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It was the fall of 2007 — only a few months before the presidential primaries would begin — and Barack Obama’s campaign wasn’t looking good.

He was trailing Hillary Clinton by about 25 percentage points, polls showed. “There are some real questions about electability,” one pollster said of him. He was even losing to Clinton among African-American voters — “one more indication of just how steep a climb remains for his campaign to overtake Clinton,” Politico wrote.

“His senior aides said they were now spending much of their days fielding calls from concerned donors and other supporters,” The Times reported. Those supporters were expressing “mounting alarm” about “his lack of assertiveness.”