Abstract
Kimberley Johnson uses the concepts of political and racial time to scrutinize Obama’s presidency. Obama’s presidency is evaluated using Stephen Skowronek’s model of political time. While Obama was initially hailed as a reconstructive president, an overview of his policy success and failures reveals that he was forced to govern as a preemptive president. Obama’s preemptive presidency was also shaped by racial time. His neoliberal race relations approach was met with resistance, within his own coalition and later by the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement as well as by the rise of right-wing white populism. The latter re-animated the Republican Party which in turn acted as a hard check on Obama’s policy goals. Johnson argues that the Obama presidency was unique not only because he was the first black president, but also because his presidency inhabited both political and racial time.
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Notes
- 1.
See Kimberley S. Johnson, “The Color Line and the State: Race and American Political Development,” The Oxford Handbook of American Political Development, Robert C. Lieberman, Suzanne Mettler, Rick Valelly, eds. (Oxford University Press, 2016); on racial orders see Desmond King and Rogers Smith, “Racial Orders and American Political Development” APSR 99 (2005): 75–92; also see Michael Omi and Howard Winant, eds., Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge, 1994).
- 2.
On Obama as a “black president” see Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years In Power: An American Tragedy (One World Books, 2017).
- 3.
The broader discussions of presidential types and times comes from two sources: Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership form John Adams to Bill Clinton (Cambridge. MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997); and, Presidential Leadership in Political Time: Reprise and Reappraisal (Lawrence, KA: University Press of Kansas, 2011 (rev)).
- 4.
See also Skowronek and Orren’s (2004) definition of “political order” as a “constellation of rules, institutions, practices, and ideas that hang together over time, a bundle of patterns…exhibiting coherence and predictability while other things change around them” (Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, The Search for American Political Development (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp.14–15.
- 5.
Barack Obama, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (Broadway Books, 2004); as well as his The Audacity of Hope (Vintage, 2008).
- 6.
For fuller discussion of racial orders, see Johnson, “The Color Line and the State,” and King and Smith, “Racial Orders and American Political Development”.
- 7.
For discussion of Civil Rights State, see Desmond King and Robert Lieberman, “The Civil Rights State,” in K. Morgan & A. Orloff (Eds.), The Many Hands of the State: Theorizing Political Authority and Social Control (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); and Hanes Walton, Jr., When the Marching Stopped The Politics of Civil Rights Regulatory Agencies (SUNY Press, 1988).
- 8.
See Peter Beinart, “The New New Deal: What Barack Obama Can Learn from F.D.R. and What the Democrats need to do,” Time (November 24, 2008).
- 9.
See Andrew Sullivan, “Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters,” The Atlantic, December 2007.
- 10.
For quotations see Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make, pp. 39–44.
- 11.
According to Skowronek, presidents in this mode are “orthodox-innovators” who “galvanize political action with promises to continue the good work of the past and demonstrate the vitality of the established order in changing times. As the fount of political orthodoxy, their office is a sacred trust full of obligations to uphold the gospel and deliver the expected services in the prescribed manner,” p. 41.
- 12.
Indeed according to Skowronek, the disjunctive president “can neither shore up the faltering system nor repudiate it,” p. 39.
- 13.
See Christopher S. Parker, and Matt A. Barreto. Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America (Princeton University Press, 2013). For Biden quote see “Joe Biden: This a Big Fucking Deal,” The Guardian, March 23, 2010.
- 14.
See Michael Hanchard and Erin Aeran Chung, “From Race Relations to Comparative Racial Politics: A Survey of Cross-National Scholarship in Race in the Social Sciences,” DuBois Review 1: 2(2004): 319–343, 332.
- 15.
We can also think of this as a “racial order,” defined as a political order in which “political actors… adopted (and often adapted) racial concepts, commitments, and aims in order to bind together their coalitions and structure governing institutions that express and serve their architects,” King and Smith, 2005, p. 75.
- 16.
On neoliberalism and black politics, see Michael C. Dawson and Megan Ming Francis, “Black Politics and the Neoliberal Racial Order,” Public Culture 1 January 2016; 28 (1 (78)): 23–62.; as well as Lester K. Spence, Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics (Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, 2015).
- 17.
Obama quote from Katharine Q. Seelye and Jeff Zeleny, “On the Defensive, Obama Calls His Words Ill-Chosen,” New York Times, April 13, 2008.
- 18.
Jeremiah Wright speech from Brian Ross, “Obama’s Pastor: God Damn America, U.S. to Blame for 9/11,” ABC News; “Barack Obama’s Speech on Race [transcript], New York Times, March 18, 2008.
- 19.
See “Barack Obama’s Speech on Race [transcript], New York Times, March 18, 2008.
- 20.
See Hanes Walton and Robert C. Smith, “The Race Variable and the American Political Science Association’s State of the Discipline Reports and Books, 1907–2002.” In African American Perspectives on Political Science, edited by Wilbur C. Rich (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007), p. 28.
- 21.
See Shelby Steele, A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win (Free Press, 2007); but also see Ralph J. Bunche, A Brief and Tentative Analysis of Negro Leadership. Edited by Jonathan Scott Holloway (NYU Press, 2005).
- 22.
For early discussion of deracialization see Georgia Persons, ed. Dilemmas of Black Politics (HarperCollins 1993).
- 23.
See Fredrick Harris’s The Price of the Ticket: Barack Obama and the Rise and Decline of Black Politics (Oxford University Press, 2012).
- 24.
See the chapter “The Propaganda of History,” in W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (Free Press 1997 [1935]).
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Johnson, K.S. (2019). Swimming the Multiple Currents: The Political and Racial Time of Barack Obama’s Presidency. In: Rich, W. (eds) Looking Back on President Barack Obama’s Legacy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01545-9_7
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