Bringing Candidacies in from the Cold: Mainstreaming Minority Candidates, 1960 and 2008

Elections are about many things. They turn on long-term factors such as party identification, socioeconomic status, gender, and education. They may also turn on short-term factors such as issues, candidate personality, and events (Romer et al. 2006). Scholars of communication also believe that rhetoric matters--that the ways in which elections are framed have important effects on electoral outcomes (Trent and Friedenberg 2004). This framing occurs within the context of these short- and long-term factors, however, and is intertwined with them. (1) No candidate can argue an economic crisis or a war away, for instance, and candidates must make arguments that resonate with their base constituencies and (at least enough) of the electorate as a whole to be elected (Seligman and Covington 1989). Understanding the limits of whom a nation will accept as "presidential" or "electable" can tell us a great deal about how the nation understands itself (McGee 1975; Stuckey 2005). Elections are moments of ideological confrontation in which participants each present differing definitions of national identity and national purpose (Ivie and Giner 2009; Stuckey 2005). One of those visions--and only one--becomes the national vision and is instantiated into policy for the next four years (Campbell and Jamieson 2008). The content of these visions is thus vitally important. To begin to understand the complex visions that candidates have for the future of the country, it is useful to analyze the rhetoric they employ to construct those visions. Candidates articulate the ideals of America. But they do so in different ways, depending on the party, political context, and character of the candidate (Buchanan 2000). Sometimes, nontraditional candidates enter the electoral fray. Because of their minority status, these candidates can be seen as threatening to the status quo and thus unsuitable for the presidency. Our analysis shows that the political context of such candidacies is an important factor in candidates' ability to break down the barriers to entry. Ironically, the ability to overcome minority status is greatest when that status is least relevant to the campaign. In this essay, we argue that there are certain moments when candidates may be able to transcend traditional constraints on their candidacies--that a certain kind of candidate, making certain kinds of appeals in a certain kind of context is able to set aside his or her identity as a "minority candidate" and attain mainstream status. These moments seem to be few and far between, and so, while our main interest in this essay is Barack Obama and the 2008 presidential election, we read that election through the previous experience of another young, relatively untested presidential candidate, John F. Kennedy. To make this larger argument, we focus primarily on two pivotal speeches in their respective campaigns: Kennedy's address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in September 1960, and Obama's "race speech" delivered in Philadelphia in March 2008. We chose these speeches because they represent pivotal moments in the ability of each candidate to set aside his minority status and enter the mainstream. These two candidacies have much in common. Both Kennedy and Obama were relatively young and relatively untested on the national stage--thus, both were subject to criticism for lacking appropriate experience. Both were minority candidates--although certainly running as the first African American nominee from a major party entailed difficulties that running as the second Catholic did not. But for our purposes, the comparison is an instructive one, as both candidacies offer insight into key moments in American political life--moments when a previously liminal minority became mainstream, and changed American politics forever by changing the ideological parameters of national identity. To make this case, we first discuss the importance of context, arguing that certain kinds of structural factors encourage the mainstreaming of minority candidacies. …