The New Yorker
January 28, 2018
It’s useful, almost ten years after his election to the Presidency, to recall how much of the opposition to Barack Obama during his first run for that office was conducted via image, and the promise—or, really, the threat—of images to come. The way he looked was inextricable from the rest of his appeal as a potential leader, and so, perhaps, a game of subliminal, symbolic tit for tat was to be expected. The latter months of Hillary Clinton’s losing 2008 primary campaign were characterized by a Pyrrhically effective, subtly racialized populist appeal to the people she referred to, at one point, as “hard-working Americans, white Americans,” in states such as Michigan and Ohio. As Clinton chugged beers and downed shots of whiskey at every notch along the Rust Belt, her campaign disseminated photos of Obama looking especially black or exotic, or standing next to figures of questionable repute.