Racially Polarised Partisanship and the Obama Presidency
Many commentators described the election of Barack Obama in 2008 as a moment in which voters put aside race and voted for president on a non-racial basis. This account of ‘colour-blind’ electoral politics contrasts sharply with lingering racial divisions
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Racially Polarised Partisanship and the Obama Presidency Richard Johnson Many commentators described the elections of Barack Obama as ‘post-racial’ moments in which voters put aside race and voted for president on a nonracial basis.1 This account of ‘colour-blind’ electoral politics contrasts sharply with lingering and, in some cases, deepening racial divisions in American society.2 Throughout the Obama presidency, the symbolism of a black president has sat incongruously against images of confrontations between severely deprived black communities and white power figures, especially the police.3 Rather than attempt to reconcile these two images of American race relations, many commentators have merely placed the Obama elections aside as exceptions, said to demonstrate rare triumphs of ‘colour-blind’ politics.4 This chapter attempts to reconcile the apparent paradox of the ‘postracial’ elections of Barack Obama against the backdrop of a deeply racially divided American society. I argue that Obama’s election and reelection were, in fact, not ‘colour-blind’ moments but represented the most racially polarised elections in recent US history. Far from being exceptions to America’s racial divisions, the Obama elections were direct products of these tensions, with attitudes on race corresponding with electoral preference more strongly than any recent presidential election.5
R. Johnson () Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 E. Ashbee, J. Dumbrell (eds.), The Obama Presidency and the Politics of Change, Studies of the Americas, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41033-3_7
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The chapter also attempts to explain Barack Obama’s perceived silence on race during his presidency. Daniel Gillion reports that Obama has mentioned race in public speeches fewer times than any post-war Democratic president.6 Some commentators have attempted to argue that Obama’s relative racial silence is a demonstration of his ‘transcendence’ of race and evidence of a colour-blind political philosophy.7 From others, it has drawn scorn as a ‘deracialised’ approach to governance which seems to have abandoned African Americans.8 However, in this chapter, I point out that Obama has not needed to speak about race explicitly for his policies to be interpreted in racial terms.9 Structural forces—particularly the confluence of racial attitudes and partisanship— help to explain the limited success of his policy agenda.
THE ELECTIONS OF BARACK OBAMA: A RACE-CONSCIOUS APPROACH In this section I analyse the racial dimensions of Barack Obama’s election and reelection to the US presidency. I first focus on Obama’s own racial campaign strategy, particularly his race-focused appeals to wavering African American voters in the Democratic primaries. Desmond King and Rogers Smith contend that America is divided between racial policy alliances.10 One coalition contends that laws and policies should be crafted as ‘colour-blind’; that is, without reference to rac
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