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 Barack obama, Race-Based Appeals, and the 00 Presidential election W HEn wE bEgan delving into the subject of racialized political communication in 2001, we never seriously imagined the possibility of a Black president. When we personally encountered Barack Obama for the first time in the Massachusetts State House chambers in 2004, among a giddy group of cheering teenagers (who by 2008 would be of voting age), we—like many Americans—got our first glimpse of a potentially serious run. yet when we began assembling this book just before the announcement of Obama’s candidacy in 2007, we thought little of his potential chances for presidential success. The evidence and data in which we immersed ourselves (and that we reported in the previous chapters) led us to the same conclusion at which many Americans arrived by going on just a hunch. We were well aware of the paltry success rate Black candidates historically had running against White candidates. In fact, we knew that most politicians of color believed their chance for success in such situations was so slim that few even bothered to seriously attempt such an undertaking. By that point, we had seen hundreds of ads, and we knew that a Black candidate running for the presidency was likely to be more of a lightning rod for White candidates’ and supporters’ racist appeals than candidates for the U.S. House and Senate attracted over the past twenty years, especially since so much more was at stake. We were wary of how state and local, as well as national, news might treat him, being fully aware of the evidence of how the media covered both of Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns; the momentum it provided for George H. W. Bush when the Willie Horton ad was revealed in 1988; and the studies showing how the media tended to hyperracialize Black candidates generally in House and Senate contests across the Barack obama, Raced-Based Appeals, and the 00 election 1 country. We knew the potential effect of these trends on a primarily White electorate that harbored negative preconceptions about Blacks and other people of color and Whites’ historical unwillingness to support them for other political offices. Add to that the fact that only five African Americans had been elected as governors or U.S. Senators since reconstruction (including Obama himself) and we came to the same conclusion that, we dare say, most people had before the Iowa caucuses early in 2008: Barack Obama had no chance to win the Democratic party nomination, much less to win the plurality in enough states (all of which are majority-White) to secure 270 electoral votes. What we did not anticipate was that over the course of an almost two-year campaign, Barack Obama and the circumstances of the 2008 election would not only validate most of the findings we report on in the first six chapters of this book, but that Obama would nonetheless become the president of the United States in the process. Given Obama’s historic, unforeseen, even unimaginable election, we want to spend some time in this final chapter offering an account of how the research and conclusions we have presented played out in the racial drama of the 2008 primary and general election campaigns. Highlighting the role rhetoric, appeals, media coverage, and voters’ choices played throughout the campaign, we also want to identify what happened. What changed among voters and the racial and political climate in the country that made Obama’s election possible? We begin our examination with the racial dynamics of the Democratic presidential primary, then move on to Obama’s general election battle against Senator John McCain. Within these two general time periods, we closely investigate the forms of racist and racial appeals that dotted the electoral landscape, the sponsors of those appeals, and their potential effect on the voting public’s perceptions of the candidates involved. We also look at the media’s role in ratcheting up the competitive novelty of the contest and its key players and the part it played in perpetuating racial controversy to strengthen the racial drama it conveyed to the American people throughout the election. Finally, we offer an explanation for why the confluence of racial circumstances in this particular presidential contest led 53 percent of American voters to cast a ballot for Barack Obama as their choice for president of the United States. oBAmA’s DReAm, CLInTon’s nIghTmARe Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton began the Democratic presidential primary...

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