As centrist, as neoliberal as Obama is, he is a radical in the way that matters most of all in the US.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/03/how_donald_trump_happened_racism_against_barack_obama.html ---------------------------snip Barack Obama is many things, but conservative rhetoric aside, he’s no radical. We can’t say the same for Obama as a political symbol, however. In a nation shaped and defined by a rigid racial hierarchy, his election was very much a radical event, in which a man from one of the nation’s lowest castes ascended to the summit of its political landscape. And he did so with heavy support from minorities: Asian Americans and Latinos were an important part of Obama’s coalition, and black Americans turned out at their highest numbers *ever* in 2008 <http://www.pewhispanic.org/2009/04/30/dissecting-the-2008-electorate-most-diverse-in-us-history/> . For liberal observers, this heralded a new, rising electorate, and—in theory—a durable majority. “The future in American politics belongs to the party that can win a more racially diverse, better educated, more metropolitan electorate,” wrote <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/06/AR2008110602571.html> Harold Meyerson in the *Washington Post* after the 2008 election. “It belongs to Barack Obama’s Democrats.” For millions of white Americans who weren’t attuned to growing diversity and cosmopolitanism, however, Obama was a shock, a figure who appeared out of nowhere to dominate the country’s political life. And with talk of an “emerging Democratic majority,” he presaged a time when their votes—which had elected George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan—would no longer matter. More than simply “change <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._presidential_campaign_slogans#2008>,” Obama’s election felt like an *inversion*. When coupled with the broad decline in incomes and living standards caused by the Great Recession, it seemed to signal the end of a hierarchy that had always placed white Americans at the top, delivering status even when it couldn’t give material benefits.
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