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WASHINGTON - Fresh beat familiar. Change beat experience. And not-Hillary beat Hillary.
Maybe it took someone new like Barack Obama — age 46, a relative newcomer to Washington — to toss aside the old political calculus and take on Hillary Rodham Clinton.
In any other year, it might have been political suicide. This year was different.
Tired of war and the ways of Washington, voters wanted change. Change? Obama offered nothing less than a chance to embrace history — a candidate who could become the nation’s first black president, pledging a different way of doing business in the nation’s capital.
“He ran a race that few people thought was possible a couple of years ago and was able to catch Hillary Clinton unprepared. She just didn’t see it coming until it was too late,” said Jack Pitney of Claremont McKenna College in California.
But the bitter primary fight exposed problems for Obama as well. He consistently lost key Democratic voters. Republicans already are trying to paint him as political naif. He’s limping to the finish line, even losing South Dakota last night.
Here are five things that helped Obama win the nomination and five pitfalls as he prepares to face John McCain.
1. Being Barack Obama When Obama stepped before the crowd on that freezing-cold day in Springfield, Ill., in February 2007, it was a day rich in political symbolism — a black man standing at the podium in the land of Lincoln, putting forth the seemingly unlikely notion that he could be elected president. After all, he had served just eight years in the Illinois state Senate and two in the U.S. Senate.
But his advisers believed their candidate didn’t merely talk of “change” and “hope”: He practically embodied it. “Two years ago it was apparent that this country was hungry for change … [a] new kind of leadership that would bring us together. This was one of those elections in which the candidate and the time sort of matched,” said Obama strategist David Axelrod.

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