The politics of Mikhail M Bakhtin's Carni‐Phallic body

While many scholars attribute Barack Obama's success in the 2008 presidential election to his so-called deracialized campaign strategy, I argue that Obama constructed a persuasive message strategy that was fundamentally based on race. I argue that in pursuing what I call a racial distinction strategy, Obama mobilized race differently than previous Black candidates running in White-voter electoral majorities. Specifically, Obama's racial distinction strategy constructed a seamless racial narrative – deployed through constellations of subtle racial language and imagery – incorporating Obama's own personal biography within a broader narrative of the nation, specifically a narrative of American progress. The fact that Obama employed a racial distinction strategy, and the fact that he succeeded in doing so, sheds new light on, and leads us to reconsider the veracity of popular political theories such as post-Blackness, post-racialism and deracialization, along with the general ideology of colorblindness.     

The Decline of Bigotry in America

Though prejudice and discrimination exist in America, it has been steadily declining and measurably so. From our very beginnings, there has been a diversity, accretion, succession, and simultaneity of racial, religious, ethnic, and gender victims and victimizers. Fortunately, there has also been a process of meliorism, epitomized by the presidential election of a black American of mixed racial parents—Barack Hussein Obama. Regardless of their group identity, today’s generation of Americans has less victims or victimizers and has more social, political, and economic opportunities than their parents. grandparents, and predecessors had.     

Polarizing cues

People categorize themselves and others, creating ingroup and outgroup distinctions. In American politics, parties constitute the in- and outgroups, and party leaders hold sway in articulating party positions. A party leader's endorsement of a policy can be persuasive, inducing co-partisans to take the same position. In contrast, a party leader's endorsement may polarize opinion, inducing out-party identifiers to take a contrary position. Using survey experiments from the 2008 presidential election, I examine whether in- and out-party candidate cues—John McCain and Barack Obama—affected partisan opinion. The results indicate that in-party leader cues do not persuade but that out-party leader cues polarize. This finding holds in an experiment featuring President Bush in which his endorsement did not persuade Republicans but it polarized Democrats. Lastly, I compare the effect of party leader cues to party label cues. The results suggest that politicians, not parties, function as polarizing cues.     

Barack Hussein Obama: the use of history in the creation of an ‘American’ president

ABSTRACT

From the time of his nomination as the Democratic Party's 2008 presidential candidate onwards, Barack Obama was the target of a panoply of political attacks. Conservatives, Republicans and even some Democrats played on his alterity in a way that previous non-white political hopefuls, particularly the Reverend Jesse Jackson, had not had to endure. If the intricate twists and turns of Obama's past did not make those attacks particularly surprising, the way in which he chose to deal with them was. In what stands as a deliberate pre-emptive attack, Obama used two substantive texts, Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope, to create and shape a historical narrative of his own past in such a way as to present himself to the US voting public as a truly American figure, worthy of the presidency. By the time he was running for high office, therefore, Obama had already used his knowledge of the discipline of history to create a usable past with which he and his supporters could denude many of those political attacks of their potency, whether they were focused on the years of his upbringing in an Islamic state, his familial ties to Kenya, his religious background or his purported links to radicalism.     

Barack Obama as the post-racial candidate for a post-racial America: perspectives from Asian America and Hawai‘i

ABSTRACT

Okamura reviews the 2008 US presidential campaign and the election of Barack Obama as a ‘post-racial candidate’ in terms of two different meanings of ‘post-racialism’, namely, colour blindness and multiculturalism. He also discusses his campaign and election from the perspective of Asian America and Hawai'i given that Obama has been claimed as ‘the first Asian American president’ and as a ‘local’ person from Hawai‘i where he was born and spent most of his youth. In both cases, Obama has been accorded these racialized identities primarily because of particular cultural values he espouses and cultural practices he engages in that facilitate his seeming transcendence of racial boundaries and categories generally demarcated by phenotype and ancestry. Okamura contends that proclaiming Obama as an honorary Asian American and as a local from Hawai‘i inadvertently lends support to the post-racial America thesis and its false assertion of the declining significance of race: first, by reinforcing the ‘model minority’ stereotype of Asian Americans and, second, by affirming the widespread view of Hawai‘i as a model of multiculturalism.     

The Age Gap in the 2008 Presidential Election

The 2008 presidential election suggests a significant realignment among voters entering the electorate, with younger voters deviating considerably from older voters in their partisan preferences. Barack Obama won the vote of those under 30 years old by a 66% to 32% margin and first time voters favored him by an overwhelming margin of 69–30%. The fact that the age gap between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton during the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination contest was also among the largest age gaps in American electoral history suggests that part of the age gap was undoubtedly due to the appeal of Obama with younger Americans. Part of the age gap, however, was also due to the unpopularity of the George W. Bush administration. The strong youth vote for Obama in 2008 was thus both pro-Obama and anti-Bush in nature. The huge age gap in 2008 suggests a split of the electorate along generational lines and the long-term consequences of the age gap appear to overwhelmingly favor the Democratic Party. George W. Bush’s unpopular and divisive presidency helped to make the youngest generation of American voters increasingly Democratic in their vote preference. This suggests that if younger Americans follow other generations in keeping the same partisan voting patterns throughout their life, the Democrats are potentially poised to make considerable gains in future elections.     

Black and White Unite? The Clinton–Obama Campaigns in Historical Perspective*

Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are battling to win the Democratic party's nomination as presidential candidate in 2008. Never has a white woman or a black man been so close to entering the White House. Standing in their way is Republican Senator John McCain, who would be the oldest white male ever to become US president. A possible spoiler for any of the three is the perennial campaigner, Ralph Nader. The political, social and economic histories of women and African Americans have been entwined, often to the cost of the other, since before the American Civil War. Before World War I the issue was the suffrage; then came the struggles for (women's) equal rights and (African American) civil rights, particularly after World War II. These narratives, with the related cross‐currents of class and ethnicity, are explored in relation to contemporary history and politics, especially the continuing gender and racial ‘gaps’ in US society.     

Sex and Race: Are Black Candidates More Likely to be Disadvantaged by Sex Scandals?

A growing body of work suggests that exposure to subtle racial cues prompts white voters to penalize black candidates, and that the effects of these cues may influence outcomes indirectly via perceptions of candidate ideology. We test hypotheses related to these ideas using two experiments based on national samples. In one experiment, we manipulated the race of a candidate (Barack Obama vs. John Edwards) accused of sexual impropriety. We found that while both candidates suffered from the accusation, the scandal led respondents to view Obama as more liberal than Edwards, especially among resentful and engaged whites. Second, overall evaluations of Obama declined more sharply than for Edwards. In the other experiment, we manipulated the explicitness of the scandal, and found that implicit cues were more damaging for Obama than explicit ones.     

What Happened to Educational Equality? Tracing the Demise of Presidential Rhetoric on Racial Inequality in Higher Education

This article asks why discussion of racial inequality in higher education is absent from presidential speeches, which helps us understand why it is absent from the public agenda. I find a decrease in presidential speech about race and education after the 1980 and 1984 elections. By analyzing Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan's rhetoric during those elections, we can see that Carter struggled to promote affirmative action and, instead, supported historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Reagan adopted Carter's arguments about HBCUs and used them to support his strategy to appeal to whites' and white ethnics' racial resentments. This dynamic led to a political stalemate: Democrats could not address educational inequality, distance themselves from Republicans, and appeal to majority whites. Therefore, presidents had no incentive to address inequality in higher education. While educational inequality still exists, it remains absent from presidential speeches.     

The Gapology of the Obama Vote in the 2008 Democratic Presidential Primaries

In their competition for the 2008 Democratic nomination, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton developed distinct demographic bases of support. This study will analyze the demographic divides in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries, focusing on the “gaps” that emerged in the support of Obama. Obama’s demographic bases of support were African-Americans, younger voters, educated voted, those with no religion affiliation, wealthier voters, males, political independents, and ideological liberals. Despite the considerable amount of attention given to the gender gap, a number of demographic gaps were more significant. Race was by far the most important gap and a key component of Obama’s victory was his tremendous support from African-American voters.     

Getting Personal? The Impact of Social Media on Preferential Voting

Ever since the successful presidential campaign of Barack Obama in 2008, attention has been drawn to the political impact of social media. However, it remains to be seen whether the successful Obama campaign is the exception or the rule. Our research focuses specifically on the impact of social media on preference voting. First it seeks to establish whether candidates make use of social media during election campaigns and whether voters in turn follow politicians. Afterwards it examines to what extent social media make a difference and yield a preference vote bonus. Theoretically, two types of effects are outlined, namely a direct effect of the number of followers a candidate has and a statistical interaction effect whereby a higher number of followers only yields more votes when the candidate actively uses the social media. To carry out our analysis, we make use of a unique dataset that combines data on social media usage and data on the candidates themselves (such as position on the list, being wellknown, exposure to the old media, gender, ethnicity and incumbency). The dataset includes information on all 493 candidates of the 10 parties that received at least one seat in the Dutch 2010 election. It turns out that candidates are eager to use social media, but that relatively few people follow candidates. There is a significant interaction effect of social media usage and the number of followers, but that effect appears to be relatively small.     

Patriotism,black politics and racial justice in America

Recent decades have seen an upsurge in interest in patriotism among progressive intellectuals and within progressive politics, while recent manifestations of black politics in the era of President Barack Obama have utilized patriotic narratives. We question this turn to patriotism on the grounds that it is a questionable manner in which to pursue racial justice in our post-Civil Rights political landscape. Patriotic appeals to civic virtue always invoke or imply the anti-patriot who lacks that virtue and is therefore less capable of exercising exemplary citizenship. This idea of the anti-patriot, however, easily coalesces with and buttresses the language of cultural pathology used historically to argue that African-Americans are deficient in civic virtue and key for reproducing racial inequality. The idea of the anti-patriot could thus provide another vocabulary for displacing responsibility for addressing racial inequality away from white Americans and onto black Americans. After illuminating this dynamic at work in some of the most successful African-American patriotic thinkers—Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Barack Obama—we conclude by arguing that those concerned with racial justice should reject patriotism in favor of three alternative traditions in African-American political thought: self-examination, prophecy, and rage.     

Racial Resentment and White Opposition to Race‐Conscious Programs: Principles or Prejudice?

White racial resentment is associated with opposition to a broad range of racial policies but it is unclear whether it derives from racial prejudice or stems from ideological principles. To resolve this ambiguity, we examined the impact of racial resentment on support for a college-scholarship program in which program beneficiaries' race and socioeconomic class was experimentally varied. The analyses yield a potentially troubling finding: racial resentment means different things to white liberals and conservatives. Among liberals, racial resentment conveys the political effects of racial prejudice, by predicting program support for black but not white students, and is better predicted by overt measures of racial prejudice than among conservatives. Among conservatives, racial resentment appears more ideological. It is closely tied to opposition to race-conscious programs regardless of recipient race and is only weakly tied to measures of overt prejudice. Racial resentment, therefore, is not a clear-cut measure of racial prejudice for all Americans.     

Transformation and polarization: The 2008 presidential election and the new American electorate

Along with the unpopularity of President Bush and the dire condition of the U.S. economy, changes in the composition of the American electorate played a major role in Barack Obama’s decisive victory in the 2008 presidential election. The doubling of the nonwhite share of the electorate between 1992 and 2008 was critical to Obama’s election as African-American and other nonwhite voters provided him with a large enough margin to overcome a substantial deficit among white voters. In addition, voters under the age of 30 preferred Obama by a better than 2–1 margin, accounting for more than 80 percent of his popular vote margin. Despite the overall Democratic trend, the results revealed an increasingly polarized electorate. Over the past three decades the coalitions supporting the two major parties have become much more distinctive geographically, racially, and ideologically. The growth of the nonwhite electorate along with the increasing liberalism and Democratic identification of younger voters suggest that a successful Obama presidency could put the Democratic Party in a position to dominate American politics for many years. However, these trends appear to be provoking an intense reaction from some opponents of the President. The frustration and anger displayed at “tea party” demonstrations and town hall meetings may reflect not just discomfort with Barack Obama’s race but the perceived threat that Obama and his supporters represent to the social status and power of those on the opposing side.     

Do White In-group Processes Matter,Too? White Racial Identity and Support for Black Political Candidates

Scholars find that negative evaluations of Blacks lead Whites to vote against Black political candidates. However, can an in-group psychological process have the same effect? We consider White racial identity to be a strong candidate for such a process. We argue that the mere presence of a Black candidate cues the identity, reducing support for these candidates among Whites. We test this hypothesis on vote choice in seven instances. Five of them involve simple vote choice models: the 2008 and 2012 Presidential elections, and three elections in 2010: The Massachusetts Gubernatorial election, Black candidates for the US House, and Black candidates for the US Senate. The other two are tests of the notion that White racial identity reduced President Obama’s approval, thus reducing support for all Democratic Congressional candidates in the 2010 Midterm and 2012 Congressional elections. We find support for these notions in all seven cases, across these seven elections, using four different survey research datasets, and four different measures of White identity. Comparisons with other presidential elections show that White identity did not significantly affect mono-racial elections. Furthermore, we find the White identity and racial resentment results to be very similar in terms of their robustness and apparent effect sizes. This indicates in-group evaluations, and those that focus on out-groups, operate independently of one another.     

Ethnocentrism as a Short‐Term Force in the 2008 American Presidential Election

Faced with a choice between John McCain and Barack Obama, voters in 2008 were swayed by the familiar play of factors—party identification, policy preferences, and economic conditions—but also, we find, by ethnocentrism, a deep‐seated psychological predisposition that partitions the world into ingroups and outgroups—into “us” and “them.” The effect of ethnocentrism was significant and substantial, and it appeared over and above the effects due to partisanship, economic conditions, policy stances, political engagement, and several varieties of conservatism. Two features of Obama were primarily responsible for triggering ethnocentrism in 2008: his race and his imagined Muslim faith. As such, we demonstrate that ethnocentrism was much more important in 2008 than in the four presidential elections immediately preceding 2008, and we show that it was much more important in the actual contest between Senator McCain and Senator Obama than in a hypothetical contest between Senator McCain and Senator Clinton.     

Barack Obama and the South: demography as electoral opportunity

ABSTRACT

Barack Obama was more successful in the South in the 2008 election than many previous Democratic presidential nominees had been. While John McCain continued Republican dominance in the conservative region, it was a major breakthrough for a northern liberal Democrat, especially an African American from Illinois, to win three southern states and secure 55 electoral votes. Florida, North Carolina and Virginia were good opportunities for Obama because, demographically, they had come to resemble other large states outside the South. In these ‘converging’ southern states, the Latino and Asian communities had grown substantially. The percentage of college-educated Whites had increased and there had been large-scale migration from other regions of the country. The states that Obama won in the South were not as ‘southern’ as they once were. In some southern states, those called the ‘neo-Confederate South’ in this article, white support for Obama was less than John Kerry had received in 2004. This decline in white voting for the Democratic presidential nominee occurred despite the difficult economic times that enveloped the country in the months preceding the election, and the general unpopularity of the incumbent Republican administration headed by George W. Bush. Some of these states, like Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi, had been among the most intransigent states in resisting the claims of the civil rights movement for social and political equality for African Americans in the 1950s and 1960s. In the future it may be more accurate to speak of more than one South, rather than refer to the region as an undifferentiated whole.     

Racial attitudes and emotional responses to the 2016 Republican candidates

ABSTRACT

We argue that both Obama ‘08 and Trump ‘16 benefited from unusually high enthusiasm generated during their respective campaigns, and these emotions conditioned underlying racial attitudes – albeit in different ways – to pave the way to the White House. Racial animosity is usually studied in the context of minority candidates, but in the 2016 election, Donald Trump (a white candidate) frequently made direct attacks on immigrants and foreigners. This study examines how emotions generated during the campaigns and racial resentment, which we consider a preexisting attitude, shaped voter evaluations of the 2016 presidential candidates in the general election and Republican primaries. Drawing on original telephone survey data from the highly salient GOP Iowa caucuses and national opinion data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), we find that racial resentment interacted with positive emotions (enthusiasm) to increase support for Trump. The effect of racial attitudes in predicting favorable evaluations of Trump disappeared or diminished to a quarter of its original size when emotional responses to the candidate were measured. The study generalizes a framework about the interactive effect of existing racial attitudes and campaign-generated emotions to apply to both white and minority candidates.     

Racial Resentment and Whites’ Gun Policy Preferences in Contemporary America

Our study investigates how and why racial prejudice can fuel white opposition to gun restrictions. Drawing on research across disciplines, we suggest that the language of individual freedom used by the gun rights movement utilizes the same racially meaningful tropes as the rhetoric of the white resistance to black civil rights that developed after WWII and into the 1970s. This indicates that the gun rights narrative is color-coded and evocative of racial resentment. To determine whether racial prejudice depresses white support for gun control, we designed a priming experiment which exposed respondents to pictures of blacks and whites drawn from the IAT. Results show that exposure to the prime suppressed support for gun control compared to the control, conditional upon a respondent’s level of racial resentment. Analyses of ANES data (2004–2013) reaffirm these findings. Racial resentment is a statistically significant and substantively important predictor of white opposition to gun control.     

Becoming black,becoming president

ABSTRACT

Speculation about the relationship between Barack Obama's election to the presidency and race in the United States was rife prior to, during and after his successful campaign. King looks at three aspects of this issue. First, as a kind of outsider, Obama had to prove himself black enough for African Americans of the traditional sort and not too dangerous for Whites. How did he achieve this? Second, Obama's election was made possible by changes in the voting behaviour of white Americans, particularly in the North, and the way that African Americans like Obama gained a foothold in, and at times control of, urban political machines, such as, in his case, Chicago. How have American historians treated this shift in white voting behaviour? Finally, the central question of how race still impinges on President Obama's performance as president. King concludes with a look at issues such as colour blindness and whiteness, the nature of black political identity and solidarity, and the variety of political roles from which a black leader such Obama can choose.