1110 ★ CHAPTER 28 A New Century and New Crises
Obama’s life story exemplified the enormous changes the United States had
undergone since 1960. Without the civil rights movement, his election would
have been inconceivable. He was the product of an interracial marriage, which
ended in divorce when he was two years old, between a Kenyan immigrant
and a white American woman. When Obama was born in 1961, their marriage
was still illegal in many states. He attended Harvard Law School, and worked
in Chicago as a community organizer before going into politics. He also wrote
two best- selling books about his upbringing in Indonesia (where his mother
worked as an anthropologist) and Hawaii (where his maternal grandparents
helped to raise him) and his search for a sense of identity given his complex
background. Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004 and first gained
national attention with an eloquent speech at the Democratic national con-
vention that year. His early opposition to the Iraq War won the support of the
Democratic Party’s large antiwar element; his race galvanized the support of
black voters; and his youth and promise of change appealed to the young.
Obama recognized how the Internet had changed politics. He established
an email list containing the names of millions of voters with whom he could
communicate instantaneously, and used web- based networks to raise enor-
mous sums of money in small donations. His campaign put out videos on
popular Internet sites. With its widespread use of modern technology and mas-
sive mobilization of new voters, Obama’s was the first political campaign of
the twenty- first century. But his election also rested on the deep unpopularity
of his predecessor, George W. Bush, because of the seemingly endless war he
launched in Iraq and the collapse of the American economy in 2008.
THE WAR ON TERROR
Bush before September 11
Before becoming president, George W. Bush had been an executive in the oil
industry and had served as governor of Texas. He had worked to dissociate the
Republican Party from the harsh anti- immigrant rhetoric of the mid- 1990s and
had proven himself an effective proponent of what he called “compassionate con-
servatism.” Nonetheless, from the outset Bush pursued a strongly conservative
agenda. In 2001, he persuaded Congress to enact the largest tax cut in American his-
tory. With the economy slowing, he promoted the plan as a way of stimulating
renewed growth. In keeping with the “ supply- side” economic outlook embraced
twenty years earlier by Ronald Reagan, most of the tax cuts were directed toward
the wealthiest Americans, on the assumption that they would invest the money
they saved in taxes in economically productive activities.