"Two days after his damaging defeat in Pennsylvania last month, Barack Obama gathered his wife and senior campaign staff around the dining room table of his Chicago home.

For two hours after dinner, Barack and Michelle Obama, campaign manager David Plouffe, message man David Axelrod, deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand, communications chiefs Robert Gibbs and Dan Pfeiffer, family friend and Chicago business heavyweight Valerie Jarrett, and scheduling chief Alyssa Mastromonaco hashed over the presidential campaign's history, looked at the upcoming primaries and decided how the candidate would approach the coming two weeks. Obama wanted to get away from the sniping, including his own, and get back to the approachable, hopeful campaign of last winter's long sojourn in Iowa.

"It wasn't like 'Let's have a discussion.' It was 'One, two, three, four, here's what we're going to do,' " a staffer said. "When things don't go well, he doesn't yell and scream. He's very prescriptive. Everybody understands this isn't about having a discussion. He's got 99 percent of the voting shares. There's no point in taking a vote."

Implored by some Democratic strategists to go more negative, to blow away Hillary Rodham Clinton, his rival for the Democratic nomination, in North Carolina and finish her off in Indiana, Obama instead went "more intimate, less iconic," as one aide put it. There would be picnics, small gatherings, games of P-I-G in the back yards of basketball-crazy Indiana, his wife and two daughters in tow at times, a riff at the ready about his decision from the start to avoid the negative tit-for-tat campaigns of presidential elections past.

Obama won North Carolina by a comfortable margin and enough for the campaign to crow that he is mathematically on his way to the nomination, and he was running a close race in Indiana, a state his team once considered his for the taking. At stake was his last chance to fundamentally change the story line of the Democratic race with two decisive victories that could force Clinton from the race.

By engaging Clinton in a heated debate about a summer suspension of the gasoline tax, Obama was able to shift the campaign discourse away from his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., and use a real-world argument to underscore his contention that he would not embrace expedient, ineffective solutions to the nation's problems for cheap political effect. Key endorsements and a steady trickle of superdelegate support over the past week kept up some feeling of momentum for the campaign.

"Despite what has been probably the toughest stretch of this entire campaign, with the bitter comments, with the reemergence of Reverend Wright, with the loss in Pennsylvania, the reality is Barack Obama is essentially in the same position that he was in before all that happened," Rep. Artur Davis (D-Ala.) said last night. "Obama has been through a very difficult several weeks, and he has lost a net one delegate. And that's not even counting the results of tonight."

But the schedule will not get any easier: West Virginia and Kentucky primaries over the next two Tuesdays that have the makings of Clinton blowouts; an Oregon contest whose results will be delayed as mail-in ballots are tallied, diminishing the positive effect for Obama; and finales in Puerto Rico, South Dakota and Montana next month that could push him over the top, but with hardly a resounding ratification.

"There is a danger zone here," fretted one Obama adviser on Capitol Hill.

In truth, no war plan survives contact with the enemy, and within 24 hours of that dining-room conference, Wright was on national television, his sudden return in a flurry of appearances a land mine that would explode with devastating force at the National Press Club on April 28. Obama's luxury campaign bus had just pulled out of Wilson, N.C., and was heading to Chapel Hill for one of his patented mega-rallies when the call came in on the candidate's cellphone. Ashen-faced and visibly shaken, the senator from Illinois begged apologies to Rep. G.K. Butterfield (N.C.) and retreated to the back of the bus.

Wright had gone "haywire," Axelrod was telling him. At the press club that morning, with television cameras rolling, Obama's former pastor had reprised it all: the dark hints that the government had created the AIDS virus, the warm statements of support for Nation of Islam firebrand Louis Farrakhan, the biblical prophecy "as ye sow, so shall ye reap" to explain the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

"I could feel the anxiety come on," Butterfield recalled, as the jovial mood of the afternoon slipped away.

A campaign that had stumbled out of Pennsylvania six days earlier was again thrown into crisis mode just as it was gaining momentum. That night, at Chapel Hill's genteel Carolina Inn, Obama pored over the transcripts of Wright's appearance, watched the ubiquitous replays on cable news, and jotted down the notes for an address that would come the following day -- far too late for some voters, especially in Indiana, but perhaps enough to help salvage a win in North Carolina.

Obama has tended to be detached from day-to-day campaign operations. He attended only a handful of fundraising events between Jan. 1 and Super Tuesday on Feb. 5, and few since his losses in Texas and Ohio on March 4. Cassandra Q. Butts, a law school friend and domestic policy adviser, recalled a time when she phoned him after reading ABC News's the Note, a daily political blog frequented by Washington insiders. His response: "Why are you focusing on that, Cassandra?"

"He's involved in macro things, okay?" Plouffe said before the Texas and Ohio primaries. "When we say we're going to these five states, he's not interested in whether we're going to Boise or Pocatello."

After Pennsylvania, Obama was determined to take control of the message. And he followed through -- with breakfasts in union halls, a family farm visit in Union Mills, Ind., a lunch of Subway sandwiches with the Fischers of Beech Grove, Ind. But his former pastor kept getting in his way.

Wright embodied nearly every doubt that any voter, friend or foe, had about Obama and his ability to be elected. He was the radical "other," the anti-messenger of the senator's once-dominant theme of race-blind, uplifting unity. As long as Obama carried Wright on his back, he could not return to the themes that had once propelled his campaign to a phenomenon.

Even before Wright's press club appearance, Obama had been hitting presumptive Republican nominee John McCain for his proposal to temporarily suspend the 18-cent federal gas tax. When Clinton embraced the "gas tax holiday," Obama's aides became convinced that a tailor-made issue had fallen into his lap, an issue that could change the subject.

Obama and Axelrod talked that Sunday and agreed that the gas tax holiday was the perfect vehicle to reintroduce Obama as the responsible reformer who refused to pander, even with a presidential election on the line.

By the time he took the stage at an 18,000-person rally in Chapel Hill on Monday night, he had sketched out his basic argument. "Gas tax holiday -- sounds good. I'm sure it polls well." But he added, "That's just politics of the moment, politics to get you through the next election. We need better leadership than that."

'Let Him Do the Talking'

Obama's opposition may have been high-minded, but it was risky for a candidate already struggling for working-class support. Campaign officials insist they did no polling on the issue before Obama staked out his stance, although it was tested heavily after the fact, in polls and focus groups. Campaign officials said the results from those surveys did not ring any alarms, although as Obama began adding references to his $1,000 middle-class tax cut proposal later in the week, to show voters he was offering a much better deal.

"The principle certainly preceded any polling, but the polling supported the principle," said Butts, the domestic policy adviser. "Good policy is good politics in this situation."

On Tuesday, Clinton aired her first ad that criticizes Obama for rejecting the gas tax holiday, and Obama advisers began debating an appropriate response. Jim Margolis, the campaign's media strategist, was screening some generic footage he had shot of Obama on Monday -- including the gas tax riff that he introduced in Wilmington, and polished throughout the day.

"As soon as we all heard it, we thought, 'We can't do better than that,' " Axelrod said. "Let him do the talking."

The issue ignited quickly, and primary voters were not the only Democrats paying attention. Sen. Evan Bayh, Clinton's most effective Hoosier weapon, had been leaning hard on his state's four freshman House Democrats, urging them to stay out of the race until the voters had spoken -- even though he was leading the Clinton charge. Obama aides were convinced that they would pick up the endorsement of Rep. Brad Ellsworth, a popular former sheriff from the expected Clinton stronghold around Evansville. But Ellsworth did not come through, nor did Rep. Joe Donnelly, whose Democrat-rich district stretches through the state's heartland, south from South Bend.

But Rep. Baron P. Hill, a southern Indianan from Clinton country, had been listening to the gas tax debate closely. He spoke with each of his district's 20 Democratic country chairs. He was impressed by the surge of support among students at Indiana University, a fixture of his district. Most important, he spoke repeatedly with former Indiana congressman Lee H. Hamilton, who co-chaired the Sept. 11 Commission and who is backing Obama.

Obama not only picked up Hill's endorsement, but also won Hoosier and former Democratic Party chairman Joe Andrew from Clinton's column, giving his Wright recovery a boost. Both superdelegates cited Obama's opposition to the tax holiday as a factor. Congressional leaders endorsed his position, and editorial boards hailed the Obama stance as principled and farsighted. The issue was featured prominently in a two-minute closing ad that the Obama campaign aired in North Carolina and Indiana.

Not everyone was convinced it would work. Rep. Melvin Watt (N.C.), an Obama supporter, said Monday that he was holding his breath.

Cornell Belcher, an Obama pollster who declined to give out his polling numbers, said: "The whole gas tax thing, it isn't about whether it's working in the polls."

Indeed, voters who chose a candidate in the past three days broke decisively for Clinton in Indiana, an indication that the gas tax debate may have worked against Obama in the state.

What it certainly did was change the subject from Wright and patriotism back to policy. By Sunday afternoon, the debate about Clinton's proposal had reached the kitchen tables of Indiana. Jody Coleman, a 33-year-old factory worker who lives in Elkhart, met Obama when he spent an afternoon knocking on doors in this working-class neighborhood, and the two had a long conversation about alternative energy sources. Coleman was unimpressed with Clinton's proposal. "What's it going to do for one day?" he said. "That's all it would help me."

But there were still niggling concerns, large tactical arguments and small failures of organization that were looming larger as his big lead in North Carolina polls shriveled, and Indiana, a state his campaign once thought was his to lose, began looking lost. Some consultants thought Obama took exactly the wrong message from Pennsylvania, that the problem was not that he had gone negative but that he had not gone negative enough.

Then there were the organizational issues. In Robeson County, N.C., where as much as 40 percent of the population is Lumbee Indian, Lumbee tribal leaders had been waiting for two weeks to hear Obama's position on federal recognition of the tribe.

Bill Clinton and daughter Chelsea had already been to the county before Eureka Gilkey, Obama's North Carolina campaign director, called Watt to dispatch him to the impoverished area with a promise of support. He spent Sunday jumping from church to church, but, he conceded, "it appeared [Clinton aides] were sending surrogates with more gravitas."

Obama campaign officials had hoped to take North Carolina in a romp, and be able to focus all their attention on Indiana, Watt said. Instead, they were scrambling to throw in resources at the last minute.

"There were a number of surrogates deployed as scientifically as they could at first, but when you get to the last days of a campaign, you send people wherever you can send them," Watt said. "It becomes a little bit less scientific and a little bit more haphazard."

To Obama aides and supporters, such hand-wringing makes no sense. The candidate emerged last night with his path to the nomination unaltered, and his refusal to go negative will ease the task of wooing Clinton voters into the Obama fold this summer.

"We're just going to have to make it very clear that this son of a single mom on food stamps, a guy who made a very self-conscious choice to be a community organizer for, what, $12,000 a year, is hardly an elitist," said Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.).

"You don't like to fall across the line. You want to sprint through the tape," said an Obama supporter on Capitol Hill. "But at the end of the day, a win is a win is a win."" (Jonathan Weisman, Shailagh Murray and Peter Slevin, The Washington Post, May 7, 2008)