Axelrod first read Obama's speech on race in his undies

White House Senior Adviser David Axelrod was standing in the dark in a Philadelphia hotel room in his underwear at 4:00 a.m. on Tuesday, March 18, 2008, when he opened an e-mail that contained a speech that then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) had just finished.

It was a speech on race that the presidential candidate planned to deliver that same day, in what would later be recognized as a seminal moment in the 2008 presidential campaign.

"He told me on Friday that he wanted to give this speech," Axelrod told ABC's Charlie Gibson on Thursday night at a joint conference in Washington, D.C., organized by The Aspen Institute and Atlantic Media. [Full disclosure: ITK's editor used to work for The Aspen Institute]

"But we had campaign stops all day Saturday," said Axelrod, "and TV taping on Sunday and a slew of editorial board meetings on Monday, so I had no idea when or how he was going to write this."

The possibility of a speech about race had long been discussed among Obama's top campaign advisers, but the choice of March 18 was an urgent one, prompted in large part by public outcry over controversial statements made by Obama's longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

"The Rev. Wright thing had blown up," Axelrod explained to Gibson, "and the editorial boards were all over [the issue of indicted Obama supporter] Tony Rezko, and then [Obama] says to me 'I want to give this speech [about race] no later than Tuesday.'"

The experience of reading the speech in the wee hours of Tuesday morning was particularly important to Axelrod because, as he told Gibson, during the earliest stages of Obama's presidential campaign Axelrod had been concerned that perhaps the candidate didn't possess as much "animal hunger" for the presidency as other candidates historically had, or that he didn't "want" to be president enough to endure a grueling national campaign.

"But then I read that speech," said Axelrod, who mimed the scrolling of a Blackberry with his fingers as he spoke, seemingly unaware that he was doing it.

"And at the end [of the e-mail]" said Axelrod, "[the President] wrote 'so what do you think?'"

"I wrote him back one sentence: This is why you should be President."