The X Factor for Obama

During February - I'm working with author, Earl Ofari Hutchinson to promote his timely new book. He is featured on the virtual book tour site - www.inspiredauthor.com/promotion. Each evening on the news and throughout all primary news coverage, we hear about how the black vote and the Latino vote have an effect on each vote. That is the message in The Ethnic Presidency. Mr Hutchinson delves into the many ways ethnic voters have impacted elections throughout the years for democrats and republicans. There is much more behind this topic than the fact that there is a black man and a white woman in the race for the presidency of the United States.

Excerpts from Chapter 1 - The Ethnic Presidency: How Race Decides the Race for the White House by Earl Ofari Hutchinson

In a wide-ranging interview with Newsweek in July 2007, Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama was piqued at the very suggestion that he was the transcendent racial candidate. This implied that he was racially neutered and was a living and breathing repudiation of the politics of racial polarization that supposedly characterized Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Obama took even greater umbrage at the notion he deliberately stoked thoughts among whites that he was the prototypical post civil rights African-American who no longer saw the world in black and white hues and whose mantra was racial conciliation, compromise and outreach.

Obama had good reason to be miffed at such talk. There was absolutely no evidence that he had ever experienced an identity crisis about his blackness. He spoke candidly about his bi-racial lineage, his early childhood years in Hawaii and Indonesia, his half-Indonesian sister, his campaign for editor of the Harvard Law Review, and his Illinois campaigns for the state house and senate. He never shied away from proudly embracing his blackness. He didn’t have too---back then.

Now that he was in the race for the biggest prize of all, the White House, things had changed. The slightest hint, let alone perception, that Obama was the “black candidate” would be the political kiss of death for him.

For more information visit -

http://inspiredauthor.com/promotion/Obama+X+Fac+tor