From our archives: Obama's road to the White House
In the lead up to Barack Obama’s inauguration eight years ago, 60 Minutes revisited correspondent Steve Kroft’s stories from the campaign trail. Kroft had been following Mr. Obama since early 2007 — when producers thought they were merely profiling a promising young politician.
“At the time, he was a very inexperienced, young junior senator who was interesting,” 60 Minutes producer Frank Devine told Overtime in 2012. “But it was Hillary’s year. Hillary, everyone just assumed, was the next candidate. And this guy probably had a very bright future — maybe was trying to position himself to be considered for Hillary’s vice president.”
That first interview took place on a frigid February Sunday in Chicago. The 60 Minutes crew was set to interview then-Senator Obama at his home, and Mr. Obama was eager to watch the Chicago Bears play in the Super Bowl later that evening. When the 60 Minutes crew arrived at his house, daughters Malia and Sasha — then ages 8 and 5 — answered the door.
“It seemed like a normal thing that a family would do,” Devine says. “When the doorbell rings, the first thing that happens is the kids run to the door and the parents are right behind them. But at the time, we were not thinking about him as being the next president of the United States.”
As seen in the video above, Kroft drove through Chicago’s South Side with the senator that afternoon, watching him point out the church basement where he first worked as a community organizer, and his mother-in-law’s home, where he and Michelle Obama lived when they were first married.
Back at the Obamas’ house, the 60 Minutes crew needed shots of a family activity, and Mr. Obama volunteered to make tuna sandwiches. The only problem? He was out of tuna. Devine says Mr. Obama left the 60 Minutes crew at home while he went to the grocery store for ingredients, which included relish — something Mr. Obama’s grandfather used when he made tuna sandwiches.
For Devine, who has produced all of Kroft’s interviews with Mr. Obama, the man making tuna sandwiches hasn’t changed much in the past decade. But there was something different about that first interview.
“I don’t think he’s changed at all in his manner in the way he deals with Steve,” Devine says. “What has changed is just the environment and sometimes, the demands on his time. You’d never get to spend days and days as Steve did with him in 2007. You wouldn’t get to spend an entire Sunday afternoon at the house making tuna fish and driving around the South Side of Chicago.”
Over the next year, Kroft and 60 Minutes followed Mr. Obama on the campaign trail, from a lackluster performance in the early debates to a stunning win in Iowa.
“I think almost everybody in the political community thought Senator Clinton was going to be the nominee,” Obama campaign manager David Plouffe says in the clip above. “And if she’d won Iowa, she would have been. But once we won Iowa, people took a second look.”
60 Minutes later spent an evening at Obama headquarters in Chicago, watching exit polls roll in on Super Tuesday — the day many had thought then-Senator Hillary Clinton would lock up the Democratic nomination. But Mr. Obama proved a formidable candidate, winning 13 states.
“I had to think about this long and hard at the beginning of this process and say, ‘Are you deluding yourself?’ Mr. Obama tells Kroft. “And I decided, you know, I might just be able to pull it off. And so a year later, it turns out that — the jury’s still out — but we seem to be stirring things up pretty good.”
Kroft was backstage at the Democratic National Convention in Denver when Mr. Obama became the first African-American presidential nominee of a political party. He spoke with Mr. Obama after the improbable nominee gave his acceptance speech.
“About a year ago, we were down 30 in Iowa,” Mr. Obama tells Kroft in the video above. “But I never doubted that it could happen.”
A few months later, Mr. Obama appeared before hundreds of thousands of people at Grant Park in Chicago as the president-elect of the United States. Just hours after Mr. Obama left the stage, Kroft spoke to the campaign advisers, asking them about the role Mr. Obama played in the campaign.
“Well, no one had a bigger role,” says Plouffe. “The great thing about our campaign was we didn’t have a lot of discussion about what our message was or what he wanted to do. From the beginning, he knew exactly what he wanted to say.”
Just as President-elect Donald Trump granted 60 Minutes his first post-election interview in November, so too did President Obama. In the clip above, Kroft interviews him alongside Mrs. Obama.
“I’m not sure if it has really sunk in,” she says. “But I remember we were watching the returns, and on one of the stations, Barack’s picture came up, and it said ‘President-elect Barack Obama.’ And I looked at him and I said, ‘You are the 44th president of the United States of America. Wow. What a country we live in.’”
