Activism, Disasters, Elections
In this extract from Black Radio/Black Resistance, Micaela di Leonardo provides an account of the media coverage of and involvement in the 2008 presidential election and their responses to the Obama presidency.
The Road to 2008: The Obama Effect
There is no dearth of scholarly and journalistic analyses of Barack Obama’s historic 2008 presidential election victory. In fact, we could say that the narrative of that particular campaign — its personnel, politics, key turns in the road, public relations — has been done to death.26 But while Obama’s racial identity was and is a central focus of mainstream press and public attention, there has been very little concern with the actual public deliberations among the working-class minority Americans whose heightened activism and voter participation played a major role in putting Obama in the White House, and in keeping him there.
Instead, commentators have heaped well-deserved praise on Obama’s campaign team, on the tightness of its organization and secure command of the ground game. Much has been made of the youth vote for Obama — ironically, though, reporters Chuck Todd and Sheldon Gawiser, running the numbers afterward, concluded that “it’s important not to overstate the youth vote in Obama’s victory,” as “the youth share of the vote was 18% of the electorate [in 2008], just one percentage point (p.175) more than in 2004.” They rammed home the statistical reality — “[I]f no one under the age of 30 had voted, Obama would have won every state he carried with the exception of two: Indiana and North Carolina.”27
[…] commentators have heaped well-deserved praise on Obama’s campaign team, on the tightness of its organization and secure command of the ground game.
Todd and Gawiser, The Pew Research Center, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and others have also come to other heterodox conclusions about the relative importance of various sectors of the American electorate to Obama’s 2008 win. Despite much journalistic ink spilled on a vision of white male racist animus against Obama, he nevertheless received 46% of all white male votes, even though “not since Carter has any Democratic nominee earned more than 38% of the white male vote.”28 As David Bositis of the Joint Center points out, “[in] all states outside of the South, Obama received significantly more of the white vote — more than any Democratic nominee since Lyndon Johnson.”29 As well, many commentators noted the increasing importance of the Latinx vote, but most focused on Latinos’ roles in the Southwestern and Western states. Post-NAFTA migration patterns, however, have spread Latinx populations across the U.S.: “If no Latinos had voted, McCain would have carried Indiana.”30
As well, despite overwhelming press and scholarly attention to Obama’s racial identity — and, during the campaign, on whether black Americans would judge him to be “not black enough” or “too black” — very little attention has been paid to actual black American apprehensions of the campaign and election. In fact, there was almost no mainstream media coverage of black American media or organizing efforts. Ironically, in reviewing both journalistic and scholarly analyses of the 2008 vote, I found a serious quantitative study of the role white racism may have played in denying Obama the landslide he might otherwise have gotten, given President Bush’s overwhelming unpopularity and the Autumn 2008 financial crash — but not a single explicit consideration of the actual electoral college effects of the increased black vote.31
[…] very little attention has been paid to actual black American apprehensions of the campaign and election.
The Pew Research Center reported that two million more black Americans voted in the 2008 than in the 2004 election — nearly matching, for the first time in history, the turnout rate of white Americans — and 95% of them supported Obama. Black women had the highest turnout rate of any population of voters, and black youth turnout was higher than that of “young eligible voters of any other racial or ethnic group in 2008” — another historic first.32 Even though, as seems likely, black voting alone did not secure Obama’s victory, it is surprising — or perhaps not — that scholars paid so little attention to exactly what role it did play.
The TJMS crew were profoundly engaged in covering Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign and election. The show’s anchors also had extraordinary access — not only multiple on-air interviews with Barack and Michelle Obama, Joe Biden, and other Democratic Party heavies but physical access to the Obama headquarters on Election Day. They gained this access because the show was partly Chicago-oriented and represented one of Obama’s key national electoral bases. But it was also, and more importantly, the result of the show’s enormous audience and extraordinary (p.176) engagement with the Obama presidential campaign, and before it, with many other Democratic Party candidates and office holders, back to President Clinton’s two terms.
Micaela di Leonardo is Professor of Anthropology, African American Studies, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and Performance Studies at Northwestern University. She has published five books and several dozen articles, and has worked as an anti-racist and feminist writer and activist since the 1970s. And she is an avid soul music fan.
