Candidate Obama and the Dilemmas of Political Time
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David A. Crockett
Historical context affects the race for the White House as much as it does presidential leadership. Candidates from the opposition party require several elements to fall into place for them to achieve victory. Is Barack Obama a successful opposition candidate—someone who won office in a fashion similar to Bill Clinton, Dwight Eisenhower, and Woodrow Wilson? Or did he run a campaign that set the stage for a new reconstruction of politics along the lines of Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan? This paper examines the 2008 presidential election through the lens of political time, evaluating the Obama campaign to determine whether it met the criteria for opposition party victory. The answer to that question helps us understand where President Obama may be placed in political time—and the nature of the opportunities and constraints he possesses as either a president of opposition or a president of reconstruction.
©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Article
- Historical Analogies, Military Surges, (and Economic Crises): Who Should be Consulted?
- It's the Financial Crisis, Stupid! How Framing and Competency Signals Altered the Economic Vote in the US and Germany
- Going off the Rails on a Crazy Train: The Causes and Consequences of Congressional Infamy
- Unhyphenated Americans in the 2010 U.S. House Election
- Candidate Obama and the Dilemmas of Political Time
- Obama to Blame? African American Surge Voters and the Ban on Same-Sex Marriage in Florida
- The Behavioral Political Economy of Budget Deficits: How Starve the Beast Policies Feed the Machine
- Publius and Proofiness: Is Using Sampling with the Census for Apportioning Representatives Constitutional?
- Testing Obama's Withdrawal Timeline Hypothesis in Afghanistan
- The Practicing Politics Working Group of the American Political Science Association: Bridging the Policy-Research Divide from the Practitioner's Point of View
- Response to Quirk's "Polarized Populism: Masses, Elites, and Partisan Conflict"
- Review
- A House Dividing: Understanding Polarization
- Review of Treaty Politics and the Rise of Executive Agreements: International Commitments in a System of Shared Powers
