With the economy in crisis and President Bush’s popularity at low ebb, the time was ripe for a Democratic victory in the election of 2008. To the surprise of nearly all political pundits, the long series of winter and spring caucuses and primary elections resulted in the nomination not of Hilary Rodham Clinton, the initial favorite, but Barack Obama, a relatively little-known forty-seven-year-old senator from Illinois when the campaign began. Obama was the first black candidate to win the nomination of a major party. His triumph was a tribute both to his own exceptional skills as a speaker and campaigner, and to how American politics had changed.
Obama’s life story exemplified the enormous changes American society had undergone since 1960.
Without the civil rights movement, his election would have been inconceivable. He was the product of an interracial marriage, which ended in divorce when he was two years old, between a Kenyan immigrant and a white American woman. When Obama was born in 1961, their marriage was still illegal in many states. He attended Columbia College and Harvard Law School, and worked in Chicago as a community organizer before going into politics. He also wrote two best-selling books about his upbringing in Indonesia (where his mother worked as an anthropologist) and Hawaii (where his maternal grandparents helped to raise him) and his search for a sense of identity given his complex background. Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004 and first gained national attention with an eloquent speech at the Democratic national convention that year.
A cartoon in the Boston Globe suggests the progress that has been made since Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger.
Clinton sought the Democratic nomination by emphasizing her political experience, both as First Lady and as a senator from New York. Obama realized that in 2008 people were hungry for change, not experience. Indeed, while Clinton’s nomination would also have been path-breaking—no woman has ever been the presidential candidate of a major party—Obama succeeded in making her seem a representative of the status quo. His early opposition to the Iraq War, for which Clinton had voted in the Senate, won the support of the party’s large antiwar element; his race galvanized the support of black voters; and his youth and promise of change appealed to the young.
Obama recognized how the Internet had changed politics. He established an e-mail list containing the names of millions of voters with whom he could communicate instantaneously, and used web-based networks to raise enormous sums of money in small donations. His campaign put out videos on popular Internet sites. With its widespread use of modern technology and massive mobilization of new voters, Obama’s was the first political campaign of the twenty-first century.
Having won the nomination, Obama faced Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee, in the general election. At age sevety-two, McCain was the oldest man ever to run for president, and he seemed even more a representative of the old politics than Clinton. Citing his willingness to break with his party on issues like campaign finance reform, McCain tried to portray himself not as part of the establishment but as a “maverick,” or rebel. He surprised virtually everyone by choosing as his running mate Sarah Palin, the little-known governor of Alaska, in part as an attempt to woo Democratic women disappointed at their party’s rejection of Hilary Clinton. Palin quickly went on the attack, accusing Democrats of being unpatriotic, lacking traditional values, and not representing the “real America.” This proved extremely popular with the Republican party’s conservative base. But her performances in speeches and interviews soon made it clear that she lacked familiarity with many of the domestic and foreign issues a new administration would confront. Her selection raised questions among many Americans about McCain’s judgment.
But the main obstacles for the McCain campaign were President Bush’s low popularity and the financial crisis that reached bottom in September and October. Obama’s promise of change seemed more appealing than ever. On election day, he swept to victory with 53 percent of the popular vote and a large majority in the electoral college. His election redrew the nation’s political map. Obama carried not only Democratic strongholds in New England, the mid-Atlantic states, the industrial Midwest, and the West Coast, but also states that had been reliably Republican for years. He cracked the solid South, winning Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida. He did extremely well in suburbs throughout the country. He even carried Indiana, where Bush had garnered 60 percent of the vote in 2004, but which now was hard hit by unemployment. Obama put together a real “rainbow” coalition, winning nearly the entire black vote and a large majority of Hispanics (who helped him to carry Colorado, Nevada, and Florida). He did exceptionally well among young voters. Obama carried every age group except persons over 65. Thus, he was elected even though he received only 43 percent of the nation’s white vote.