Racial Change and the Politics of Hope

Abstract

“I was never the likeliest candidate for this office,” Barack Obama reminded his enthusiastic supporters at Lincoln Park, Chicago, in his victory speech. Yet the jubilant crowd showed how high the Obama electoral coalition had climbed within a short period. It defeated arguably the most formidable political organizations led by Hillary Clinton in the primaries and John McCain in the general election in 2008. To explain how Obama built the first ever black-led minimum winning coalition at the national level, this chapter examines the pre-election context in which Obama started his “politics of hope.” This chapter focuses on the relative positions of whites and minority racial groups in political coalitions and their major group interests. Built on the rationality thesis developed in the last chapter, this chapter will explain why Obama’s message of hope served as a rational foundation for his minimum winning racial coalition.

It was like a bad dream. I wandered down Broadway, imaging myself standing at the edge of the Lincoln Memorial and looking out over an empty pavilion, debris scattering in the wind. The movement had died years ago, shattered into a thousand fragments. Every path to change was well trodden, every strategy exhausted.

—Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

My concern is, rather, with the operative theory of democracy, with how the theory relates to, and passes into, practice.

—Giovanni Sartori, The Theory of Democracy Revisited