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Preface For many,election night November 4,2008,seemed as though it might be the moment when Martin Luther King’s long“arc of the moral universe” finally did bend “toward justice.”1 The seemingly impossible came true as the United States of America stood on the cusp of electing and then inaugurating its first African American president, Barack Obama. Many readers, of course, will remember those days and will have been equally cognizant of the importance and possibility in those events as they were transpiring. Contemporary politics, however, rarely lets us linger in such moments, but instead always rushes ahead with new stories about transitions and appointments and policy initiatives and the like. Nevertheless, we contend that it is not only worth remembering those early moments of what became the Obama presidency but also analyzing them,particularly with an eye to the way that the moment was rhetorically constructed and how this construction shaped the early fortunes of this historic administration . The essays in this volume represent the work of an interdisciplinary group of scholars who participated in Texas A&M University’s March, 2010,“Rhetoric,Politics,and the Obama Phenomenon”conference.When we began planning a conference on Barack Obama’s meteoric rise from little-known Illinois state senator to president of the United States, we thought that we would focus on what seemed like the “Obama Phenomenon ”—the throngs of crowds, the celebrity-like popularity, the strategic use of new media, and the talent for powerful oratory. What we could not have predicted was that one year into Obama’s first term the Obama phenomenon would have turned into Obama’s phenomenal burden as overlapping sets of responsibilities, hurdles, and constraints shaped the ways he approached and performed his new position. The essays in this volume reflect an interest both in the phenomenon that won him the presidency and the historic and contemporary burdens of that presidency. Since Obama’s victory, scholars have published numerous commentaries on the significance of the Obama campaign and election. Some of these pieces can be found in special issues of journals or edited volumes like this one,2 others in monographs and articles that analyze the 2008 campaign and election,3 particularly the role race played in it,4 or volumes that assess the new president’s performance in various dimensions of his x : Preface administration.5 Other scholars, in various ways, engage the transformative nature of Obama’s rise to power, providing insight into how it came to be and offering wise explanations for why Obama’s successes required careful and precise navigation of several political, cultural, and historical hurdles.For example,HoraceG.Campbell explains howObama motivated and mobilized a movement of networks and organizations that marked the possibility of progressive change in contemporary American politics,6 a notion embraced by Ian Reifowitz, who makes the case that Obama’s vision of American identity as inclusive and based upon shared bonds provides the new president with an opening to redefine and transform the American polity.7 Other scholars take a more cautious view as they urge awareness of deeply entrenched factors of American life that challenge and limit Obama’s ability to lead and succeed. For example,Thomas J. Sugrue shows how, despite the apparent evidence of Obama’s election, post–civil rights era racial divisions continue to challenge not only the nation but also Obama’s administration.8 Sugrue notes that much of the corresponding battle has already been fought within Obama, as the future president painstakingly searched for and embraced his identity as an American and as an African American.9 Stephen J. Wayne has also focused on the internal dimensions of Obama’s leadership, showing how Obama’s character, beliefs, and style function as their own set of resources and constraints in shaping his response to political challenges and opportunities.10 At the same time,Jeffrey C.Alexander locates the promise of Obama’s candidacy and future as president in distinctly external ways, presenting a narrative of Obama’s rise to power as one that emphasized performance and image .11 Alexander argues that on that momentous and memorable election night in November, 2008, Americans “elected a civil hero,” one who was charged with restoring “the utopian spirit of the nation’s revolutionary origins and the promise of its founding fathers to create a more perfect democracy.”12 Indeed,in a moment Obama went from accomplishing one heroic task—becoming the first African American to win election to the White...

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