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The remarkable presidential campaign of Barack Obama rested on a profound cultural shift away from overt racism. The post-World War II era witnessed a Cold War strategy to eliminate de jure Jim Crow. The Democratic Party led the way with its 1948 platform of integration. American sports followed with its integration and the Supreme Court gave these events constitutional legitimacy. Conservatives as well as liberal Americans began, in different degrees, to support the changing times. America's youth welcomed these changes without restraint. Ultimately, as popular culture established itself with mainstream voters via television and film, a "clean, proper, and multi-cultural" Black face in a high place became very acceptable. This acceptance, coupled with the economic collapse, set the stage for the ascendancy of Barack Obama.
Barack Obama's campaign for the 2008 Presidency is described by many political analysts as brilUant, remarkable, and almost flawless (Ifill, 2009). Despite his inexperience in national politics and limited experience in state poUtics (Obama was first elected to political office in 1994), he assembled a remarkably cohesive and effective "no drama" campaign team (Mendell, 2007), which in turn helped him craft and deliver his message of hope and change that ultimately resonated with the majority of American voters on election night, November 4, 2008.
The origins of this "improbable" campaign, to use Obama's words, can be traced to July 27, 2004. Obama was on his way to an easy victory in his campaign for the U.S. Senate from Illinois when he was invited to give the keynote address at the Democratic Convention in Boston. Many pundits refer to this speech as the one which placed Illinois State Senator Obama before the national electorate and where he established himself as a different type of Black American politician (Souza, 2008).
Obama described himself as a post-civil rights, multi-cultural "Horatio Alger" (Obama, 1995). He rejected the divisiveness of the left and the right that had marred American poUtics for decades and in his rhetoric embraced a singular United States of America while laying claim to the values of hope and change for a better America. That speech before millions of American television viewers generated a resounding outpouring of national support. Consequently, Obama toured the nation to introduce himself to the electorate,...