Race and patriotism were recurring themes during the 2008 presidential campaign that were used to highlight differences between Barack Obama and his opponents. Yet we know little about how racism and patriotism ultimately affected support for Obama among Whites. Appeals to working-class Whites, a lot of which were thinly veiled allusions to Obama’s race and perceived lack of patriotism, also fi...

By combining news coverage and survey data from the BP oil spill of 2010, this study demonstrates how the media played an important role in connecting the disaster to President Obama. Rather than criticizing Obama from the outset, the spill reporting escalated from a period of event-based, factual coverage to a highly politicized phase of governmental blame attribution. We utilize a natural exp...

This paper argues that community development has much to learn from the discursive strategies developed within Barack Obama’s successful 2008 presidential campaign. The discourse of the campaign constructed specific identities of both Obama and the public which (re)produced a collective mood for change. By constructing the public (rather than the campaign) as active agents for change, the Obama...

Three studies tested whether the opportunity to endorse Barack Obama made individuals subsequently more likely to favor Whites over Blacks. In Study 1, participants were more willing to describe a job as better suited for Whites than for Blacks after expressing support for Obama. Study 2 replicated this effect and ruled out alternative explanations: participants favored Whites for the job after...

Identifying the effects of political endorsements has historically been difficult. Before the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, Barack Obama was endorsed by talk show host Oprah Winfrey. In this article, we assess the impact of this endorsement using, as measures of Winfrey s influence, subscriptions to her magazine and sales of books she recommends. We find that her endorsement increased O...

Future machines will connect with users on an emotional level in addition to performing complex computations (Norman 2004). In this article, we present a system that adds an emotional dimension to an activity that Internet users engage in frequently, search. ESSE, which stands for Emotional State Search Engine, is a web search engine that goes beyond facilitating a user’s exploration of the web...

When Barack Obama became the “first Black President” of the United States in 2008, researchers examined how his election impacted Americans’ views of racial progress. When he was reelected in 2012, the minority status of the president had become less novel. In the present study, we investigated whether perceptions concerning racial progress varied: (1) before and after President Obama’s reelect...

President Barack ObamaObama, stated that some of America’sAmerica most costly mistakes since World War IIWorld II were the result not restraint, but a “willingness to rush into military adventures without thinking through consequences.”