I suppose that a tiny number of white people may have been more likely to vote for Obama due to his race but let’s be honest-being black has historically been a HUGE negative in getting elected in the US and your assertion that Obama was an “affirmative action” hire strikes me as extremely wrong, and based on some kind of caricature. Did you see the campaign that McCain ran against him? Did you see the campaign that Clinton ran? The only way I can see that race may have really worked in his favor is that some of his opponents added so much racist subtext that it made THEM look bad and ruin their OWN campaign. That makes race a factor in a roundabout way, but it’s certainly not affirmative action.

Race has always been a hidden factor. It’s that in the past, being a person of color was a net minus; that is, there were more people who would vote against than for owing to race. In short, race was one factor among many, and it is nothing but conjecture, as you say, to weigh race as the deciding factor.

My stance was based on conjecture. Hence the “I find it hard to believe…” Have you got some poll data to back your assertion that race wasn’t a decisive factor in his victory?
Were his policy stances (oblique as they were) so different from those of John Kerry?
I don’t begrudge Obama being elected but I do believe his race and the historical nature of a first black president acted in tandem with his rhetoric to get him elected. A promise of “Change” coming from, as Chirol states, a white freshman congressman wouldn’t resonate with the same force by my measure.

Also, I find it personally impossible to believe that a white freshman senator with virtually no experience would have been even a candidate for the nomination, much less the nominee and actually president. There is no case to be made Obama had the requisite experience to run. He even used running as ‘experience.’

Again, this is my personal impression and opinion and my point is that it was a factor when it shouldn’t have been one. Nevertheless, I can understand why it was one.

@Jay:

What is a “hefty portion”? Do you have poll data to support your gut feeling? My 68-year-old mother still recounts bitterly how she lost a great job opportunity with the state government owing to affirmative action, yet for the first time since 1964, she cast a vote for a democratic presidential candidate. Obama’s supporters are a diverse demographic. Obama’s race won him some votes but cost him others. A fellow employee whom I had never considered racist cracked a joke about an Obama White House replacing the Rose Garden with a watermelon patch. I don’t think anyone can accurately quantify whether Obama’s race was a net gain or loss, but it certainly was not the overriding factor in his win.

People who focus on their diffferences do so because they can’t focus on talent or excellence.

Witness the truly great figures in history. They do not play on gender, race or creed. Losers do. Obama and his Obamabots are racists.

Joe: I agree culture is better way to describe it. Perhaps that will be the trend in the future, away from skin color and towards different types of subcultures.

AA= affirmative action.

Obama will not try any gun control moves. Way too many Blue Dog democrats to kill that, especially Jim Webb.

However there are two parallel cultures at work now. Those that want to move beyond skin color and those who want to use it to enhance preferred customer status.

The US is at least sensible enough to officially consider “Hispanic” or “Latino” a separate classification from race, since every country in Latin America has white, black and Native American Hispanic/Latinos in varying proportions. Heck, there are even a lot of Asians down there. Calling Hispanic a race is like calling American a race.

My high school in Florida was statistically “90% black,” but still had incredible cultural diversity between its Americans, Jamaicans, Bahamians, Dominicans, Cubans, Haitians, a smattering of other Afro-Caribbean people and even a few “real” Africans. Many people who had never been there were surprised that a white kid like me could survive there. But skin color is ultimately little more than what people make it to be. (Not that I wouldn’t mind more melanin when I go to the beach…)

Even hispanic is considered a race. Which makes little sense. From a distance race seems to be a euphemism for what multiethnic countries call ethnicity.

I’m definitely willing to give him a chance on many things. It’s hard to know what exactly to believe. At times I don’t trust him and loathe his ideas while at others he seems to demonstrate his awareness of the difficulties that lie ahead and realize Bush made many good moves with the information he had at the time.

However, if he brings back the “assault weapons” ban, or any other anti-gun legislation, that’s it for me.

Curzon: That article didn’t say much. Merely that because people like Obama so much, it must be a great thing. We’ll see how that pans out in 6 months, or when a major catastrophe hits.

Eddie: I don’t accuse Obama of being the only one to practice identity politics, just that he did it at the expensive of fighting a real and deeper racism. As for Palin, swimsuit contest aside, she was a retard and a blatant and pathetic attempt to bring so-called joe sixpack on board. It’s one bad McCain decision.

What do you think the Sarah Palin was about? That was a blatant attempt to grab HRC supporters and add novelty/change to the ticket.

Most would argue that Obama’s race hurt him in every other way in the election campaign, aside from the increased black vote in key states. It took a top-notch organizational effort, an economic recession, a deeply unpopular president and party and a series of miscues on his opponent’s part for Obama to win.

I see no evidence people in Nevada, Colorado, Virginia, New Mexico, Iowa, etc. who had no reason to support a black candidate based on his race, did so.

I do see substantial evidence both in the primaries and the general that a considerable number of whites voted against him for his skin color.

Now that he has won, his story becomes America’s and can be used to soothe all types of personal needs and wounds.
In a year of O.J., R. Kelly, Jesse Jackson, etc., not to mention more personal problems such as massive numbers of black families losing their homes and jobs, dozens of black children being gunned down at school and in front yards, did you not expect black Americans to vote en masse for one of their own to push back decades of being told they were not good enough for equality, let alone the Presidency?

Or for Republicans like Rollins, Huckabee, McCain, Cheney, Bush, etc. to not express with believable joy in their voices what a historic moment this is and what it says about America?

People tend to try to look on the bright side of things, especially right now.