If I understand it right, Obama's appeal is a kind of Blairite (or even Clintonite) transcendence of the 'old politics'. His core base is black and young, but to show that he is of a different stripe, he has to distance himself from race politics.
Max Sawicky:
Substantively the Clintons are the Blairites, judging by record in office. BHO is still a work in progress. He's on the outer edge of acceptable (U.S.) liberalism in terms of campaign rhetoric. He could turn Third Way like Clinton after 1992, or not.
Doug Henwood:
Yup. Except that he's triangulating the Clintons too. ======================================= All European social democrats and their allies in the US Democratic Party are "third way", are they not? That is, in terms of presenting themselves as beholden to neither Labour (as were their predecessors in the 30s) nor Capital (as are the conservative parties to their right), but as representatives of the nation as a whole against both these narrow "special interests."
This has really been so ever since the end of WWII and even beyond, but especially since the unions and socialist movement went into decline and the political centre of gravity shifted further to the right in the 80s and 90s. These parties then felt urgently compelled to stress that they had truly loosened their ties to the industrial unions and had fully embraced the market. Both Blair and Clinton, good friends joined at the hip, promoted the Third Way brand as something new and different in their bid to catch the parties of Thatcher and Reagan.
While they distanced themselves from the higher taxes and social programs traditionally associated with the parties of the centre-left, they easily incorporated - even celebrated - racial diversity and multiculturalism, not least as a means of appealing to the growing racial and ethnic communities which were beginning to overtake the weakened unions as their major base of electoral support.
Obama and the Clintons seem to fit equally well within this Third Way paradigm. The paradigm, of course, has been evolving over the past year in the wake of the current financial and housing crises, which have tarnished capitalism and require a more active role for the state. Both Clinton and Obama are increasingly sounding populist themes, and it is the Republicans who are now feeling pressures to adapt as the political pendulum swings back to the left.