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\"With lively prose and sensitivity to context, this book offers a sweeping, authoritative history of the Obama presidency, focusing particularly on its impact and meaning vis-à-vis African Americans. This interpretative account captures the America that made Obama's White House years possible, while at the same time rendering the America that resolutely resisted the idea of a Black chief executive, thus making conceivable the ascent of his most unlikely of successors\"-- Provided by publisher.

This book seeks to go beyond existing public polls regarding Barack Obama, and instead offers a comprehensive treatment of public perceptions that resist mass generalizations based on race, gender, age, political affiliation, or geographical location. Drawing from a large national qualitative data set generated by 333 diverse participants from twelve different states across six U.S. regions, Mark P. Orbe offers a comprehensive look into public perceptions of Barack Obama's communication style, race matters, and the role of the media in 21st century politics. Communication Realities in a \"Post-Racial\" Society: What the U.S. Public Really Thinks about Barack Obama is the first of its kind in that it uses the voices of everyday U.S. Americans to advance our understanding of how identity politics influence public perceptions. The strength of a book such as this one lies within the power of the diverse perspectives of hundreds of participants. Each chapter features extended comments from rural volunteer fire fighters in southern Ohio, African American men in Oakland, CA, religious communities in Alabama; New England senior citizens; military families from southern Virginia; Tea Party members from Nebraska; business and community leaders from North Carolina; individuals currently unemployed and/or underemployed in Connecticut; college students from predominately White, Black, and Hispanic-serving institutions of higher learning; and others. As such, it is the first book that is based on comments from multiple perspectives - something that allows a deeper understanding that hasn't been possible with public polls, media sound bites, and political commentary. It is a must read for scholars interested in contemporary communication in a time when \"post-racial\" declarations are met with resistance and political junkies who seek an advanced understanding of the peculiarities of rapidly changing political realities.

The first edition of this book offered one of the first social science analyses of Barack Obama's historic electoral campaigns and early presidency. In this second edition the authors extend that analysis to Obama's service in the presidency and to his second campaign to hold that presidency. Elaborating on the concept of the white racial frame, Harvey Wingfield and Feagin assess in detail the ways white racial framing was deployed by the principal characters in the electoral campaigns and during Obama's presidency. With much relevant data, this book counters many commonsense assumptions about U.S. racial matters, politics, and institutions, particularly the notion that Obama's presidency ushered in a major post-racial era. Readers will find this fully revised and updated book distinctively valuable because it relies on sound social science analysis to assess numerous events and aspects of this historic campaign.

Barack Obama's sudden arrival on the national scene has created a wave of excitement in American politics, a phenomenon that has been dubbed \"Obamamania.\" In What's Wrong with Obamamania?, Ricky L. Jones places Obama's run for the presidency in the context of deep and often disturbing shifts in black leadership since the 1960s. From Charles Hamilton Houston to Thurgood Marshall to Jesse Jackson, from prosperity preachers to megachurches, from W. E. B. Du Bois's Talented Tenth and civil rights advocates to Black Entertainment Television and hip-hop culture, Jones paints a picture of lowered expectations, cynicism, and nihilism that should give us all pause.

This book seeks to go beyond existing public polls regarding Barack Obama, and instead offers a comprehensive treatment of public perceptions that resist mass generalizations based on race, gender, age, political affiliation, or geographical location. Drawing from a large national qualitative data set generated by 333 diverse participants from twelve different states across six U.S. regions, Mark P. Orbe offers a comprehensive look into public perceptions of Barack Obama's communication style, race matters, and the role of the media in 21st century politics. Communication Realities in a \"Post-Racial\" Society: What the U.S. Public Really Thinks about Barack Obama is the first of its kind in that it uses the voices of everyday U.S. Americans to advance our understanding of how identity politics influence public perceptions. The strength of a book such as this one lies within the power of the diverse perspectives of hundreds of participants. Each chapter features extended comments from rural volunteer fire fighters in southern Ohio, African American men in Oakland, CA, religious communities in Alabama; New England senior citizens; military families from southern Virginia; Tea Party members from Nebraska; business and community leaders from North Carolina; individuals currently unemployed and/or underemployed in Connecticut; college students from predominately White, Black, and Hispanic-serving institutions of higher learning; and others. As such, it is the first book that is based on comments from multiple perspectives - something that allows a deeper understanding that hasn't been possible with public polls, media sound bites, and political commentary. It is a must read for scholars interested in contemporary communication in a time when \"post-racial\" declarations are met with resistance and political junkies who seek an advanced understanding of the peculiarities of rapidly changing political realities.

This study explores time trends in public trust in science in the United States from 1974 to 2010. More precisely, I test Mooney's (2005) claim that conservatives in the United States have become increasingly distrustful of science. Using data from the 1974 to 2010 General Social Survey, I examine group differences in trust in science and group-specific change in these attitudes over time. Results show that group differences in trust in science are largely stable over the period, except for respondents identifying as conservative. Conservatives began the period with the highest trust in science, relative to liberals and moderates, and ended the period with the lowest. The patterns for science are also unique when compared to public trust in other secular institutions. Results show enduring differences in trust in science by social class, ethnicity, gender, church attendance, and region. I explore the implications of these findings, specifically, the potential for political divisions to emerge over the cultural authority of science and the social role of experts in the formation of public policy.

This study argues that President Obama's strong association with an issue like health care should polarize public opinion by racial attitudes and race. Consistent with that hypothesis, racial attitudes had a significantly larger impact on health care opinions in fall 2009 than they had in cross-sectional surveys from the past two decades and in panel data collected before Obama became the face of the policy. Moreover, the experiments embedded in one of those reinterview surveys found health care policies were significantly more racialized when attributed to President Obama than they were when these same proposals were framed as President Clinton's 1993 reform efforts. Dozens of media polls from 1993 to 1994 and from 2009 to 2010 are also pooled together to show that with African Americans overwhelmingly supportive of Obama's legislative proposals, the racial divide in health care opinions was 20 percentage points greater in 2009—10 than it was over President Clinton's plan back in 1993—94.

People categorize themselves and others, creating ingroup and outgroup distinctions. In American politics, parties constitute the in- and outgroups, and party leaders hold sway in articulating party positions. A party leader's endorsement of a policy can be persuasive, inducing co-partisans to take the same position. In contrast, a party leader's endorsement may polarize opinion, inducing out-party identifiers to take a contrary position. Using survey experiments from the 2008 presidential election, I examine whether in- and out-party candidate cues—John McCain and Barack Obama—affected partisan opinion. The results indicate that in-party leader cues do not persuade but that out-party leader cues polarize. This finding holds in an experiment featuring President Bush in which his endorsement did not persuade Republicans but it polarized Democrats. Lastly, I compare the effect of party leader cues to party label cues. The results suggest that politicians, not parties, function as polarizing cues.

Partisanship is a primary predictor of attitudes toward public policy. However, we do not yet know whether party similarly plays a role in shaping public policy behavior, such as whether to apply for government benefits or take advantage of public services. While existing research has identified numerous factors that increase policy uptake, the role of politics has been almost entirely overlooked. In this paper, we examine the case of the Affordable Care Act to assess whether policy uptake is not only about information and incentives; but also about politics. Using longitudinal data, we find that Republicans have been less likely than Democrats to enroll in an insurance plan through state or federal exchanges, all else equal. Employing a large-scale field experiment, we then show that de-emphasizing the role of government (and highlighting the market's role) can close this partisan gap.