I’m not.
I was shocked by the vocal rot and bile so many people spewed after the election. I’m surprised they hadn’t died years ago from septic poison brain lesions. The way some public officials made free with racial slurs was terrible. After the election I realized the southern states have more nasty entrenched bigots than I thought.
Bill Clinton’s dad was a travelling salesman. W’s dad was President. What’s the similarity? Folksy charm and Southern accents?
Did y’all see Deep Impact? 
I agree. There was so much in Obama’s favor that I would have been shocked if he’d lost.
If Obama had a gone against a white male in the Dem primary, I’m not so sure he would have succeeded.
That’s funny because I was having thoughts about how my friends are so excited there’s a black president and I thought, did you vote for him based on the color of his skin or the content of his character? And then realized that it must have been about more than his skin because Jesse Jackson didn’t make it very far.
I think this was key. If McCain had picked a male VP, I’m not sure that O would have pulled it off. When it comes to the public’s stereotypes about what a president should look like, Black Man wins over Woman of any color.
It’s easier for people to picture a black man being an assertive and decisive leader than a woman, and they don’t tend to fret about “Who will watch Obama’s kids?!? He’ll be distracted by that and won’t run the country right!” the way that some people fretted about what Palin would do with her kids while in office.
Has John Edwards been that forgotten already?
I think both Obama and Clinton actually benefitted from not being white males to the extent that their campaigns drew extra early media attention. Of course, that only goes so far - at some point the story has to stop being about how you’re a black man/white woman running for President and become about you as an individual. Nobody gets elected as a symbol.
I mean head-to-head. Once Edwards was out of the picture, it was just BO and HC.
Edwards wasn’t popular enough to have a chance against either Clinton or Obama. All he managed to really do was siphon off some of the white vote that might have gone to Hillary.
This is a good point and I agree with it 100%. The Jacksons and Sharptons of this world will never be elected president. When somebody feels the need to bring up race in nearly every sentence, that is the time when I tune out. I don’t want to be told that I’m a racist just because I don’t agree with you on certain issues. It wears me down and not in a good way.
Of course there is still racism in this country, just not as much as the far left would like us to believe.
“Shocked” is not the word I would have chosen, but I was surprised. I suspect that much of the variance in response to this election is related to age. In my lifetime this country has gone from tolerating lynching (even sending postcards of them) and jim crow to electing a black president. There was a good deal of violence between those two points, and, if Oscar Grants is any indication, there is still more to come.
How could you *not *be surprised?
Since I thought he would win before the primaries started I’m not shocked he won.
He certainly didn’t win by default either. Clinton was a very formidable candidate and her gender certainly wasn’t some anchor she had around her neck. There are more women voters than men anyway. how quickly we forget the rest of the field. Edwards, Richardson, et all. There were a number of qualified candidates white and non-white, male and female who could have won. McCain was by far the most electable Republican of the pack and he couldn’t beat Obama either.
There were people who assured me that a black man could never win in America. Now I hear a lot of excuses for how it could have happened, bad opponents, bad economy with the moral of the story being that normally this never could have happened.
I remember Lars Von Trier going batshit over how offensive he thought it was to show a black man as president TV shows because America was way too racist for ever such a thing to ever happen. I haven’t heard anything from him lately on the subject.
Given Obama’s margin of victory, I doubt that.
Um, what?!
Whatever Bill’s dad was, bill himself was a Rhodes Scholar and Yale grad. Both of them were more or less elite white males who played down for votes. If Obama had tried that, he never would have won.
Absolutely. I’m old enough to remember the civil rights marches, and while not shocking, Obama’s victory not so long after black people in the south had to risk their lives to even vote is amazing.
But remember, there was a once in a lifetime confluence of factors. We have an exceptional black candidate running after eight years of one of the worst administrations in history, and in the midst of a financial meltdown. He was running against someone who made nearly every mistake possible. Plus, Obama is not mainstream - he is truly African American, with an African father, who grew up in a white family.
I was actually more surprised we Democrats pulled it off, but I’ve been burned before.
Gosh
You mean us old racists whiteys actually WANT our blackie presidential candidates to be somewhate educated, experienced, literate, and intelligent?
We actually kind of want that from the white ones too ya know…
I wish that were the case. Thinking on the downside for a moment, what did it take for a black man to be elected? A country absolutely run into the ground for eight years with one of the worst imaginable despicable authoritarian torturing incompetent administrations, and a pathetic opponent who chose the worst conceivable running mate in the world. Absolutely everything had to go in Obama’s favor on this.
I think I can simultaneously say
(1) Given where we are as a society right now, I’m not surprised that Obama was able to win
and
(2) It’s incredible that we’ve come so far in the last few decades that I’m able to say that.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not naive enough to think that racism is no longer an issue. But in a few decades we’ve gone from the institutionalized racism of Jim Crow laws and such, to now having an African-American man as president. That shows a pretty incredible level of progress.
I’m young enough that I don’t personally remember the days of Jim Crow, but my parents do. I think for many people of their generation and previous ones, it’s not so much that they’re “shocked” that Obama won based on how things were in 2008, but that they’re shocked that they lived to see such a time.
I think that’s a retroactive view. John McCain went into this campaign looking like the strongest Republican contender. And Obama had no easy stroll to the nomination either - he had to get past candidates like Clinton and Edwards who had a reputation as being more electable.
But I’ll concede the worst imaginable administration and worst possible running mate points.
Why 2004?
It most certainly changed when Barack Obama entered the scene, I was refering to the period before that.
Which kind of proves my point, no?
