Right. This strikes me as the essential problem with most Obama-related theorizing. Pundits are basically using made-up stories about the roots of Obama’s political appeal as hooks for their own writing about race. If you look, however, at Obama’s base of support the phenomenon looks pretty banal. Obama is popular among the intersecting groups of black people, young people, and people for whom Iraq is a high priority issue. This, of course, is not very hard to explain. Obama is black, relatively young, and has a consistent record of opposition to the Iraq War. And, obviously, he’s good at giving speeches to large crowds. ~Matt Yglesias

Yglesias makes a fair point here.  Talking about Obama as a race-transcending figure (or the ways in which he is not actually that figure) makes no sense of why his current supporters among regular voters are supporting him, so perhaps a lot of this talk is less interesting in understanding current trends, but this talk seems very relevant to understanding why Obama has received an unusually large amount of unusually favourable media coverage and bizarrely effusive responses from crowds of people who don’t even necessarily know anything about his Iraq war views when they first show up to hear him talk.  This level of enthusiasm for a Senator of no great accomplishments after a very few years on the national stage is simply inexplicable without taking race and attitudes about race into account as significant factors.  They may not be as important as some of the observers have concluded, but it seems unlikely that they are entirely unrelated.  

Meanwhile, the media have shown tremendous tolerance for Obama’s preference for vague platitudes over substantive policy remarks, which is something that journalists do not normally endure for very long before becoming much more critical of a candidate.  He is getting something of a free ride, and has actually gotten such a free ride that the overkill of it is practically the only thing that has started to make people turn against him.  Some of all of that has to relate to his being the first “viable” black presidential candidate and what that does or doesn’t say about race relations and Obama’s appeal to people from different races.

This media love fest has probably helped propel Obama among younger voters who, I’m sorry to say, are among the least informed, least curious and least politically involved voters in the country.  I am guessing that young supporters are responding to the media’s treatment of Obama as a kind of cultural icon and they are most susceptible to his meaningless chatter about hope and a new politics.  Another possibility is that the “Millennials” have significantly different attitudes about race relations and therefore serve as a kind of leading indicator of what Obama’s strongest appeal is, which is that he represents or embodies (however ideally or fantastically) their own attitudes about race, which are rather predictably more “liberal” than that of their parents.