It is difficult to overstate the importance of the campaign and election of 2008 as a touchstone in the development of American political culture. For the first time in American political history, a woman candidate enjoyed front-runner status for several months moving into the campaign season, and she was viewed by many as not only the likely nominee from a major party, but also the odds-on favorite to become the next president. However, that eventuality never materialized, as a surprising new challenge suddenly emerged to thwart what many regarded to have been a fait accompli, a challenge that blocked the nomination and election of the first woman president but that nonetheless led to an electoral achievement equally remarkable and no less significant.
Prior to the election season of 2008, the 2006 midterm elections led to the Democratic Party’s reemergence as it regained control of the House of Representatives. Growing anger over the lack of progress in Iraq contributed directly to the outcome of the congressional elections. But as dissatisfied as many American voters were with regard to the course of the war, troubling signs in the economy also weighed heavily on the voters and exposed the vulnerability of the Republican Party. The first quarter of 2007 saw the housing bubble burst with the decline of the subprime mortgage industry. First in California and then in the rest of the country, home prices collapsed as mortgage money began to disappear. By 2008, the bursting of the housing bubble would contribute to a severe recession that would become the most serious economic downturn since the Great Depression (although still not nearly as grave as the crisis in the 1930s). As a result, the Bush presidency lost a great deal of support, President Bush’s approval ratings having dipped to the low thirties through the latter half of 2007 and clearly moving down (they would reach, according to some polls, as low as 19% before the president left office, the lowest ever measured since the approval ratings polls were instituted in the late 1930s, the second term of President Franklin Roosevelt). The country as a whole seemed not just anxious for change but insistent upon it, and the field of candidates exploring their options seemed to grow with each month as the 2008 season approached. President Bush, who remained resolute in his commitment to his policies, was increasingly isolated. His vice president, Richard Cheney, who had served an important role in the Bush administration, was almost universally unpopular and blamed for many of the policies that were now either rejected by large segments of the population or under close scrutiny and reevaluation. It was clear that the president would not pass along the legacy of his administration to a chosen heir; Vice President Cheney expressed no desire to run for nomination, and no other major GOP figure sought President Bush’s imprimatur.
And so, for the first time since 1960, the 2008 campaign season opened without either an incumbent president seeking reelection or an incumbent vice president hoping to inherit the party’s nomination (as in 1960 with then vice president Richard Nixon), and for the first time since 1952 (Dwight D. Eisenhower versus Adlai Stevenson), no incumbent president, incumbent vice president, or former vice president stood as a candidate for nomination. It was the most wide-open field since at least the 1968 election, an election thrown into turmoil with the withdrawal of the incumbent president (Lyndon Johnson) and the assassination of a leading candidate (Robert Kennedy); and to some, given that in 1968 the GOP was dominated on one side by a former vice president (Nixon, who would go on to win that year) and the 1952 campaign included the towering figure of General Dwight D. Eisenhower (who would win both his party’s nomination and the presidency), it was in reality the most wide-open field since 1920 (the campaign season that produced, out of a pool of numerous candidates of all stripes and levels of ability, the Harding-Cox contest). Even if Vice President Cheney had chosen to run for president, he likely would not have garnered much support, given his controversial tenure. Thus the Republican nomination was up for grabs.
The Democratic Party, as mentioned above, did have a front-runner: New York senator and former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose campaign for the presidency was already a cultural milestone. In past elections, one woman, Representative Geraldine Ferraro, had been nominated by a major party for the vice presidency (running alongside Senator Walter Mondale in 1984), and other women had been mentioned as presidential candidates in the past, most of them, beginning with suffragette Victoria Woodhull in 1872, representing minor parties, with a few, most notably Shirley Chisholm—the first woman candidate to win a major party primary in 1972—running under the banner of a major party (as a Democrat). But Senator Clinton was the first woman candidate ever to be considered the top contender. She was joined by a broad field of Democrats, including former North Carolina senator John Edwards, the vice presidential candidate in 2004 and considered by most to be Senator Clinton’s main challenger; Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, who had briefly been a candidate in the 1988 campaign; New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, a prominent member of President Bill Clinton’s administration and one of the more notable Hispanic politicians in the country; Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana; Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut; Ohio representative Dennis Kucinich, a candidate in 2004; former senator Mike Gravel of Alaska; former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack; and Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, an ascending figure in the party who had launched his national career via a breakthrough moment delivering a captivating keynote address at the 2004 convention.
While many analysts anticipated, over the long term, a battle between Clinton and Edwards, early polls indicated surprising strength for Obama. Interestingly, former vice president Al Gore was viewed by many as a potential contender, and in the early polls he ran second to Clinton, with some polls indicating that a significant number of voters might shift their support from Clinton to Gore should he formally announce. But Gore remained detached from the electoral process, having met with bitter disappointment in 2000 when, in winning the popular vote by nearly half a million ballots, he lost the election in the Electoral College. By the campaign season for the 2008 election, Gore was not a serious consideration, although a number of Democrats were prepared to fall in behind him. Other candidates that drew early attention but who ultimately decided not to run were Massachusetts senator John Kerry, the party standard-bearer in 2004; Howard Dean of Vermont, famous for his Iowa caucus “meltdown scream” in 2004; activist Al Sharpton; and Virginia senator Mark Warner. Each of these candidates drew a loyal core of followers but, for various reasons, decided not to mount a campaign.
Of all the candidates, Clinton, Obama, Edwards, Biden, and Dodd drew the most attention early, but it became clear that once Gore and Kerry were eliminated from the mix, it was shaping up as a contest between Clinton and Obama. Senator Clinton drew from a well-funded campaign war chest; enjoyed the support of the party leadership; built, along with her famous husband and former president Bill Clinton, a well-constructed and well-managed campaign organization; and seemed to be the only sure bet to take the nomination. Senator Obama, while popular and appealing, was considered by many within the party to be moving prematurely toward the White House, and when compared to the skilled Clinton campaign, he appeared to be out of his depth. Nonetheless, Obama possessed personal qualities that exuded confidence and competence, and as a fresh face in the eyes of the American electorate, he posed an attractive alternative. Obama ably ran a sharp campaign, borrowing lessons from Howard Dean’s 2004 use of new media to generate attention, support, and donations, while avoiding the pitfalls that damaged Dean by also undertaking more traditional tactics and running, in some ways, a more conventional campaign by comparison. Senator Obama was clearly the underdog to Senator Clinton, who was looking more and more like a juggernaut prior to the commencement of the primary season; but he was nonetheless carving inroads toward electoral support. The Iowa caucus revealed that the 2008 contest would promise to be a battle.
In Iowa, Obama stunned the Clinton campaign. Obama won a substantial 38 percent in the caucus to 30 percent for Edwards; falling to third, Clinton showed a respectable but disappointing 29 percent. It was an unforeseen and heavy early blow to the Clinton campaign, and her front-runner status immediately evaporated; Obama enjoyed a ten-point lead in the polls just prior to the New Hampshire primary, while Edwards, sensing Clinton’s weakness, began targeting her campaign in what appeared to be a joint effort with Obama to deliver the coup de grâce to Clinton’s hopes, some pundits and wags declaring her candidacy moribund if not already dead.
However, Edwards’s tactic of attempting to ally with Obama to gang up on Clinton backfired. In a particularly powerful moment during a debate at New Hampshire’s St. Anselm College, Senator Clinton responded to Edwards’s claim that her campaign could not promise real change, and that a Clinton presidency could not deliver genuine change. Playing to both his supporters and Obama’s, Edwards claimed that they (i.e., he and Obama) could effect change, while Clinton was simply another version of the status quo. Roused, Clinton shot back, “Making change is not about what you believe; it’s not about a speech you make. It’s about working hard. I’m not just running on a promise for change. I’m running on thirty-five years of change. What we need is somebody who can deliver change. We don’t need to be raising false hopes.” It was seen by many as a pivotal moment for the Clinton campaign. Clinton, who had been the epitome of restrained and disciplined professionalism in the early stages of her campaign, was now opening up to the voters, revealing a more emotional and impassioned candidate. The voters responded favorably and rallied behind her, pushing her toward a three-point victory—39 percent to 36 percent—over Obama after having at one point trailed by as much as 13 percent, amounting to at least a 16 percent turnaround. Edwards’s decision to pile on Clinton backfired; he won slightly under 17 percent of the vote, a distant third, with Richardson a still more distant fourth at around 4.5 percent, causing him to withdraw from the campaign. It was now shaping up to be a protracted battle between Senator Clinton and Senator Obama.
Senator Clinton’s comeback was worthy of her husband, the “Comeback Kid,” tightening and complicating the primary race and promising the most interesting primary season since 1976 (which pitted President Ford against former governor Ronald Reagan). It was clear that Clinton and Obama, who had actually split the delegates in New Hampshire, were the only real candidates for the party’s nomination, and it was equally clear that neither one could confidently claim sole front-runner status. It was also evident that winning the popular vote in a given primary was not enough; the delegate count was not determined by the straight overall percentages. In New Hampshire, Clinton had won the popular vote, but the delegates were split between her and Obama. In the following Nevada primary, Clinton won the popular vote but took a close second to Obama in the delegate count, winning twelve delegates to Obama’s thirteen; by the Nevada primary, Edwards was no longer a factor.
With the primary season now in a dead heat, former president Clinton stepped in to assume a more active role, but it nearly backfired. In South Carolina, where Senator Obama was projected to win, Bill Clinton, in an uncharacteristically foolish campaigning moment, dismissively attributed Obama’s likely victory in the Palmetto State as being akin to Jesse Jackson’s win there twenty years earlier during the 1988 campaign, a win that was largely due to heavy support among African Americans there. Perceived as an unnecessary and pointless observation that, for the first time in the campaign, made an issue of Obama’s race, many Democrats were understandably put off by Clinton’s awkward remarks, which were atypical of the former president, owing both to his experience on the stump and to his solid reputation within the African American community. Obama did win South Carolina, as expected; but the campaign now turned more negative moving into Super Tuesday, and the party was dividing along Clinton and Obama loyalties. Significantly, after South Carolina, both Senator Edward Kennedy and his niece, Caroline Kennedy, daughter of President John F. Kennedy, openly supported the Obama campaign, significant endorsements tapping into an important Democratic legacy that boosted Senator Obama’s confidence.
Prior to Super Tuesday, Clinton won in both Michigan and Florida, her campaign once again moving forward. Super Tuesday was a heated battle. In the end, Senator Obama could claim victories in twelve primaries, Senator Clinton ten primaries, with Missouri deadlocked. While Obama won slightly more states, Clinton’s victories occurred in heavily populated states, including by far the largest electoral prize, California, as well as another big state, New York, and adding Massachusetts, a key Democratic stronghold and indicator of a candidate’s strength among the party rank and file. For the first time since 1988, the Super Tuesday cluster of primaries failed to solve the issue, and a prospective nominee still had not emerged.
Most pundits considered the race up in the air. However, when Clinton admitted that her campaign was experiencing funding problems (announcing that she had to pony up $5 million of her own money to stay afloat), while Obama’s campaign enjoyed ample and growing funding, the mood began to shift toward Obama. Looking ahead at the demographics in the upcoming round of primaries, pundits and forecasters began to predict a momentum change for Obama. In a series of primaries and caucuses beginning on February 9 and running intermittently for ten days, Senator Obama swept all eleven contests in a spectacular breakthrough move. Even before it was over, on February 13, NBC News was referring to Obama as the front-runner, the Clinton campaign now viewed as on the descent.
But Clinton was far from defeated. Thanks in part to incendiary comments by Senator Obama’s pastor, a particularly controversial cleric who impudently “damned” the United States while delivering a self-indulgent and inflammatory sermon denouncing its domestic and foreign policies, Obama’s momentum was temporarily mired in a thicket of criticism impugning both the young senator’s religious values and the sincerity of his patriotism. Obama responded admirably, delivering his most important speech since the 2004 keynote address at the Democratic Convention, and certainly the most important speech of the 2008 campaign, in which he spoke candidly and reasonably on the complexities of race and disaffection within the context of American history and social development. Simultaneously expressing an understanding of the reasons behind such comments and rejecting their substance as being “profoundly distorted,” Obama managed to define his campaign in terms of the ongoing quest for “a more perfect union.”
Obama’s deft response notwithstanding, Clinton rebounded to win three more primaries, including convincing wins in Ohio and Rhode Island and a close victory in the Texas primary, with Obama winning in the parallel Texas caucus. In an effort to build on its new momentum, the Clinton campaign focused on the importance of record and achievement, claiming that Obama lacked the experience and political maturity that is needed to competently manage international crises. A dramatic television ad asked voters to consider which candidate would be better prepared to answer the inevitable “3:00 AM phone call” alerting the president to news of an unfolding international crisis requiring swift action and intelligent, courageous leadership. The “red phone” television ad was visually and viscerally effective, but it was not enough to dampen Obama’s attempts to restoke his campaign. Parrying Clinton’s thrust, he managed to win primaries and caucuses in Wisconsin, Vermont, and Mississippi, thus marshaling his forces for an important charge at the late primaries running from late April into June and hard upon the threshold of the upcoming convention in Denver. As predicted in the polls, Clinton opened this last phase of the primary season with a solid win in Pennsylvania, and she also managed to win more primaries and caucuses between April 22 and June 3 than Obama. But in spite of Clinton’s successes in the latter primaries, Obama kept winning more pledged delegates, and significantly, he began receiving more pledges from the important and influential cohort of superdelegates than his adversary.
Thus, on the eve of the Denver convention, Obama held a slight lead in delegates even though Clinton had actually won more primaries; but as close as it was, it proved to be just enough of a lead to win the nomination in just one ballot. Shortly before the Denver convention, the media began to refer to Obama as the “presumptive nominee” after recent wins in the Montana and South Dakota primaries, which were accompanied by the commitment of sixty additional superdelegates pledging for Obama. On June 7, a crestfallen Clinton, who just narrowly fell short after the most competitive primary season campaign in thirty-two years (Ford and Reagan), conceded the nomination. At the Denver convention, Senator Obama officially became the first African American to be nominated for the presidency by a major political party. Obama selected Delaware senator Biden as his running mate, even though Biden had at one point early in the campaign put his foot in his mouth with what was perceived as a well-intentioned but poorly worded, racially suggestive comment about Obama’s “clean” image. But all of that was put well behind the two men as they now moved forward to carry forth the Democratic standard in 2008; they were among the most diverse tandem in memory—Obama an African American with biracial roots, and Biden a Roman Catholic (only three other Roman Catholics had been nominated by a major party to run for vice president—Republican William Miller in 1964 and Democrats Edmund Muskie in 1968 and Geraldine Ferraro in 1984).
In his acceptance speech, candidate Obama declared, “Our government should work for us, not against us. It should ensure opportunity, not for just those with the most money and influence, but for every American who is willing to work. That’s the promise of America, the idea that we are responsible for ourselves, but that we also rise and fall as one nation, the fundamental belief that I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper. That’s the promise we need to keep, that’s the change we need right now.”
The contest for the Republican nomination was in some ways the reverse of the Democratic campaign. While former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani was widely considered the front-runner in the early phase of the process, as the campaign year approached, it became evident that Giuliani’s political capital was not as strong as initially anticipated. In other words, while both Clinton and Giuliani were widely regarded as the front-runners in 2006 and 2007, as the actual campaign season approached, Giuliani’s position was revealed as quite weak, leaving the impression that the GOP field was even more open than the Democrats’. Along with Mayor Giuliani, the major Republican candidates consisted of former governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney, son of George Romney, who ran for the GOP nomination against Richard Nixon in 1968; former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee; and Arizona senator John McCain, who ran for the nomination against George W. Bush in 2000. Other candidates of note included former Tennessee senator Fred Thompson (currently a television actor), Representative Ron Paul from Texas, and California representative Duncan Hunter.
The exact nature of Giuliani’s vulnerability was exposed in Iowa, where Governor Huckabee surprised the field by taking 34 percent of the popular vote, with Romney placing a respectable second at 25 percent. McCain and Thompson landed in a tie for third with 13 percent, and the previously assumed front-runner Giuliani fell far behind the field, winning a meager 4 percent. New Hampshire thus became critical for Giuliani, but his showing there was again discouraging, taking just slightly below 9 percent and less than half a percentage point ahead of fifth-place Ron Paul. The big surprise in New Hampshire came from Senator McCain, whom many pundits and analysts had proclaimed finished the previous year. Both McCain and Romney campaigned vigorously in the Granite State, with the payoff of just under 38 percent of the vote for the former and 32 percent for the latter. Huckabee finished a distant third with approximately 11 percent, Thompson barely registered in sixth with slightly above 1 percent.
After Iowa and New Hampshire, it was clear that the once broad field was narrowed to three major figures: McCain, the New Hampshire winner; Huckabee, the Iowa winner; and Romney, who finished a respectable second in both events. Romney won the next primary in Wyoming, but the big test for his campaign was in Michigan, where his father had served as governor in the 1960s. Pollsters detected a dead heat between McCain, who carried the momentum of New Hampshire, and Romney, who was well known in Michigan owing to his upbringing, with Huckabee also showing the likelihood of a close third, and possibly higher. In the actual primary voting, Romney surged ahead with 39 percent to McCain’s 30 percent, injecting energy into his campaign and tightening the race still further. Huckabee fell farther behind than anticipated, taking just over 16 percent. The following primary in Nevada proved an even bigger victory for Romney, as he took over 51 percent of the vote. Saving their resources and energies for South Carolina, neither McCain nor Huckabee campaigned in Nevada, thus allowing Ron Paul to place behind Romney in the Silver State. Romney’s victory in Nevada pushed him ahead in the delegate count and thus gave him, at least for some, front-runner status.
South Carolina was the site of McCain’s pivotal loss to George W. Bush in 2000, and, given Romney’s recent successes, it was a state critical to both the McCain and Huckabee campaigns. South Carolina was also Fred Thompson’s last stand. Thompson entered the race late, in response to what was perceived to be a grassroots groundswell for the conservative former senator. Thus Thompson devoted considerable energy to South Carolina, particularly focusing his efforts on challenging Huckabee’s conservative credentials and claiming that he, Thompson, offered the real choice for conservatives. But it was McCain’s moment; in a reversal of his 2000 fortunes, McCain won in South Carolina with just over 33 percent, Huckabee placing with slightly below 30 percent, with Thompson lagging far behind, showing a dismal 15.6 percent, scarcely above the 15 percent taken by Romney, who did not mount a campaign there.
Meanwhile, Mayor Giuliani, after being chastened in Iowa and New Hampshire, opted to ignore every state except Florida, gambling that a big win there would reignite his campaign. Florida was a genuine battleground state, as the last two elections had proved; thus if Giuliani could impress in Florida, he would be in a good position to turn his campaign around. Giuliani devoted all of his energy, resources, and focus to the Sunshine State, and for a time pollsters agreed that the strategy might work. But after South Carolina, the other candidates and their supporters began to canvass Florida hard. The result of the Florida primary obliterated Giuliani’s campaign and propelled McCain into the status of the clear front-runner: McCain won 36 percent of the popular vote and took all of Florida’s 57 delegates; Romney placed at 31 percent, with Giuliani limping into third at only just under 15 percent, Huckabee lagging farther behind with only 13 percent. After Florida, McCain began receiving the endorsements of the party’s more prominent leadership, setting him up for more success on Super Tuesday, when twenty-one states would be in play for GOP candidates: nine states would be won by McCain, seven would go to Romney, and five would see wins for Huckabee. Significantly, following the endorsement of California’s “Governator,” Arnold Schwarzenegger, McCain won the Golden State. With California’s weight behind him, McCain’s campaign now could claim around three-fifths of the delegates needed to win the nomination, and he clearly held momentum going into to the later primaries. Huckabee followed Super Tuesday with wins in Kansas and Louisiana, but the McCain camp remained confident, and on February 12, in what is called the “Potomac Primaries” (consisting of Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia), McCain swept up all the delegates in play and was deemed by the media as the “presumptive nominee.” And so it was—on March 4, McCain swept four more primaries (Texas, Ohio, Vermont, and Rhode Island) and clinched the nomination. Moving toward the convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, all that was left was to find a running mate.
It was a reasonable assumption to expect a possible McCain-Romney or McCain-Huckabee ticket, but the McCain camp, anticipating a tough contest with the Democrats, who were guaranteed to nominate a historic candidacy (either the first-ever African American or the first woman nominee from a major party), sought a running mate that would similarly excite the voters. Upon the advice of his inner circle, McCain tapped Alaska governor Sarah Palin, scarcely known outside her home state, as his vice presidential running mate. Palin, who was to most voters an unknown quantity, was a bold, dramatic, and risky choice; but her debut performance at the national convention introducing her to the general public proved outstanding, injecting the McCain campaign with renewed energy and drawing considerable interest to the GOP ticket. Thus the 2008 election, regardless of the result, was guaranteed the result of a watershed moment: either the first African American president or the first woman vice president would be elected come November.
The campaign for the general election thus drew more excitement within the voting public, as well as within the media, than any campaign in recent memory. The Obama campaign stressed the renewing themes of hope and change; the McCain campaign emphasized experience, heroism, and patriotic commitment. Both candidates and their running mates stumped hard throughout the country, with the polls indicating a tightening race in the post-convention stretch. The McCain campaign worked hard to connect to the average working American, making a pop culture hero out of an otherwise anonymous citizen who would come to be known as “Joe the Plumber,” an Ohio plumbing contractor who had vocally challenged candidate Obama during a stump event in his home state. To the McCain-Palin campaign, “Joe the Plumber” represented the industrious, self-reliant, middle-class working man who would be hampered by the typical “tax and regulate” policies that were once again offered by a liberal, activist Democrat, and hence he became a symbol of the values of small government and personal initiative that were central to the Republican Party’s core principles. Republicans followed the lead of the Clinton strategy and attacked Obama’s lack of experience, McCain drawing upon decades of public service and his status as a seasoned and accomplished elder in the Senate, Obama depicted as too young and too green, a veritable backbencher not having even completed his first term in the Senate. Stumping Republicans, egged on by Rudy Giuliani’s St. Paul convention speech, mocked Obama’s record as a “community organizer” in Chicago, and it was frequently implied that an Obama presidency would move the country too far to the left, setting national policies upon a slippery slope that would precipitate an insidiously more “socialist” United States.
Rhetorically, the Obama campaign focused on associating McCain with the Bush presidency, something that the McCain people had labored hard to prevent (not unlike Gore’s efforts to distance himself from Bill Clinton in 2000, and to a lesser extent Hubert Humphrey’s similar efforts to detach himself from President Johnson in 1968). The Democrats indicted the Bush administration and the GOP leadership, which included Senator McCain, for mistakes and deceptions leading to and nearly ruining U.S. efforts in Iraq. Senator Obama, while critical of the war in Iraq, was clearly in support of increased efforts in Afghanistan forcefully directed against al-Qaeda. Thus, while Obama was embraced by many who were against the war, it was clear that Obama’s main criticism was only against the conduct of the war in Iraq. The Obama campaign also targeted Governor Palin. After her dramatic and surprisingly effective debut, the Alaska governor seemed slightly out of her depth on the campaign trail, unable to perform as well on the stump as she had at the convention. With Palin’s every slight miscue or gaffe, the Democrats pounced, gleefully depicting her as shallow and clueless. Thus, while both campaigns did send positive messages to the voters, there was plenty of mud slung across both camps.
In the presidential debates, Senator Obama played well to the viewing audience. Evincing a cool and collected demeanor, and well equipped to recall facts and form arguments in a style that was no doubt cultivated during his days as a law school professor, Obama seemed increasingly more qualified than his critics would allow. Senator McCain’s performance was uneven. At times he seemed strong and seasoned, but at other times, he appeared clumsy and out of touch. Tellingly, both candidates were parodied by television comedians, but the manner in which McCain was spoofed was decidedly unflattering compared to comic interpretations and parodies of Obama. After the first debate, polls indicated that 40 percent of viewers thought Obama the victor and another 30 percent called it a draw, while only 22 percent felt that McCain had won the day. Polling also revealed that Obama was viewed more favorably on economic issues, while McCain was seen as more adept in foreign policy.
A second debate was scheduled shortly after, but in the wake of the recession crisis that interrupted the campaign season, Senator McCain announced that he was suspending his campaign (and thus postponing the next debate) so that he could direct all of his energies to the current crisis. Both candidates flew to Washington, DC, and participated in a roundtable meeting about the crisis with President Bush and several key advisers, but insiders soon leaked that McCain’s presence was scarcely relevant, while Obama, at least according to the accounts of those present, was at least more engaged. McCain’s effort to demonstrate the need for nonpartisan responsibility during the crisis was viewed in the media, rightly or wrongly, as cynical grandstanding. On September 26, after the short emergency hiatus from the campaign trail, McCain agreed to a second debate.
The second debate went poorly for Senator McCain. Senator Obama again appeared fluid and in command; McCain spoke haltingly and committed a number of slight but nagging mistakes, such as calling Senator Obama “that one” and seemingly wandering around stage while Obama spoke. These goofball moves were easily exaggerated in the press and were all too ripe for the late-night wags and the armchair critics. Afterward, polls universally indicated that voters saw Obama as the winner; in some polls, Obama’s favorable ratings were as high as 55 percent, with McCain scarcely making 30 percent in his best showing. Sarah Palin’s debate against Joe Biden did not play as well as the Republicans had hoped. Her convention triumph was now a distant memory, as both she and Senator McCain were, fairly or unfairly, viewed as unable to manage their counterparts in public debate. Governor Palin did develop an ardent and energized following, but her campaign performance on the whole was not sufficient to win over many voters beyond the loyal corps of true believers. The third debate showed even better for Obama. Thus, after the round of debating was over, what began as a dead heat in the polls between the two candidates had evolved into a significant lead for Senator Obama. All polls indicated that the senator from Illinois would prevail and thus become the first African American to be elected president of the United States.
And so it was. On Election Day, Barack Obama was elected to serve as the forty-fourth president of the United States by winning a record number of total votes, coming in at just a fraction under 69,500,000 (or 52.9%), with Senator McCain winning just over 59,850,000 (45.6%) and no minor-party candidate managing above 0.5 percent. Significantly, Obama’s percentage of the popular vote, at just under 53 percent, was the highest for a Democratic candidate since 1964 (Lyndon Johnson’s 61% landslide), and he was the first Democratic candidate to win over 50 percent since Jimmy Carter’s 50.08 percent in 1976. In fact, only three Democratic candidates in history have won a larger percentage of the popular vote than Barack Obama: Franklin Roosevelt (whose percentage of the vote exceeds Obama’s on four occasions, winning 57.4%, 60.8%, 54.7%, and 53.4%), Lyndon Johnson (61.1%), and Andrew Jackson (on two occasions, 55.9% and 54.7%). Furthermore, Obama won the highest percentage of the popular vote by any candidate since the elder Bush’s 53.4 percent in 1988, although it should be noted that President Clinton’s margin of victory of 8.5 percent in 1996 was noticeably higher than Obama’s margin of 7.3 percent, even though Clinton never won more than 49 percent of the vote. In the Electoral College, Obama’s popular-vote victory converted to 365 electoral votes (68%) to 173 for McCain (32%), with Obama carrying every state won by John Kerry in 2004 but significantly adding the battleground states of Florida, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Colorado (going to the Democrats for the first time since 1992 and only the second time since 1964), Nevada, North Carolina, and Virginia, the latter won by the Democrats for the first time since the Johnson landslide in 1964 (a state that even bucked the trend in 1976 and went for the Republican candidate, President Ford, preventing Carter from sweeping the South that year).
If not a landslide, it was nonetheless clearly a decisive victory for Obama; more importantly, it was one of the most important electoral events in American political history and a cultural marker of monumental proportions. A nation that once permitted the brutish enslavement of millions of Africans and people of African descent had just elected, through a decent democratic process, a man of biracial birth to the highest office in the land, an act that for many reflects the nobler principles of that more perfect union toward which the Founders aspired and to which thoughtful Americans to this day remain ardently committed. President Barack Obama has proven to all Americans, and indeed, to the world at large, that the democratic process, when duly framed by the principles of equal rights and liberties and protected by the rule of law, can draw from all of us the sense of fairness and the commitment to dignity that all human beings should ever expect and that every human being always deserves.
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