ABSTRACT
"The first African American serious contender for the presidency was a great story," said Charlie Cook, a widely respected journalist who publishes the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. Many of the editorial endorsements of the Democratic candidate characterized Barack Obama's Republican rival as "John McSame"—in other words, saying that electing McCain would be tantamount to reelecting the unpopular George W. Bush to a third term. The historic nature of Obama's campaign spawned any number of articles based on interviews with African Americans about what his nomination meant to them on a personal level. In 2008, the Internet was in the midst of transforming the field of communication, and the thousands of reporters and editors on the front lines of that revolution appreciated that the tech-savvy Democratic candidate was on the vanguard with them. When a detached observer assessed Obama's qualifications to be president, his major weakness was that he possessed scant experience for the job.
