Admiration Reborn: The British View of the US Presidential Election

Abstract

Listening in on Britain’s national conversation on the US presidential election during 2008, one might have been forgiven for thinking that what approached was a referendum on Barack Obama rather than a contest between two candidates. Certainly Obama’s photogenic visage and sweeping rhetoric in search of “change” won the lion’s share of the British media coverage. Indeed, often coverage and debate seemed to slide close to tacitly assume Obama’s coming victory, and minds turned regularly to asking whether and to what extent his rhetoric would be implemented once in office. To the extent that this presupposition of victory was challenged, it was through the prism of the debate on race, with a question mark suspended in British minds over the plausibility of America’s election of a black man to the highest office in light of its tortured racial history. This latter factor ensured that at least some consideration was given to the possibility Obama might be denied victory, though at the expense of drawing attention away from specific features of the candidate himself and onto his meaning in the context of evolving social attitudes to race. Only a relatively small effort was put into weighing the qualities of his Republican opponent, John McCain, who was thoroughly overshadowed in the popular consciousness by the bulldozer of the Obama narrative.