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This chapters asks, Does having a Black president, compared to previous administrations occupied by White presidents, lead to aberrational trust in government for Blacks and Whites? I posit that the Obama presidency indeed had this effect. During the years of the Obama presidency, we saw changes in perceptions of trust and political efficacy among Black Americans. Using national public opinion data from the American National Election Study from 1992 to 2014, this chapter gauges how Black Americans perceived their influence(s) on the political system during different years to determine what, if any, lasting impact Obama's presidency may have on Black political involvement and trust in the political system. The results of the public opinion analyses indicate that trust attitudes during the Obama presidency were more positive for Blacks than Whites; however, compared over the forty-year period, the results are not consistently aberrational. Subsequently, I examine the racial implications of these results for Americans’ political trust after the Obama era, especially during the early years of the Donald J. Trump presidency.

In this chapter, we examine the influence of Obama’s presence on racial divisions in partisanship. We interpret these divisions as evidence of racial polarization. Since Obama is a Democrat and because African Americans vote overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates in presidential elections, we define polarization as a gap in the extent to which African and Anglo Americans identify with the Democratic Party. Our focus on polarization stems from the fact that partisanship has always been a racialized concept in American politics. We ask the following questions: Was there a race gap in party identification during the Obama presidency? If so, did the former president’s media activities influence the width of this race gap? How did Obama’s media presence affect the party gap? Did the former president push Whites away from the Democratic Party (while pulling African Americans into it)? Or did Obama make racial differences in partisanship disappear? We conclude this chapter by discussing the substantive implications of our evidence and the limitations of our research design. When discussing potential avenues for research, we focus on the fact that Obama’s presidency gave race scholars the opportunity to study descriptive representation in the nation’s highest political office.

This chapter examines neo-Wilsonianism in the White House, considering the Bush Doctrine—often referred to as the National Security Strategy of the United States, September 2002, or NSS-2002. In the annals of American foreign policy there had never been anything even remotely like NSS-2002, its façade of Wilsonianism covering a far more aggressive imperialist claim for American exceptionalism than Woodrow Wilson had ever espoused, which in due course threatened to destroy altogether the credentials of good stewardship for world affairs that American liberal internationalism had enjoyed from the 1940s through the 1980s. One month after NSS-2002 appeared, the Iraq Resolution passed Congress with strong majorities in both chambers. Neo-Wilsonianism, born in theory during the 1990s, entered into practice five months after this historic vote with the invasion of Iraq that started on March 20, 2003. The chapter then looks at neo-Wilsonianism during the Obama presidency.

This chapter discusses the challenges faced by Obama as he sought to reform social welfare policy, and how these may likely curtail the perceived and actual political effectiveness even of his policy successes. It focuses on tax expenditures and higher education policy, and also gives some attention to health care reform. It shows that the nature of the submerged state requires reformers to reveal its existence and how it functions to the public. To the extent that Obama has done this, it helped to facilitate the accomplishment of his goals. Yet several of the reforms that his administration has accomplished expand the submerged state further, which means that the dynamics it promulgates are likely to continue rather than to diminish.

Obama's rise to the presidency has been accompanied by much debate over whether his success represents a “postracial” politics or is the harbinger of a postracial era in US politics. Despite the great skepticism, particularly in academia, about whether the US is genuinely moving beyond a politics shaped by racial divisions, even skeptics accept that Obama ran a postracial, or at least a “race-neutral,” campaign. This chapter attempts to provide greater specificity to these contentions by analyzing the 2008 presidential campaign strategies and the prospects for racial equity in the nation's future through the lens of what is argued to be the basic structure of American racial politics: the continuing clashes between America's rival racial institutional orders.

This chapter argues that Obama's response to the crisis he inherited had less to do with his reluctance to alienate the coalition of corporate and financial elites that helped finance his election campaign, and certainly much less to do with any sudden embrace of neoliberal ideas, than with the systemic structural linkages between capital and the state. His actions were determined by the assumption of responsibility for sustaining capital accumulation and managing capitalism's contradictions that came with occupying the highest offices in the American state.