ABSTRACT
The celebrations that met Barack Obama’s election as president in November 2008 extended beyond the ranks of established left-leaning periodicals such as The Nation and The American Prospect. Even those on the far left who stressed the logic of the capitalist order and the inability of reformism to ameliorate economic crises seemed to be caught up in the emotions of the moment. Although doubts were raised about Obama’s embrace of ‘post-partisanship’ during the campaign, his opposition to the Iraq war, his defeat of Senator Hillary Clinton in the primaries, and repeated insistence upon ‘change’ appeared to mark a repudiation of both George W. Bush’s presidency and the Clinton administration that preceded it.
