27October2009
The 2008 presidential election
The 2008 presidential election will go down as a historic turning point in the history of the United States of America. For the first time in the country’s history, a major party had nominated a black man as their candidate for office, an unprecedented occurrence especially considering that in united states history, every presidential candidate but three had been a white male protestant. The closest we’d ever come to electing a “minority” would be John Fitzgerald Kennedy, a white male catholic. Besides Kennedy, only two other Catholics – Al Smith in 1928 and John Kerry in 2004 – had ever even won a nomination, and no other people besides white, male protestants had ever even been nominated.
Which is why the 2008 presidential election will be studied for years. The democratic party’s nominee was Barack Hussein Obama, the son of a white American woman from Kansas and a black Kenyan exchange student. Obama’s wife, Michele, is also black. For a country that only forty years earlier had instituted Jim Crow laws, and had integrated such crucial components of society such as the military and postal service only in the 1950s, it was a spectacular reversal of precedent.
Also notable about the 2008 presidential election is that Obama’s opponent, John McCain of Arizona, selected a female to be his running mate. McCain tapped Alaska governor Sarah Palin to fill the number two slot on his ticket, feeling that her rabid conservatism, good looks, and propensity to speak in an uneducated manner on subjects she knew nothng about would remind the conservative core of George W. Bush, allowing him to consolidate that particular voting block. Palin was only the second woman to be on a national ticket, joining Geraldin Ferraro, who was Walter Mondale’s VP choice in the 1984 election.
Palin’s selection did in fact consolidate the conservative core of voters that McCain was having trouble winning over, but in the end it cost him the independents that he needed even more desperately. Palin’s mean intellect, lack of credentials and good judgement ended up turning off reams of undecided voters, who moved en masse to Obama’s ticket because of his moderate approach and adult manner.
The telling blow for the McCain/Palin ticket in the 2008 presidential election came in an interview with ABC’s Charles Gibson, an able broadcaster but not a journalist known for particularly hard-hitting interviews. When he asked Palin whether she agreed with the Bush Doctrine, she was clearly flummoxed and didn’t know how to respond. This lack of knowledge about the foreign policy doctrine that had defined the decade killed any momentum McCain/Palin had, and exposed them both as being dangerously out of touch.