THE 2008 USA PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS

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THE 2008 USA PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS
Introduction
In the year 2008, after rigorous presidential campaign that had lasted for more than two years, the US citizens elected Barack Obama as 44th president of the USA. This was an historic event, as Obama, being an Illinois based first-time senator became the nation’s first time Negro President. He also sets history by becoming the first time senator to win presidential elections from the time of President John F. Kennedy in 1960. The election also saw a large number of voters turning out as Obama outmatched his greatest rival John McCain, the oldest candidate in the presidential race. In this election, Obama had scooped more than half of the total votes. This paper will evaluate the political environment at the time of the campaign, Obama’s strengths and weaknesses during this time, challenges he encountered, the strategies he employed, the keys that led to the victory and our viewpoints on what it takes to become president today.
The 2008 Political Environment in USA
Hillary Clinton was one of the competitions for the nomination of the presidential ticket under the Democratic Party. During this electioneering period, she formed a committee and filed with the FEC for the nomination of the Democratic Party. Consequently, she sought campaign money through fundraisings and started her vigorous campaigns for her presidential bid. For many months preceding the election period, she was the leading among other presidential contestants in opinion polls. However, Obama started to pull closer by substantial margins in these opinions polls until he became even with her. Hillary then regained her opinion leads by large margins. For instance, in the autumn of 2007, she was the leader among other candidates in the Democratic Party by large margins in the opinion polls. However, the subsequent opinion polls saw her lose popularity and therefore leaving space for other Democratic Party candidates to trail her.
For much of the campaign period, it looked like Hillary was the most preferred candidate for the Americans. She was well established with well-staffed offices throughout the nation. Obama on the other hand could be described as starting his political campaigns from scratch. This is because; the guy had no serious offices, leave alone qualified staff and operated on what could be described as a briefcase office (Balz and Haynes, 2007 p72).
John McCain was another presidential candidate in the 2008 presidential race. The senior Arizona senator had launched his presidential campaign during this time in an attempt to win the presidency for the second consecutive time. His venture in the race was officially announced in Feb 28, 2007. He chose HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Palin" \o "Sarah Palin"Sarah Palin, who was the Alaska governor at that time to be his running mate. McCain started his campaign as an obvious republican flag bearer. H e formed a strategy of appearing as if he was the much-taunted candidate to solve the nation’s woes. His website depicted an article from the AP describing him as a “political celebrity”. However, though he was among the established candidate than others, he was rated lowly in opinion polls compared to other candidates.
McCain’s high expenditure and misuse of campaign money may have led to his political downfall fall. This is because in the middle of his campaign, he virtually ran out of money to proceed with his campaign trail. This forced him to fire a number of key staff and close many of his offices during the campaign period. He also lost many of his supporters to Obama’s side because by his failure to manage his campaign, the supporters perceived that he could not as well be a good mana...