Abstract
In an historic spectacle before about 80,000 people crowded into Denver’s Invesco Field, 45 years to the day of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, Barack Obama accepted the Democratic nomination for president of the United States. Emotions were a mile high at the football home to the Denver Broncos, with a stadium of delegates and audience members who had made the trek hollering along to campaign slogans such as “Yes We Can.” It was the first time that a major party candidate had accepted the presidential nomination in an outdoor stadium since 1960 when Senator John F. Kennedy unveiled his New Frontier speech at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
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Notes
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See Robert Dallek, Ronald Reagan: The Politics of Symbolism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
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See Mark Rozell and Clyde Wilcox, God at the Grass Roots (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995).
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See Gerald Pomper, ed., The Election of 1992 (New York: Chatham House, 1993).
See Gerald Pomper, “The Presidential Election,” in Gerald Pomper, ed., The Election of 1996 (New York: Chatham House, 1997), pp. 173–204.
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John C. Green, Mark J. Rozell, and Clyde Wilcox, eds., Prayers in the Precints: The Christian Right in the 1998 Elections (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2000).
See also, Jim Wallis, The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith and Politics in a Post-Religious Right America (New York: Harper One, 2008)
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For a geographical analysis of such differences, see Richard Morrill, Larry Knopp, and Michael Brown, “Anomalies in Red and Blue: Exceptionalism in American Electoral Geography,” Political Geography 26 (2007): 525–533.
John Kenneth White, The Values Divide: American Politics and Culture in Transition (New York: Chatham House Publishers, 2003), p. 167.
David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), p. 43.
Morris Fiorina, Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America (New York: Pearson, 2005), p. 106.
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© 2009 Kevin J. McMahon, David M. Rankin, Donald W. Beachler, and John Kenneth White
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Rankin, D.M. (2009). The West. In: Winning the White House 2008. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100428_8
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