'Disciplined' finish to an uphill climb

The Texas air had a cool edge the night of March 4, 2008, as several thousand eager but anxious supporters of Sen. Barack Obama filled a square in San Antonio. They feared the news wasn't going to be good.

It wasn't.

The vote was in from Texas. And Ohio.

Sen. Hillary Clinton had easily taken the Ohio primary and won Texas, too. A stone's throw from the Alamo, Obama's back was to the wall.

The senator's task was to put a public face on a painful loss.

Victories don't reveal a candidate the way defeats do.

That night in Texas, Barack Obama, dressed in a blue suit, white shirt and red tie, sent an unmistakable message to America.

Composed and steady, he spoke of the journey still ahead.

"We were told this wasn't possible," he said. "We were told the climb was too steep."

It was feeling very steep indeed.

The path to the White House began on a bitterly cold morning in Springfield in February 2007, and ended in the wildly warm embrace of 240,000 late Tuesday night in Grant Park.

If there is a word to best describe the campaign Obama ran, it is "disciplined." As internal struggles hit the camps of Hillary Clinton and John McCain, Obama's team stayed as steady as the candidate. They were cohesive, drama-proof. Much of that credit goes to campaign manager David Plouffe, who led the organization from his office just off Michigan Avenue. The senior staff that began the campaign was still standing when it ended.

No small feat in presidential politics.

But there were stumbles along the way. A cocky overconfidence following the win in Iowa led to a defeat in the New Hampshire primary.

Obama's off-the-cuff remark to Clinton during a debate that she was "likable enough" was read as disdainful.

In San Francisco at a closed fund-raiser, there was that remark about fearful people in small-town America clinging to their religion and guns, this from a Chicago senator who favors arugula. Too elitist.

In Chicago, there was Tony Rezko, the now-indicted political insider and Bill Ayers, the former Weatherman radical who lived down the block, and Jeremiah Wright, the firebrand mentor-minister whose church the Obamas had to leave. But at each turn, the candidate seemed to learn and grow with the stumbles, setbacks and attacks.

And the discipline and consistency paid off.

Then again, a certain unexpected alignment of dark and bright stars did as well. The economy's crash eclipsed the war.

Obama's stock rose as the Dow dropped.

The great Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, Studs Terkel, who died the same week Obama's grandmother passed away, would have explained it in three words: "Hope dies last," he always insisted.

In the speech announcing his candidacy back in February 2007, Obama used the word seven times. "This campaign must be the occasion, the vehicle, of your hopes, and your dreams," Obama said to those gathered in Springfield and those listening around the country. Listening around the world.

Hope.

On college campuses students signed up to vote -- and actually did.

Hope.

In campaign offices across the country, supporters volunteered in droves.

Hope.

Campaign contributions large and small poured in, to the tune of more than 600 million unprecedented dollars.

We are all changed as a result.

A black man will sit in the White House.

A new generation will lead.

But America remains a divided nation. And massive problems plague us.

There is a war in Iraq that must be concluded. A war on terrorism that remains unfinished. An economy that hasn't yet hit bottom. And a government that hasn't gotten its arms around any of it.

In announcing his intention to run for president, Obama offered this quote from Abraham Lincoln who, too, faced a divided country: "Of strange, discordant, and even hostile elements, we gather from the four winds and formed and fought to battle through."

No less of a battle is now needed.

At the great Civil War battlefield of Gettysburg, Lincoln went to honor the dead. But he also laid the challenge before the living, imploring them to help shoulder "the great task before us."

The steadiness that so well served the senator from Chicago's South Side that night in Texas has never been needed more urgently than now as president-elect Obama embarks on the loneliest job in America.

And the world.