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Introduction Taking the Long View of Election 2008 Liette Gidlow It was an awkward situation. In their first side-by-side appearance as rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton gathered in March 2007 in Selma, Alabama, with crowds of supporters and well-wishers. Forty-two years earlier, some six hundred activists, most of them black, had tried to march from Selma to Montgomery to press President Lyndon Johnson and Congress to enact a law to remedy decades of disfranchisement. In the bloody clash that erupted on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, state and local police attacked the marchers with batons, horsewhips, and tear gas, injuring seventy-eight people. Now, commemorating that march at the beginning of what would become the most hotly contested primary the Democratic Party had ever experienced, the competing candidates walked the line between recognizing the solemnity of the sacrifices made there and vying for the votes of an African American electorate that could decide the nomination. Both candidates acknowledged their debt to the brave men and women who had walked the bridge before them, and both candidates connected their personal histories to the history of that moment and place. As Hillary Clinton put it to a group at the First Baptist Church, the Voting Rights Act was “giving Senator Obama the chance to run for President of the United States, and by its logic and spirit, . . . yes, it’s giving me that chance, too.”1 Election 2008 made history in numerous ways. By the middle of January it was clear that the Democratic Party was going to nominate either the first African American or the first woman to head the ticket of any major political party. This Democratic nomination was also the first since the creation of the modern primary system in the 1970s to be decided not by voters in the primary process, but by select party“superdelegates”at the convention. The Republicans made history of their own by choosing Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska and the first female named to a Republican presidential ticket, to run with party nominee Senator John McCain of Arizona. Both parties took advantage of new cell phone and Internet technologies, and the Democrats were especially effective in using them to raise money, communicate with supporters, and turn out voters. Together the parties shattered old fund-raising records and took campaign spending to new heights. Of course, the most striking historical development of the 2008 election was the outcome. When Senator Obama won, he broke the presidential color line. Election 2008 made American history, but it was also a product of American history. Obama, Clinton, and Palin smashed through some of the most enduring barriers to high political office, but they did not come out of nowhere .The historians whose work appears in this volume show that though the campaigns of 2008 pointed to a new future in American politics, they also had deep roots in stories of the American past—inspiring accounts of families working hard and moving up; painful narratives of bigotry and discrimination; stirring tales of the American West as the frontier of freedom; and controversial chronicles of the 1960s, with their competing legacies of justice and division. The candidates’ successes demonstrated their ability to adopt and adapt familiar stories and tested tactics, and Americans’ understandings of the past framed the way they understood the election of 2008. Barack Obama’s ascent to the highest office in the land may have seemed the most improbable journey of the three. Born to a white mother and African father, raised by his mother and grandparents in Indonesia and Hawaii, and endowed with an uncommon name, the future president was unknown enough to the American public that as recently as 2004—on his return trip home from giving the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in Boston—he was pulled out of the airport screening line for an extended security check. Three years into his Senate term, Obama declared that “the ways of Washington must change”and launched his presidential bid from the steps of the historic Illinois state capitol at Springfield.Adopting a mantra of “change”in the midst of a lingering war and a stalling economy, Obama took his campaign to Iowa and began to reinvent old paths to power—organizing supporters and raising heaps of money—through the use of the interactive Web and the latest in mobile technologies.2 It was deeply ironic that in her contest with Obama...

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