Hype The Obama Effect

Timely, multidisciplinary analysis of Obama’s presidential campaign, its context, and its impact.

Barack Obama’s historic 2008 campaign exposed many white Americans more than ever before to a black individual who defied negative stereotypes. While Obama’s politics divided voters, Americans uniformly perceived Obama as highly successful, intelligent, and charismatic. What effect, if any, did the innumerable images of Obama and his family have on racial attitudes among whites? In The Obama Effect, Seth K. Goldman and Diana C. Mutz uncover persuasive evidence that white racial prejudice toward blacks significantly declined during the Obama campaign. Their innovative research rigorously examines how racial attitudes form, and whether they can be changed for the better. The Obama Effect draws from a survey of 20,000 people, whom the authors interviewed up to five times over the course of a year. This panel survey sets the volume apart from most research on racial attitudes. From the summer of 2008 through Obama’s inauguration in 2009, there was a gradual but clear trend toward lower levels of white prejudice against blacks. Goldman and Mutz argue that these changes occurred largely without people’s conscious awareness. Instead, as Obama became increasingly prominent in the media, he emerged as an “exemplar” that countered negative stereotypes in the minds of white Americans. Unfortunately, this change in attitudes did not last. By 2010, racial prejudice among whites had largely returned to pre-2008 levels. Mutz and Goldman argue that news coverage of Obama declined substantially after his election, allowing other, more negative images of African Americans to re-emerge in the media. The Obama Effect arrives at two key conclusions: Racial attitudes can change even within relatively short periods of time, and how African Americans are portrayed in the mass media affects how they change. While Obama’s election did not usher in a “post-racial America,” The Obama Effect provides hopeful evidence that racial attitudes can—and, for a time, did—improve during Obama’s campaign. Engaging and thorough, this volume offers a new understanding of the relationship between the mass media and racial attitudes in America.

Examines the complicated political legacy of our first black president Written during the presidency of Donald Trump, After Obama examines the impact President Barack Obama and his administration have continued to have upon African American politics. In this comprehensive volume, Todd C. Shaw, Robert A. Brown, and Joseph P. McCormick II bring together more than a dozen scholars to explore his complex legacy, including his successes, failures, and contradictions. Contributors focus on a wide range of topics, including how President Obama affected aspects of African American politics, how his public policies influenced the quality of Black citizenship and life, and what future administrations can learn from his experiences. They also examine the present-day significance of Donald Trump in relation to African American politics. A timely and thorough work, After Obama provides the first examination of the Obama administration in its entirety, and the lasting impact it has had on African American politics.

On November 4, 2008, the election of Barack Hussein Obama as the forty-fourth president of the United States showed that the country had finally overcome its most hurtful, shameful, and enduring legacy—slavery. Though Obama's election showed progress, the John McCain–Sarah Palin campaign and the Republican Party used age-old smear campaign tactics. Their operators pulled out all the stops in an attempt to win and spread falsehoods about Obama that have only multiplied after the election. The Obama Haters seeks to answer the following questions: Who are these Obama haters? Why do they despise him? Why do various news organizations, commentators, and political entities treat the same facts differently? Why are these pundits so powerful? In order to do so, Wright first lays out the democratic principles and civility toward which Americans should strive. Next, he investigates the persistent expressions of hatred for President Obama, connecting historic antecedents of political mudslinging along with the background of virulent right-wing smear tactics over the past two decades. And finally, he shines a harsh spotlight on the haters and fearmongers and their tactics. While Americans have the right to criticize their political leadership, their reasons for disapproval should be based on facts. Those who invent and repeat lies to hurt the reputation of leaders weaken the democratic ideal. This book is for anyone who wishes to learn how to cut through the hypocrisy and propaganda to make informed decisions based on truth.

FOREWORD by Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics and Grown Up Digital The Obama campaign’s mastery of social media for everything from fundraising to volunteer coordination has been widely reported. Until now, there hasn’t been an in-depth analysis of how they did it. In Yes We Did, new media strategist and campaign headquarters volunteer Rahaf Harfoush gives us a behind the-scenes look at the campaign’s use of technology, from its earliest days through election night. She reveals strategic insights organizations can apply to their own brands. Discover how unwavering strategic vision and collaborative technologies—email, blogs, social networks, Twitter, and SMS messaging—empowered a formidable online community to help elect the world’s first “digital” President.

Invoking America's greatest leaders, Robert Kuttner explains how Obama must be a transformative president--or a failed one--a president who must succeed in fundamentally changing our economy, society, and democracy for the better.

Recent federal court activity has dramatically changed the regulatory environment of campaign finance in the United States. Since 2010, the judiciary has decided that corporations and labor unions may freely spend in American elections, and that so-called "Super PACs" can accept unlimited contributions from private citizens for the purpose of buying election advertising. Despite the potential for such unregulated contributions to dramatically alter the conduct of campaigns, little is known about where Super PACs get their money, where they spend it, or how their message compares with other political groups. Moreover, we know almost nothing about whether individual citizens even notice Super PACs, or whether they distinguish between Super PAC activity and political activity by other political groups. This book addresses those questions. Using campaign finance data, election returns, advertising archives, a public opinion survey, and survey experiments, Super PAC! provides unprecedented insight into the behavior of these organizations, and how they affect public opinion and voting behavior. The first in-depth exploration of the topic, this book will make significant contributions in both political science and applied policy.

""Bias" is a term that circulates frequently in the contemporary landscape of political media, a term intended to diagnose a failure when media outlets fail to maintain journalistic objectivity. Beyond Bias interrogates what would seem, at first glance, to be cases of utterly biased examples of political media-contemporary conservative documentary films. However, rather than dismiss such examples of political representation as exemplars of ideological nonsense, reactionary propaganda, etc., Beyond Bias locates in such examples of conservative media a mode of discourse central to contemporary democratic debate in the US. Specifically, this book identifies conservative media as a mode of hysterical discourse. As the book makes clear, hysterical political discourse occurs when debate is simulated as a means to avoid a more substantive exchange; when appeals to compromise function as a screen to blur the distinctions between opposing sides or viewpoints; as recourse to any and all opinions or "alternative facts" conducive to conservatism's ideological priorities, no matter how divorced from reality; through the reduction of complex issues into moral binaries; through the depoliticizing emphasis on form over content; and, ultimately, as a sustained means to "police" the political with excess nonsense and noise that drowns out any alternative voices. Drawing from psychoanalytic theories of hysteria (Jacques Lacan, Juliet Mitchell, Teresa Brennan, Christopher Bollas, and others) and Jacques Rancière's aesthetic politics, and likewise by placing conservative documentaries in the context of many concerns central to Documentary Studies (participation, observation, representation, the archive, etc.), Beyond Bias views conservative documentary, and conservative media and politics more generally, not as the biased excesses of the contemporary political landscape but rather as texts central to understanding the implicit, though sometimes affectively traumatic, antagonisms inevitable in democracy and constitutive of democratic debate"--

This detailed overview and analysis of the results of Barack Obama’s historic 2008 presidential win gives us the inside state-by-state guide to how Obama achieved his victory, and allows us to see where the country stood four years ago. Although much has changed in the nearly four years since, How Barack Obama Won remains the essential guide to Obama’s electoral strengths and offers important perspective on his 2012 bid. The votes in each state for Obama and McCain are broken down by percentage according to gender, age, race, party, religious affiliation, education, household income, size of city, and according to views about the most important issues (the economy, terrorism, Iraq, energy, healthcare), the future of the economy (worried, not worried) and the war in Iraq (approve, disapprove).