, just two weeks after establishing an exploratory presidential committee.

It was our first exposure to what came to be called "Obamamania." You sensed immediately that something unusual was going on, something rarely seen in American politics.

Some 5,000 students had turned out to see him, flooding the floor of the Johnson Center and ringing the floors above. He opposed the Iraq war from the onset, and encouraged his young audience to cast aside their cynicism of politics and engage the system, evoking the words of Martin Luther King.

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. It bends towards justice. But here's the thing, young people - it doesn't bend on its own," he told the students.

He had yet to declare his candidacy, but he was already the biggest political celebrity in America. Propelled by the media hunger for a fresh face and a good story, he had graced the covers of Time and Newsweek, been endorsed by Oprah, and the campaign itself seemed to morph out of his latest book tour.

As he left the stage at George Mason University and made his way out of the building, he was mobbed by a crush of people, protected only by campus security.

It was not a problem he encountered in the U.S. Senate, where as the junior senator from Illinois he was 88th on the list of seniority - a political neophyte in a body where patience is prized. Frustrated by the ways of Washington, and concerned about being co-opted or compromised, he decided that this was his moment to make a move.

"I wanna read you a quote from The St. Petersburg Times: 'Obama needs more than one Senate term to qualify for the presidency of the United States. The world is too complex and dangerous for this likeable, charismatic, African-American neophyte to practice on-the-job training,'" Kroft read. "Why are you in such a hurry?"

"You know, the truth is I'm not," Obama replied, laughing. "We have a narrow window to solve some of the problems that we face. Ten years from now, we may not be in a position to recover the sense of respect around the world that we've lost over the last six years. Certainly, when you look at our energy policy and environment and the prospects of climate change, we've gotta make some decisions right now. And so I feel a sense of urgency for the country."

There were all sorts of things that mitigated his chances for success, not the least of which was race. His father was a black man from Kenya, his mother a white woman from Kansas, and he spent his formative years living with his maternal grandparents in Hawaii. As a black child in a white family, he struggled with his racial identity.

"If you look African-American in this society, you're treated as an African-American. And when you're a child in particular, that is how you begin to identify yourself," Obama told Kroft.

Asked how important race is in defining himself, the senator said, "I am rooted in the African-American community. But I'm not defined by it. I am comfortable in my racial identity. But that's not all I am."

Obama told Kroft he thought the country was ready for a black president, and that race was not going to hold him back. "I think if I don't win this race, it will be because of other factors. It's gonna be because I have not shown to the American people a vision for where the country needs to go that they can embrace."

A few days later, 60 Minutes and Obama were driving around the South Side of Chicago, where that vision had begun to take shape. After graduating from Columbia University, Obama took a job working as a community organizer for $13,000 a year.

It was Obama's first real interface with politics and government, and helped convince him that change comes from the bottom up by mobilizing grass roots support, one of the tenets of his campaign. But support was slow in coming from the African-American community, where some dismissed him as the son of an immigrant, not a descendant of slaves.

"There are African-Americans who don't think that you're black enough, who don't think that you have had the required experience," Kroft pointed out.

"The truth of the matter is, you know, when I'm walking down the South Side of Chicago and visiting my barbershop, and playing basketball in some of these neighborhoods, those aren't questions I get asked," Obama replied.

"They think you're black," Kroft remarked, laughing.

"As far as they can tell, yeah. I also notice when I'm catching a cab, nobody's confused about that either," Obama said.

He would make lasting political friendships in Chicago that would help him later in his career, but after three years as a community organizer, Obama enrolled at Harvard Law School. And through a summer program with a Chicago law firm, he met Michelle Robinson, another Harvard Law School grad who was assigned to look after him.

Michelle Obama said she was his mentor. "I was his boss," she laughed. "No. I was a first year associate at Sidley and Austin and he was a first year summer associate," she recalled.

She told Kroft it wasn't love at first sight. "It was interest at first sight, because I had this preconceived notion about who this guy was gonna be, because, you know, I had read his biography. But, then he came in that first day and he was cuter than he looked on his picture, so I was impressed. And we went to lunch and we actually had a good conversation. He was interesting. He was self-deprecating. He was funny, and his background was just amazing."

"And when… how long did it take to become something more than that?" Kroft asked.

"Well, I was persistent. So, I asked her out and she said 'No,'" Barack Obama recalled. "She was taking this whole advisory thing too seriously. Eventually, she gave in. I took her to Baskin Robbins for ice cream - that sealed the deal."

When they first got married 16 years ago, they lived at her parents' home on Chicago's South Side. "Right here is my mother-in-laws' house, the house that Michelle grew up in. And we lived on the second floor before we could afford our own apartment," Obama told Kroft, pointing out the home. "I studied the bar [exam] up in that little alcove right up there, and so my mother-in-law still lives here. This is the favorite place to hang out for my two daughters. The still love coming here where they know they can get away with anything."

The Obamas now live in a house on the edge of the University of Chicago campus, where Michelle was an executive with the university's hospitals. Their two girls, Sasha and Malia, were five and eight and they were the ones who let us in when we rang the door bell.

The two girls were interested in their father's campaign only to the extent that it influenced their campaign to get a dog. "Their only memory of the White House when they made the tour was President Bush's dog, so that was their main focus - was the possibility if…," Obama explained.

"This is our 'in' to get a dog," Michelle Obama added. "'Good. Really. You run for president. But, if we get a dog, we don't care what you do.'"

When it came to politics, Michelle Obama has always been the harder sell. Asked if it had put strain on their marriage from time to time, she told Kroft sarcastically, "Oh-nooooo."

"Absolutely it has," the senator acknowledged.

But she said she let him go ahead with his political ambitions. "I think if I weren't married to him, I'd want him to be in there. So, I don't wanna stand in the way of that, because we have to work out a few things. So, we've had a few arguments, and…."

"And, I've lost them all," Barack Obama interrupted.

"Well, we were with him at George Mason and it was like a rock concert. I mean, people were mobbing him. Do you understand this charisma thing?" Kroft asked.

"Well, yeah. I do. I do. I'm not moved in that way," Michelle Obama replied, laughing.

"You were saying the other day, but you have your husband. …And, then there's this character…Barack Obama," the senator said.

"That's how the kids see it," Michelle Obama said, mimicking them, "There's Barack Obama."

"And he's interesting….Yeah." "You might vote for him," the senator joked.

"I would vote for him," Michelle Obama said. "I want him to run for office."

Asked if her husband was competitive, Mrs. Obama told Kroft, "Oh, yeah. No, no he doesn't like to lose. Yeah. No, he's a competitor. He's an athlete. You know. Even playing a pickup game, even playing Scrabble. I mean, he likes to win."

"This is a tough question to ask, but a number of years ago Colin Powell was thinking about running for president, and, his wife Alma really did not want him to run, because she was worried about some crazy person with a gun," Kroft said. "Has that been a factor? I mean, have you talked about that? Is that something that you think about?"

"I don't lose sleep over it, because the realities are that, you know, as a black man, you know, Barack can get shot going to the gas station, you know. So, you know, you can't make decisions based on fear and the possibility of what might happen. We just weren't raised that way." Michelle Obama replied.

The following Saturday, February 10, 2007, they journeyed to Springfield where Barack Obama formally declared his candidacy for President of the United States from the steps of the old Capitol. "I know I haven't spent a lot of time learning the ways of Washington. But I've been there long enough to know that the ways of Washington must change," he told the crowd.

It seemed like a real long shot, but 17,000 people waited hours in seven degree temperatures to witness the occasion. Obama's two year audition before for the American people had begun.

Produced by L. Franklin Devine, Michael Radutzky, Tom Anderson and Jennifer MacDonald