Obama's Biggest Challenge: Surviving Better Times
By wchung | 23 Feb, 2025

The biggest threat to an Obama second term isn't hard times but the emerging better ones.

Barack Obama’s presidency is a child of some of the hardest years most of us have known. Whether it can flourish now that hard times are receding into memory will be another indicator of American attitudes toward African Americans and racial minorities in general.

In the last election Obama’s eloquent empathy connected with a nation desperate for change. For some his race was even a token difference that seemed to validate his promise of change from a bleak status quo. There may even have been a perception that a black man can better empathize with the suffering of working people clinging by their fingernails to their middle-class dreams. Conversely, poor John McCain looked too much like the pictures hanging in most public buildings of these United States to be reassuring to those who had been kicked in the teeth by the establishment.

Despite the electoral landslide (365 to 173) the popular vote margin was modest. Only about 9.5 mil. votes separated the winning ticket from the losing one. Had about 5 million voted the other way, President McCain would be in the White House. That isn’t an awful prospect to my mind (aside from who would be presiding over the Senate on important votes). My point is that the Obama win didn’t signify unconditional racial acceptance so much as a highly conditional one based on a desperate need for change.

The 2012 election should be a bigger test for Obama and the ideal of racial equality. That would be ironic because I fully expect that by then — thanks in great measure to Obama’s steady resolve in the face of all-out assaults by anti-bailout forces — the Great Recession will have become neatly tucked into economic and history textbooks and most Americans will be back to enjoying one of the world’s highest standards of living. That will mean an end to the sublimation of racial prejudices to the desire for a change from dire economic straits.

How will those 5 million working class swing voters see the prospect of a second Obama term then?

Obama’s healthcare reform victory is one for the ages but 2012 doesn’t give quite enough time for its multitudinous benefits to have manifested for those 5 million. If anything it may create some alienation among those educated, upper-middle voters who, far from benefiting personally from the reform, will actually see more of their earnings disappear to the ideal of universal health care. I am one of them.

Yet, like me, most will stick by Obama and his vision of a cleaner, more rational government. But as it was in 2008, the 2012 election will again be decided by those 5 million working-class voters who could swing either way. If they forget what Barack Obama did for them in their darkest hours, we will be seeing some truly dark times ahead as a right-wing backlash begins dismantling social and economic progress brick by brick and replace it with the fear-and-greed-based system of old.

There remains much national drama between now and the start of an Obama second term. Some of it will reveal just how far we’ve come on the road to true color-blindness.