nessus2 wrote:
ERBetelgeuse wrote:
Do you really think if Obama looked white and not black he would have gotten the nomination?  Look at this thread, he keeps getting hailed as the first black president.  He's just as much white as he is black but he looks black and not white.  If he looked like, say, John Boehner, or Paul Ryan, he would never have gotten the nomination.


   Yeah, because, you know, we've never, ever elected a white man president...
She's not entirely wrong, imo.  The Democratic electorate was enamoured with the idea of making history.  That, coupled with Obama's charisma, propelled him from a guy who gave a great speech and had been in the Senate a short time to the front of the pack.  He beat the Clinton machine, and did it handily.

Biden looked like John Boehner and Paul Ryan (minus the orange, of course).  So did some of the other also-rans, many of them rather popular in Democratic circles at the time.  They didn't even come close.

Being African-American isn't The Reason Obama won the Democratic nomination in '08, but it helped. 


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