Center Stage

Holder, a former deputy U.S. attorney general in the Clinton administration and an old Washington hand, was struck by Obama's half-open, half-inscrutable manner during the nearly eight hours of meetings they spent together going over potential veeps. Obama was diligent, bringing up small morsels of information hidden in the fat briefing books, and he acted like a law professor who calls on reluctant pupils ("I haven't heard from you," he'd say to anyone around the table who had been silent too long). A lot of politicians pretend to be inclusive; Obama actually was. But "at the end, you didn't know where he stood. When you got down to the final judgment, I had a sense, but I didn't have any kind of certainty." Holder thought Obama was being shrewd to not signal his intentions too clearly—since "people want to say what the boss wants to hear, and if they don't know, you'll get more honest advice."

At the democratic convention in Denver, there were no unpleasant surprises. Both Clintons gave stellar speeches that stirred the base, the true believers in the hall and millions of Democrats watching on TV. (It did not go unnoticed in Obamaland that Hillary, toward the end of the convention, reportedly assembled her closest advisers in a hotel room to discuss her prospects for 2012.) Well aware that she would be watched in some living rooms with a coldly critical eye, Michelle Obama made sure that her speech was finished a month early and memorized it. Lest there be any doubt, in the speech she distinctly declared how much she loved her country. On opening night, she was visibly nervous before the cameras, but nonetheless elegant and beautiful. Michelle and her two precocious girls engaged in some stagy but cute banter by video with Barack, who had been planted in the living room of a white middle-class family in the Midwest to watch her speech. Obama pulled his usual all-nighters to draft his Thursday-night address. He was finally rehearsing the most important speech of his life with a teleprompter in his suite at the Hyatt when there was a knock on the door. The candidate stopped the speech to go to the door. It was room service. "All right," Obama said. "Who ordered the salad?" Axelrod sheepishly raised his finger and everyone laughed.

A few hours later, at 7:30 p.m., Obama walked slowly down a curtained hallway, dark and claustrophobic, to a small waiting area behind the stage. (The night before, Axelrod had ordered the setting toned down a little more—fewer lights, more American flags.) Obama paced in a slow circle, hand on chin, eyes downcast. He stopped, folded his arms, turned to face the stage for a few moments, then strode out, the roar of 80,000 people crashing around him.

His speech was solid, workmanlike, inspirational at moments—but not nearly as rousing as his stump speech in the primaries. Through much of the speech, Obama looked like just another Democratic presidential candidate reading from a list of promises. Obama was accepting the nomination of his party on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall. Standing before the fake pillars on the Invesco Field stage, Obama briefly referred to "a young preacher from Georgia," but he did not mention King by name. Whether he was merely being poetic or avoiding using a name that still polarizes some white working-class voters, his advisers would not say.

But his closest aides were profoundly moved, perhaps less by the speech than by the distance they had come. Axelrod, who stood, crying, through the entire speech, appeared drained, all done in by the long march to this history-making night. Plouffe, the stoical campaign manager, looked nearly as wound tight as ever, but he confessed, "I cried. I was just shaking my head. You think back to all you've seen over 18, 19 months, and it's just hard to describe. Now we have nine and a half weeks to make it a reality."

Obama's chief of staff, Jim Messina, had slept only a few hours when his cell phone rang. It was still dark on the morning of Aug. 29. Messina and a few other staffers had gone to a bar to carouse after Obama's speech.

"Get your ass up," said the voice on the other end. "They picked Palin."

Messina could not mistake Plouffe's flat, no-nonsense voice, but he was still groggy. "F––– you," he said. "Why are you waking me up? Stop teasing me." "I'm serious," said Plouffe. "Get up and get your team together." Messina stumbled out of bed, thinking that Republicans must really be panicking, that they would never pick someone like Sarah Palin unless they were desperate.

Obama's plane was taking off from Denver airport around 9 a.m. when Axelrod got confirmation that McCain had indeed picked Palin as his running mate. He went to the front cabin to tell Obama and his new running mate, Joe Biden. Biden asked, "Who's Palin?"

McCain had initially wanted Joe Lieberman. The two senators were fellow romantics, deeply imbued with a sense of righteousness and honor. In mid-August, when NEWSWEEK's editor Jon Meacham was interviewing McCain aboard the campaign plane, the discussion turned to "The Winds of War," Herman Wouk's mega-bestseller about World War II. The main character, a naval commander named Pug Henry, was a favorite of McCain's. As it turned out, Lieberman—sitting just across the aisle and listening in on the NEWSWEEK interview—was a friend of Herman Wouk. "Let's go see Herman!" Lieberman piped up. "Yes!" exclaimed McCain. The two began planning a road trip out to Wouk's California home. "We can shake the money tree," McCain cackled (Wouk lives among the wealthy in Palm Springs, Calif.). McCain loved to travel with Lieberman, a fellow maverick who had stood fast on Iraq, nearly at the cost of his Senate seat in liberal Connecticut. McCain's other traveling buddy, Lindsey Graham, urged McCain to pick Lieberman, still a nominal Democrat, as a way to show that McCain put country over party label—and as a way to answer the Democrats' choice of the first African-American presidential nominee. "We've got to match history with history," Graham declared.

But when McCain brought up Lieberman's name at a secret high-level meeting held in Sedona, Ariz., to consider veep choices on Sunday, Aug. 24, his top aides balked. They warned that McCain's support among evangelicals was already soft. Lieberman was pro-choice on abortion, and a pro-choice pick would deeply antagonize the religious right, maybe even provoke a floor fight at the convention. Pollster Bill McInturff told the group that a pro-choice running mate had the potential to cause a 20-point drop in support among McCain's core voters. A small uptick in independent voters or crossover Democrats wouldn't begin to make up the difference. It would be very difficult for McCain to heal the party in the two short months before Election Day.

Lieberman was put on ice. So was former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge, another McCain favorite who was also pro-choice. On the shortlist, that left Tim Pawlenty, the governor of Minnesota; Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts; and a dark horse—the governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin. Romney made a certain sense; the country was heading into dark economic times and Romney, a former businessman, could compensate for McCain's self-professed lack of economic knowledge. But McCain viscerally disliked Romney during the primaries—and he owned too many houses (three, which meant that between them McCain and Romney would own 10). Pawlenty, the popular governor of a swing state the Republicans badly needed to win in November, was the safe choice. Salter especially liked Pawlenty's salt-of-the-earth qualities.

But McCain didn't want the safe choice. A top adviser would later recall that telling McCain that Pawlenty was "safe" was "like guaranteeing" that McCain would not pick him. Prodded by Schmidt and Rick Davis, McCain began asking about Palin, a first-term governor who had shaken up the Alaska political establishment by taking on her own party elders, who was fearless and defiant, who was … a little bit like McCain. He had called her that Sunday morning while she was attending the Alaska State Fair. It was a quick phone call, only about five minutes, and Palin had trouble hearing McCain over the noisy crowd. But McCain was intrigued. He told Salter and Schmidt to fly her down to Arizona and take a close look.