Inside Obama’s Dream Machine

Pretty mild stuff by recent political standards. But no matter what, he said, he would not demonize her. It would undermine the rationale for his whole campaign. "Barack looked around the room and said, 'That's not the way I want to win'," recalls Eric Holder Jr., deputy attorney general under Bill Clinton, who was present at the dinner. " 'We're not going to get personal. We're not going to kneecap anybody'." The room went silent. "It felt like time slowed down," Holder says. (Asked by NEWSWEEK how he'd recognize the threshold between "sharpening distinctions" and out-and-out attacks, Obama harked back to a noted Supreme Court case. "I think it was Justice [Potter] Stewart during an obscenity case, when they asked him what obscenity is, he said, 'I know it when I see it.' I know where I think you cross the line into the dark side of politics.")

Now Obama looks back on that period with wry humor. At an event last week in Coralville, Iowa, he described a favorite editorial cartoon that had appeared at the time. It depicted him smiling and hugging Hillary. The caption read: OBAMA ATTACKS CLINTON. "Folks were writing us off," he said. "They said, 'He's got to go negative. He can't keep on this positive campaign. If he wants to catch up, he's got to kneecap the front runner, do a Tonya Harding on her.' That's what they said … 'He's too nice. He can't win.' But you know what? We didn't change course. We kept on running a positive campaign. We pointed out our differences, but we rejected the slash-and-burn tactics that Washington is so accustomed to."

In the final three days in Iowa, Obama operatives made 150,000 phone calls to potential supporters. The campaign gave canvassers strict printed instructions telling them how to engage with voters as they went door to door drumming up support. "While canvassing for the campaign, you are acting as a representative of Senator Obama," the sheet read. "It's absolutely imperative that at all times we remain respectful, polite and overly nice to the people we encounter." Obama's Iowa staff painted a motto on the wall of the state's campaign headquarters. It sounded like something more suited to the side of a small-town police car: RESPECT, EMPOWER, INCLUDE.

Obama's reluctance to go negative dates back to his earliest forays into politics. Running for president of the Harvard Law Review, he won the support of conservative students in part by opting out of the culture wars on issues such as affirmative action in the early 1990s. Obama rewarded them for their support by appointing some conservatives to the review's masthead. As a state senator in Illinois, he made friends with GOP lawmakers and worked with them to reform the state's deeply flawed death-penalty system.

This approach does not endear him to some Democrats who, furious at George W. Bush, came to the '08 campaign hoping for a fight. For a more direct, unvarnished approach to politics, they need look no further than Obama's wife. Michelle has thrown herself into the cause and the competition. Where Obama emphasizes hope and self-belief in his stump speech, Michelle Obama throws down a challenge to voters to step up. While Obama rarely references his own racial identity or his personal struggles, Michelle draws a direct link between his experience in overcoming prejudice to his readiness for power. "On the day that he's inaugurated, [he] is going to send a different message to kids like me, thousands of kids like me who were told, 'No, no, wait. You're not ready, you're not good enough'," she told one crowd in Waterloo, Iowa, last week. "See, I'm not supposed to be here. As a black girl from the South Side of Chicago, I wasn't supposed to go to Princeton because they said my test scores were too low. They said maybe I couldn't handle Harvard because I wasn't ready. I don't even know why. But see, every time I pushed past other people's doubts and limitations, [when] Barack and I … earned the seat at the table that other people felt entitled to, the only thing we realized was that we were always more ready, more prepared than we ever imagined."

Still, after speeches, voters sometimes approach Michelle to express fear that Obama may not be able to win or could put himself in harm's way. Obama received Secret Service protection early in the campaign after unspecified threats. It is not a subject his wife likes to talk about. "She doesn't allow herself to go there," says Valerie Jarrett, Michelle Obama's close friend, who says Michelle has not raised the subject with her. "It would paralyze her to think like that." Michelle's brother, Craig Robinson, who is the head basketball coach at Brown University, says the potential danger was one of the things he discussed with her when Obama began his campaign. "That's always in the back of everybody's mind," he told NEWSWEEK. "There are a lot of crazy people out there. But you can't live your life worrying about them."