The Politics of Cognitive Dissonance: Spin,the Media,and Race (and Ethnicity) in the 2008 US Presidential Election

This article examines the roles of spin, the media, and race (and ethnicity) in influencing voter behavior in the 2008 US presidential election. It invokes the concept of cognitive dissonance to explain how political strategists effectively propagandize – i.e., “reinvent their candidates” and “reinvent their opponents' actual record” – in order to successfully garner votes for their candidates. In particular, it considers spin and how spin and the media are used to shape public opinion by causing voters to distrust the veracity, credentials, and records of opposing candidates and to set the policy agenda. It also discusses how race, ethnicity, gender, and policy issues were used in the 2008 US presidential election campaign, and describes the impact of “spinning” on voter behavior and the election outcome. Equally important, it discusses the implications of the Obama victory for Canadian governance in two pivotal areas: domestic race relations and direct parliamentary representation of minorities. The article closes with a brief discussion of the symbolism attributed to Barack Obama's electoral victory by both American and Canadian voters.     

Surge and Decline: The Impact of Changes in Voter Turnout on the 2010 Senate Elections

Enthusiasm among Republican voters and a lack thereof among Democrats was cited by many post-election analyses as a contributing factor to the outcome of the 2010 midterm elections. Analysis of the aggregate county level voter turnout and results of the 2010 Senate races provides strong evidence of (1) a sharper decline in turnout from 2008 to 2010 in areas in which Barack Obama did well in 2008 and (2) a significant relationship between turnout changes from 2006–2010 and 2008–2010 and changes in the vote share of Democratic Senate candidates in 2010. In addition, a test of the referendum theory of midterm elections shows that declining presidential approval ratings, but not economic indicators, are predictive of the Democratic vote share in 2010. Despite previous findings that midterm and presidential electorates do not fundamentally differ, this analysis of the 2010 Senate elections provides evidence that differential turnout among core and peripheral voters is an important part of the explanation for the surge that occurs in presidential elections and the subsequent decline in voter participation during midterms.     

The American system: US foreign and domestic politics since the Second World War

Historians, like politicians, need to find a language and frame of reference to connect with their audience or readership. In the current US presidential campaign the candidates, Senators John McCain and Barack Obama, are offering the voters a bridge between the troubled past and a more hopeful future. The works under consideration in this review article employ a similar method. All the authors share the widely held view of the broad shape of US foreign relations since the Second World War, in particular the ideological struggle with the Soviet Union known as the Cold War followed by the more amorphous attempt to maintain American primacy, which has characterized the last two decades. Throughout this longer period the processes and goals of US foreign policy have been controversial: there has not, of course, been complete consensus. One topic which was and remains debated is the role and value of individuals, either high‐level politicians or senior diplomats, in the conduct of foreign policy. Another area of debate, often fierce argument, is the impact of domestic forces upon policy‐making. In the present case the leading example is provided by the amalgam of influences which determine US policy towards that nexus of competing interests often optimistically short‐handed as the Arab–Israeli peace process. One link between these two topics is the role of the US in multilateral bodies; and American actions within the United Nations and towards other international organizations are also examined. These and other related issues are contextualized geographically through an examination of American policies in the Greater Middle East, in particular the predominantly Muslim states which stretch eastwards from Egypt to India. While not providing a partisan political programme for the incoming president to follow, the collective message of these texts offers guidelines, even injunctions for the future conduct of US foreign policy.     

Place,candidate roots,and voter preferences in an age of partisan polarization: Observational and experimental evidence

Throughout the mid-twentieth century, scholars identified considerable contextual variation in American electoral politics. Party platforms varied significantly across the country, split ticket voting was commonplace, and candidate idiosyncrasies appeared to matter a great deal to voters. According to previous research, candidates' roots seemed especially important to voters, with “homegrown” candidates enjoying a boost at the polls. There is good reason to expect, however, that voters may no longer care about candidate roots. Partisan politics have polarized, both ideologically amongst elites and “affectively” amongst the electorate, continually since the mid-1990s (Mason, 2018). In addition, recent work suggests that American political behavior has “nationalized; ” meaning that national level partisan cues dominate voters' decision calculus, from presidential to mayoral races (Hopkins 2018). Both trends suggest little to no role for apolitical candidate characteristics to factor into voters' evaluations of candidates. To reassess voters’ appetite for homegrown candidates, this paper features observational and conjoint experimental studies designed to discern whether individuals in the United States still care about candidate roots. Results indicate that, despite trends of partisan polarization and nationalization, voters continue to consider candidate roots important. Furthermore, this preference appears especially strong among those with a strong place identity, suggesting that those for whom geographical identity is most important are particularly sensitive to geographical cues.     

President Obama,the Bible,and Political Rhetoric

Abstract

How has President Obama made use of the Bible in his political rhetoric, especially as it relates to public policy debates? This article addresses Obama's religious origins, his work as a community organizer in Chicago, his coming to Christian faith under the leadership of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and the development of his understanding regarding the relationship between faith and politics. In particular President Obama has emphasized the notion that we are all our brothers' and sisters' keepers. He also stresses the present generation of black Americans as "the Joshua Generation." The article considers President Obama's hermeneutics, as well as the important context of the black church for his own use of Scripture. The lenses of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Reinhold Niebuhr are also addressed as they relate to Obama's use of Scripture in political rhetoric.     

Race to the top: using experiments to understand gender bias towards female politicians

ABSTRACT

Gender balance in political representation is an important goal of governments. In this paper, we ask: Do voters judge female politicians less favourably than male politicians, when given an otherwise identical set of information about their backgrounds? We employ an innovative online experiment (N?=?1933) to measure Australians’ attitudes towards female politicians and examine a series of hypotheses. We find voters see female candidates as more capable and are more likely to vote for them, but they are less likely to expect them to win. Female candidates are seen as more capable in their military and healthcare roles, but gender is perceived to be a major barrier to a female candidate’s success. Women and those aligning with the Labor/Green parties are more supportive of a female candidate, but we find limited evidence that those aligning with the Liberal/Nationals are openly hostile to a female candidate.     

Pragmatism or what? The future of US foreign policy

This article discusses the intellectual sources of the presidential candidates' foreign policies. In the case of Barack Obama, the article examines the formation of his worldview, his intellectual inspirations, his most significant foreign policy appointments and the diplomatic course he has pursued as president. Mitt Romney's foreign policy views are harder to identify with certainty, but his business and political career—as well as the identity and dispositions of his advisory team—all provide important clues as to the policies he will pursue if elected in November 2012. The article finds much common ground between the two candidates; both are results‐driven pragmatists, attuned to nuance and complexity, who nonetheless believe—in agreement with Robert Kagan—that US geostrategic primacy will continue through the span of the twenty‐first century. The gulf between the candidates on domestic policy is vast, but on foreign policy—Romney's bellicose statements through the Republican primaries served a purpose that has passed—there is little between them.     

Cartographies of Globalisation,Technologies of Gendered Subjectivities: The Dub Poetry of Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze

By locating the current usage of ‘diaspora’ within today's cultures, I make a case for the unacknowledged subject of Paul Gilroy's black Atlantic world being Western, urban and male. In order to consider the black Atlantic as the site of multiple and heterogeneouslyproduced subjectivities, I turn to the Jamaican performance poet, Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, whose work stages modern black subjectivities that are Third World, rural, domestic and female. Her poems depict black female subjectivities that are both local and global, articulated more through dancehall culture and radio technology than a ‘cut‐and‐mix’ music style that tends to be male‐identified.     

Ten years on: Obama's war on terrorism in rhetoric and practice

Ten years after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington DC on September 11, 2001, the United States remains embroiled in a long‐term struggle with what George W. Bush termed the existential threat of international terrorism. On the campaign trail, his successor as US President, Barack Obama, promised to reboot the ‘war on terror’. He claimed that his new administration would step back from the rhetoric and much of the Bush administration policy, conducting a counterterrorism campaign that would be more morally acceptable, more focused and more effective—smarter, better, nimbler, stronger. This article demonstrates, however, that those expecting wholesale changes to US counterterrorism policy misread Obama's intentions. It argues that Obama always intended to deepen Bush's commitment to counterterrorism while at the same time ending the ‘distraction’ of the Iraq War. Rather than being trapped by Bush's institutionalized construction of a global war on terror, the continuities in counterterrorism can be explained by Obama's shared conception of the imperative of reducing the terrorist threat to the US. The article assesses whether Obama has pursued a more effective counterterrorism policy than his predecessor and explores how his rhetoric has been reconstituted as the actions of his policy have unfolded. By addressing his policies toward Afghanistan and Pakistan, Guantánamo Bay and torture, the uses of unmanned drone attacks and domestic wire‐tapping, this article argues that Obama's ‘war’ against terrorism is not only in keeping with the assumptions and priorities of the last ten years but also that it is just as problematic as that of his predecessor.     

The 1984 Australian elections: Find the women?

There was a record number of women candidates in the 1984 Federal Elections. 105 (25%) ran for the House of Representatives enlarged from 124 seats to 148. 53 (25%) ran for the 48 positions at the half Senate Elections. This resulted in increased representation for women, with 2 new MHRs (including one who moved from the Senate) and after some musical chairs one extra Senator.⁽¹⁾ These were not the numbers predicted by some politicians and commentators on the eve of the December Elections and the increase was certainly not in proportion to the greater number of candidates and seats, taking 1983 as the base year.⁽²⁾     

President Obama at mid‐term

This article provides an analysis of President Obama at mid‐term. It looks at the mid‐term elections from the perspective of the political issues that informed the debate, the implications of Republican control of the House of Representatives for both legislation and relations between the administration and Congress, and the policy areas where cooperation and possible progress is possible. The article looks at the Tea Party movement as a collection of single issue and multi‐issue political groups ranging from ‘nativists’ to Christian fundamentalists to the eclectic and unprecedented combination of fiscal and social conservatives seen at Glen Beck's ‘honoring America’ event at the Washington Monument. This broad movement may be seen as a classical revitalization movement, not unlike those described by Anthony F. C. Wallace. It is opposed by another ‘revitalization movement’ namely the ‘American renewal’ promised by Obama as he ran for office in 2008. These countervailing narratives—in effect two different versions of America, one reflecting the Tea Party broadly conceived and the other reflecting Obama's ‘promise’—are seeking political traction among independents. The implications of this struggle are momentous. The prevailing narrative will frame policy going forward on a range of domestic issues and on selected foreign policy questions, which will include the present debate on the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with Russia and the upcoming debate on China, which will have even further reaching effects. Finally, this article describes Obama's struggle to frame his policy successes and the ensuing debate in a favourable light. His opponents have sought to limit his progress by presenting him as ‘the other”, an effective but destructive technique that could have longer term effects on the domestic political discourse. However, the author remains an optimist; he believes, together with 50 per cent of Americans, the president is likable, logical and gives a good speech, and that he will be re‐elected in 2012.     

Obama and the third Bush term: towards a typology of Obama studies

In 2008, Barack Obama pledged to transform not simply his nation's domestic orientation but also its foreign policy and its reception abroad; he would be the ‘un‐Bush’ president. The books under review each offer a preliminary assessment of how far he has departed from Bush and how far he has adapted and improved his predecessor's approach. For some, Obama has been compromised in his international agenda, like Bush before him, by domestic constraints that have afflicted every modern US president; for others, his lofty ambitions have been hobbled by the enduring realities of global politics. This review offers a typology of assessments of Obama's foreign policy and suggests which is more accurate and why.     

The Presidential Manipulation of Inherited Wars of Choice: Barack Obama's Use of Nixonian Methods as Commander in Chief

Despite their apparent differences, both Richard Nixon and Barack Obama secured their party's nominations and ultimately the presidency partly due to their manipulation of contentious and inherited “wars of choice.” The wars in Vietnam and Iraq provided the political and cultural circumstances that made Nixon and Obama credible “peace candidates” in 1968 and 2008 respectively. Having championed their opposition to the wars to gain the presidency, both men continued the conflicts throughout their first term and subsequently utilized these conflicts to help secure a second term in office, declaring “victory” as part of their re-election campaigns. This study examines the manner in which Obama, like Nixon, benefited as president from an inherited “war of choice” and adopted Nixonian methods to maximize his chances for re-election in 2012.     

Success,swing and gender: The performance off women candidates for parliament in New Zealand, 1946–87

New Zealand was the first country in the world to give women the vote, and it has a higher proportion of women as Members of Parliament than any of the other Anglo‐American first‐past‐the‐post democracies. An examination of the vote‐pulling powers of women candidates for Parliament in all the general elections in New Zealand since the end of the Second World War finds that female candidates for the Labour Party have done statistically significantly better than their male counterparts, but for National Party candidates the reverse is the case — men perform better than women. Various reasons for these findings are canvassed, including the possibilities that Labour in New Zealand is benefitting from its initiatives with respect to women's affairs, and from the female equivalent of an ‘old boys’ network.     

The Judicial Bookshelf

A well‐established fact of American government is the unpredictability of vacancies on the U.S. Supreme Court. Representatives and Senators face voters every two and six years, respectively. A President serves for four years and may be reelected only once. Justices, however, do not sit for fixed terms and in effect enjoy life tenure. After his inauguration as the forty‐third president in January 2001, George W. Bush had no opportunity to make a High Court appointment until he was well into his second term when, on July 1, 2005, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor announced her intention to leave the Bench. ¹ By contrast, the forty‐fourth President encountered his first High Court vacancy much sooner, and in his first term, as Justice David Hackett Souter notified the Obama White House on May 1, 2009, of his intention to retire from “regular active service as a Justice” when the Court recessed for the summer. ²     

George W. Bush,Barack Obama and the future of US global leadership

The foreign policy world views of George W. Bush and Barack Obama differ dramatically. Bush made terrorism the focal point of his foreign policy and dismissed the idea that either allies or international institutions should constrain America's freedom of action. Obama sees terrorism as one of many transnational problems that require the cooperation of other countries to combat and, as a result, the United States must invest more in diplomatic efforts to build partnerships. Despite these differences, both presidents share one common conviction: that other countries long for US leadership. Bush believed that friends and allies would eventually rally to the side of the United States, even if they bristled at its actions, because they shared America's goals and had faith in its motives. Obama believed that a United States that listened more to others, stressed common interests and favored multinational action would command followers. In practice, however, both visions of American global leadership faltered. Bush discovered that many countries rejected his style of leadership as well as his strategies. Obama discovered that in a globalized world, where power has been more widely dispersed, many countries are not looking to Washington for direction. The future success of US foreign policy depends on the ability of policy‐makers to recognize and adapt to a changing geopolitical environment in which the US remains the most significant military, diplomatic and economic power but finds it, nonetheless, increasingly difficult to drive the global agenda.     

Washington's failure to resolve the North Korean nuclear conundrum: examining two decades of US policy

More than two decades of nuclear dialogue between the United States and North Korea have not prevented Pyongyang from conducting four nuclear tests and building up a nuclear weapons arsenal. Putting the blame for the failure of this dialogue solely on Pyongyang ignores the hesitancy and confusion of US policy. Historical evidence suggests that the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations consistently failed to prioritize their objectives and adopted an impatient and uncompromising negotiating strategy that contributed to this ongoing non‐proliferation fiasco. Identifying US policy mistakes at important crossroads in the dialogue with Pyongyang could help to prevent similar mistakes in the future. In this regard, the following analysis suggests a new approach towards Pyongyang based on a long‐term trust‐building process during which North Korea would be required to cap and then gradually eliminate its nuclear weapons in return for economic assistance and normalization of relations with the United States. Importantly, the United States might have to resign itself to North Korea's keeping an independent nuclear fuel cycle under supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency, as well as to accepting South Korea's request to independently enrich uranium and pyroprocess spent nuclear fuel. This would be a more favourable alternative to allowing North Korea to continue accumulating nuclear weapons. Moreover, if the United States continues on the Obama administration's failed policy path, then there is a better than even chance that the Korean Peninsula may slide into a nuclear arms race.     

Normalizing US–Cuba relations: escaping the shackles of the past

President Barack Obama explained his historic reversal of half a century of US antagonism towards Cuba as necessary because of the failure of the policy of hostility pursued by his ten predecessors. But the old policy's failure was not new, and thus was not, in itself, an adequate explanation for the dramatic shift. This article uses theories of agenda‐setting, policy failure and policy change to explain the persistence of the US policy of hostility from 1959 to 2014 and the policy change announced by President Barack Obama in December 2014. Four structural factors account for the continuity in policy and, as a result of gradual changes in those factors, the eventual policy shift. They are: the security threat Cuba posed to the United States during the Cold War; the political influence of the Cuban American community; the diplomatic cost to Washington, especially in Latin America, of maintaining the status quo; and domestic changes under way in Cuba.     

“Birtherism” and Anti-Blackness: The Anti-Islamic Ante-Life of Africanized Slavery

The first black President of the United States, Barack Obama, entered office on a wave of racial optimism. But rather than transcending the United States’ racialized history, Obama's presidency has in a sense “outed” it, exposing this history's anti-Islamic origins. This article establishes a link between anti-blackness and the Islamophobic reaction to his election: late medieval and early modern European Christians could classify newly Africanized peoples as uniquely and ontologically enslaveable only because they previously had imagined Muslims as such.