Prior to and during his candidacy, many democratic and republican political pundits described Obama as the most liberal senator in the senate. In reviewing his overall campaign, one cannot say that Obama has made grandiose promises that will be impossible to achieve. In understanding the nature of American capitalism, Obama has not supported the universalization of health care. Furthermore, it appears that Obama’s stance on gay rights has been consistent. Unlike the Republican Party and very much like his democratic counterparts, he has supported gay civil unions, the abrogation of the military’s ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ policy, and gay adoption rights. On issues of the Middle East, President- elect Obama’s predecessors have made promises that they have failed to achieve. Should they be branded false prophets? Are we imposing or holding Obama to an unreasonably high standard, a standard which previous presidents have not been held to?

Though the very embodiment of Obama represents change, depending on one’s ideological prescriptions, the notion of change can have multiple meanings and interpretations. In other words, Obama is to people, what people want him to be. This, I believe marked the success of his political campaign. Can we blame him for running a successful campaign that appealed to our idealist aspirations? After all, is it not the nature of political campaigning to appeal to the needs of the electorate? Is Obama the first politician to have successfully appealed to the aspirations and needs of the electorate? Using words like “messianic” to describe the first by-racial or black presidential candidate and president only reveals the internal turmoil some white Americans continue to grapple with.

We cannot characterize the Obama win as “uncritical exuberance” or “messianic” because despite the idealist notions that underpinned Obama’s campaign strategy, a perceptive mind could deduce from the debates and his latter and election day speeches that he is a human being who is aware of his limitations, who understands that divisions still exist, and that things have not really changed as profoundly as it may seem, despite his win. Many prejudices including sexism, racism, and homophobia are still very significant challenges to overcome, and from observation, Obama has not downplayed this fact. Moreover, while I cannot profess to speak for a people as historically and contemporaneously marginalized and divided as people of African descent, I can say that we know our reality, and understand from history that racist oppression is as entrenched as fish are in the sea. Though some may see the light of equity and human decency, others may forever evade, re-caste, mask, or rationalize their racist sentiments using the cost-benefit calculus for economic success.

However, the fact that a man of European and African ancestry won the American presidency may indicate that sexism trumps racism during challenging economic times. We know from the history of North American nation building that the interests of concentrated capital are sometimes achieved at the cost of preserving the racial homogeneity/‘whiteness’ of the settler colony. This is evident in capitalist economies like that of the U.S. and Canada, where congress may chose to take its time in dealing with supposedly ‘illegal’ or irregular labour migration from Mexico, and in the case of Canada, parliament may choose to allow the entry of more skilled immigrants who arrive in Canada with hopes of professional mobility, only to work in low skilled and low wage service sector jobs that the mainstream white/European domestic population may not be willing to do.

Since the notion of race was employed by classical aristocrats in justifying the appropriation and accumulation of wealth for the purpose of economic development in the West. One can thus argue that those who voted for Obama's presidency even though they view him as selling out gay rights and Palestine, and as a Muslim terrorist only did so because of their understandings of race and the historically constructed economic role played by racial minorities. In other words, Obama’s race or African ancestry has made him the historically ideal or convenient ‘clean-up guy’ to fix the global economic crisis enabled by his white predecessor. What I wonder is this: if Senator Clinton had won the democratic nomination and then the presidency, would there be questions of “uncritical exuberance” ? Or is Obama’s win so historically overwhelming that people have to be brought back to their proper ‘senses’?