Three Years that Broke American Politics (Part Three)

2008: The internet and social media upend politics, and a backlash to the election of Barack Obama

This is Part Three in my series, Three Years that Broke American Politics. Also see Part One: 1968, and Part Two: 1994. Note that I haven’t included 2016/2020 as a piece in this series, partly because that history is still unfolding now, but also because the plight of American politics today is more the result of trends and forces that first arose in earlier decades.

The quick 2008 backstory

At first glance, 2008 seems like an unusual choice for a year that contributed to the breaking of American politics. It was, after all, an historic contest won by Barack Obama, the country’s first Black president. The election left many Americans with hope that the nation was breaking free of the divisive political battles of the previous few decades.

But Obama’s election in some ways had the opposite effect of what many expected. Instead of leading to more tolerance and cross-partisan goodwill, it produced a backlash among certain voters that seemed to intensify the divisiveness. Perhaps more significantly in the long run, 2008 was also the first contest in which the internet and social media played a significant role. This was also something that initially engendered great hope but in the years since has seemed to fan the flames of discord.

2008: Backlash to Barack Obama’s election

President-elect Barack Obama on election night in 2008. (Image via Shutterstock)

This is how Time Magazine described election night in America after Obama’s election:

“There was a rush of noise, of horns honking and kids shouting and strangers hugging in the streets. People danced in Harlem and wept at Ebenezer Baptist Church and lit candles at Dr. King’s grave. More than a thousand people shouted ‘Yes, we can!’ outside the White House.”¹

That night, 125,000 people heard Obama speak in Chicago’s Grant Park. The election of a Black president who’d campaigned on a message of hope and bipartisanship seemed to signal the opening of a new era in U.S. politics.

But the hope was fleeting. Even aside from the economic disaster of the Great Recession that erupted in 2008, two factors in particular combined to diminish Obama’s presidency and prolong the nation’s partisan strife.

1. Obstructionism Returns

The strategy of obstructionism that Gingrich pioneered in 1994 roared back to life after Obama’s election. In fact, on the very night of the new president’s inauguration, leading Republicans met for dinner and agreed to obstruct the entire Obama agenda. Gingrich himself was at the meeting as an advisor.

One of the most striking aspects of this decision is that it was made when the country was in the throes of an economic crisis. When Obama took office, he inherited the worst economy of any new president since 1933. The economy was losing 800,000 jobs a month, the housing and credit markets were collapsing, and the auto industry was on the edge of bankruptcy.

Just months earlier, Congressional Democrats helped President George Bush pass an unpopular bailout of the financial industry to prevent a global meltdown. But with the economy still in freefall in 2009 Republicans refused to return the favor. According to one report, Mitch McConnell told Senate Republicans that “bipartisan cooperation would just make Obama look like a hero.”

Thus, when the Obama administration proposed a $787 billion stimulus to jumpstart the economy, Republicans called it a socialist plan, even though fully one-third of the money went to tax cuts favored by the GOP (and most economists believe today that the legislation boosted the economy and averted a greater economic meltdown).

Later, when Obama’s health care reform proposal included an individual mandate to buy insurance, Republicans declared it unconstitutional despite the fact that it was initially a conservative idea that was implemented two years earlier by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts. And when Obama declared support for a deficit reduction task force favored by the GOP, it was blocked in Congress by the same Republicans who had earlier supported it.

As Ohio Senator George Voinovich later admitted, if Obama was for something, “we had to be against it.”

This isn’t to say that Democrats didn’t engage in their own norm-shattering during this era, such as by filibustering judicial nominees during the Bush administration. But dozens of Democrats also supported Bush on various issues, from tax cuts and education reform to the Iraq War.

This strategy of obstruction may well have been brought back against any Democrat elected in 2008. But there was particular urgency about muddying up Obama because he’d built a brand around bipartisanship, so it was thought the best way to weaken him was to block bipartisanship from succeeding.

2. The Birtherism Movement

Then there was the birtherism movement, which more obviously arose out of a backlash to Obama’s election.

During the 2008 campaign, Obama touched a nerve with some Americans because of the uniqueness of his candidacy: His skin color, his exotic name (Barack Hussein Obama), his unusual childhood growing up in Hawaii and Indonesia, and rumors that he was a Muslim. At the time, the conspiracy mill was also alive with suggestions that Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii, and was ineligible to serve as president.

Obama released his birth certificate in 2008, only to have the fever swamps claim the document was a fake. Finally, Donald Trump emerged in 2011, while contemplating a presidential run, and turned the rumors into newer and bigger headlines.

Birtherism, though, was more than a controversy over the reality of Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate. It was also a gut-level, fear-based reaction to changes in American life.

When the Tea Party movement erupted within weeks of Obama’s inauguration, for instance, it was hard to miss the “Take Our Country Back” signs at rallies. And while Tea Partiers as a group were not racist, numerous studies have shown that a considerable number of members were energized not just by spending and deficits, but also by fear that multiculturalism might be changing the country.

One of the most in-depth studies of the opinions and feelings of Tea Party members concluded:

Tea Partiers are deeply concerned that the country they live in is not the country of their youth … for many Tea Partiers, the change Obama represents provokes deep anxiety.

The same study noted that 59% of Tea Partiers doubted that Obama was American, which obviously overlaps with birtherism. Simultaneous to all this was a drive to cast the president as an Other, such as Gingrich calling him “the first anti-American president,” or Rudy Giuliani saying, “I do not believe the president loves America.”

It’s not hard to see that the persistence of birtherism, overlaid with these strands of indignation, was a reaction to Obama himself. Just as the civil rights movement spurred a backlash in the 1960s, so did the election of the first Black president.

Obama later reflected on this in his memoir, A Promised Land:

It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted. Which is exactly what Donald Trump understood when he started peddling assertions that I had not been born in the United States and was thus an illegitimate president.

Why This Still Matters

First, the obstructionism mattered because it worked, just as in 1994, to put the GOP quickly back in power. Republicans picked up an historic 63 House seats in the 2010 midterms and six Senate seats, a wave driven by voter dismay over Obama’s supposed inability to work with Republicans and frustration about the still-recovering economy.

The GOP also took control of more Governor’s offices and state legislatures, which they used to gerrymander districts after the 2010 census to ensure Republican control of an enormous number of legislative seats for at least the next decade.

Longer term, meanwhile, the defiance of Obama and the backlash to his presidency as typified by the birther movement signified a budding uprising in GOP politics that would grow stronger during the next few years.

The only problem was that Republicans, in a way, became ensnared in their own trap. They created a sense of outrage about Obama among their voters that had to be continually fed. “The more Republicans trashed Obama,” noted Politico, “the harder it became for them to engage in even basic gestures of civility without alienating their base.” For the rest of his presidency, many GOP legislators felt they could never vote for something that would look like a win for Obama.

And the more the GOP obstructed the president, the more voters grew frustrated with not only the aftermath of the Great Recession but also with the apparent inability of the parties to work together. By 2016, voter exasperation boiled over.

That year’s election, wrote Ronald Brownstein in The Atlantic was “almost physically vibrating with the accumulated frustration of political life under a divided government.” Both parties faced populist insurgencies in their nomination battles, with Bernie Sanders calling for “a political revolution to transform our country,” and Trump upending all sorts of political norms on his way to the GOP nomination and the presidency.

The irony is that if the GOP had tried to work with Obama to ameliorate the economic challenges facing the country, this populist uprising might never have arisen. Given that Americans rarely vote the same party into the White House for more than two or three elections in a row, there would have been a decent chance of Republicans winning in 2016 with a more traditional candidate. However, as Michael Grunwald noted at the time, the GOP strategy of obstructing Obama and turning him into the enemy had worked almost too well:

President-elect Trump is in many ways the logical result of their Obama-fighting, norm-violating, non-governing strategy …

All 17 Republican candidates for the nomination followed the party line that Obama was turning America into a dystopian hellscape, and all 17 essentially promised to roll back the Obama presidency, so it isn’t surprising that a plurality in the primary backed the loudest and angriest voice in the anti-Obama brigade, the candidate who questioned not just his policies but his citizenship …

Lately, some Trump skeptics in the GOP establishment have been pondering how much their relentless anti-Obama-ism helped fuel [Trump’s] rise.

2008: The internet and social media

The other formidable factor that changed politics during this time was the advent of the internet and the rise of social media.

It seems almost hard to imagine now, but the internet first became ubiquitous in America only in the 1990s. Then, in quick succession, Facebook was launched in 2004, YouTube made its debut in 2005, Twitter came online in 2006, and the first iPhone was unveiled in 2007.

This rush of online innovation transformed presidential elections. The Obama team in 2008 revolutionized campaigns by creating a grass-roots online community and its own social networking site, while raising record-setting sums of money from small donors.

Then, in 2016, Trump used the internet in another way that was unconventional for its time. In this case, the candidate used social media as a way to dictate his message, generate controversy, and drive the media narrative. He could often control the news cycle with a single blast from his Twitter account.

The way in which Americans consumed news also underwent another dramatic shift. Voters began relying even less on television or newspapers for information and more on the internet. Between cable news, talk radio, online publications, and social media, voters were thrust into a news cycle that never stopped.

In all of these ways, the internet upended American politics every bit as much as television had a half-century earlier.

Why This Still Matters

Less than two decades ago, social media was being hailed as a way to connect people and spur social change. After 2008, numerous articles and case studies were written about the transformative effect of the internet and social networking on politics. Then in 2011, all the talk was about the Arab Spring and the pro-democracy protests spreading across part of the Muslim world, in which social media played a vital role in facilitating communication among activists.

But things changed so quickly that now, just 15 or so years later, the articles are about how social media is destroying democracy.

Just as with the changes to the presidential nominating system and the rise of 24-hour news, it turns out there was also another side to the rise of the internet and social media. Another case of good intentions going awry over time:

• The growth of online news meant voters could get information anytime, without relying on broadcast news or print publications. But it also meant voters were able to more easily choose their own media sources and follow everything from their smartphones. The result is that a fair number of people, whether consciously or not, are trapped in information bubbles that don’t always reflect reality.

• The rise of social media allowed candidates to communicate more directly with supporters without the filter of the media. But it also gave them the power to deliberately sow controversy, even with made-up stories.

• Social media can be a wonderful tool for connecting and organizing activists and voters. But it can just as easily be used by foreign governments to stir controversy in U.S. politics. Or to coordinate events such as the January 6th attack on the Capitol.

• The internet provides unparalleled access to information, which is useful for everything from finding a candidate’s policy positions to researching a DIY project for your home. At the same time, one of the greatest challenges of the current political moment is the unchecked spread of deliberate misinformation online.

A recent essay about social media and democracy explored how information overload and social networking can facilitate the spread of misinformation:

Unsubstantiated claims and narratives go viral while fact-checking efforts struggle to keep up … By the time they do, the falsehoods may have already embedded themselves in the collective consciousness. Meanwhile, fresh scandals or outlandish claims are continuously raining down on users, mixing fact with fiction.

Even an effort to correct misinformation can be fraught with peril. Bill Adair, who founded PolitiFact in 2007 as a nonpartisan monitor of politicians’ words, said in a recent article that the mere “act of calling out falsehoods” now is itself “characterized by some as a political exercise.” The problem is exacerbated, he said, because one party now believes it “can benefit from lying.”

Right? Hello, Haitians and hurricanes.

But when a political party knows that it benefits from spreading misinformation, why should it stop? At some point, voters can no longer tell the difference between truth and lies, so they become exhausted from the effort and often give up trying. And if everything feels chaotic enough, a natural response is to turn to an authoritarian figure who promises to fix it all.

Which is why Vox concludes: “Social media, in the way it’s used now, objectively favors authoritarians.”

So what happens when these trends merge? When Americans become overloaded with information, when they sort themselves into partisan bubbles, and when one party discovers the benefits of using social media to push controversies and lies?

Or, what happens when this also merges with earlier trends that discombobulated the political landscape? When misinformation preys on racial anxieties (as with Haitians in Ohio), when it convinces politicians that obstructing progress is better than solving a problem, or when a controversy gets amplified by talk radio or Fox News?

Put it all together and you get American politics in 2024.

Interestingly, eight years ago The New Yorker interviewed Barack Obama about politics in the wake of Trump’s 2016 election. One of the challenges, he noted even then, was that changes in the way people consumed information was also changing the meaning of truth. Now, “everything is true and nothing is true,” he said.

This led to a short exchange on some of the ways politics had changed in a short period of time. Said Obama:

“An explanation of climate change from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist looks exactly the same on your Facebook page as the denial of climate change by somebody on the Koch brothers’ payroll. And the capacity to disseminate misinformation, wild conspiracy theories, to paint the opposition in wildly negative light without any rebuttal—that has accelerated in ways that much more sharply polarize the electorate and make it very difficult to have a common conversation.

“Donald Trump is not an outlier; he is a culmination, a logical conclusion of the rhetoric and tactics of the Republican Party for the past ten, fifteen, twenty years. What surprised me was the degree to which those tactics and rhetoric completely jumped the rails. There … was no one to say, ‘No, this is going too far, this isn’t what we stand for.’ …

“Trump understands the new ecosystem, in which facts and truth don’t matter. You attract attention, rouse emotions, and then move on. You can surf those emotions. I’ve said it before, but if I watched Fox I wouldn’t vote for me!”

That was eight years ago. It was before we had 30,000 lies in a single presidential term, a war of words over COVID information, falsehoods about voter fraud, and an effort to overturn an election. It was before praise for authoritarians and talk about how the political opposition is an enemy within. It was before a deluge of misinformation led to bomb threats against schools in Ohio and confrontations with FEMA workers over hurricane relief. It was before threats against yet another upcoming election.

American politics has been fracturing, bit by bit, for a half-century. It’s not yet broken irretrievably; there is still hope for healing and for a return to democratic norms. But the healing won’t happen if we don’t understand what brought us to this point. So I hope this series on Three Years that Broke American Politics is helpful in some small way in contributing to that conversation.

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This essay was written for Substack, but parts of it were adapted from my book, Quest for the Presidency: The Storied and Surprising History of Presidential Campaigns in America (Lincoln, Nebraska: Potomac Books/University of Nebraska Press, 2022).

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1. Nancy Gibbs, “’This Is Our Time,’” Time Magazine, November 17, 2008.