Obama Slams Black Dads on Father's Day

Plouffe book recalls a historic campaign that got lost in transition

(NEWSER) - 'Yes, we can" was the rallying cry of a game-changing campaign that swept Obama to victory on the shoulders of a grass-roots tidal wave one year ago—and President Obama would do well to remember Candidate Obama, writes Arianna Huffington in a lengthy look at David Plouffe's new campaign memoir. The senator whose mantra was change has forgotten his middle-class mandate, and become the president who decided "the American people can only have as much change as Olympia Snowe will allow," she writes. More»

Many men 'still a little obtuse' about imbalance in household dynamics

(NEWSER) - The men in many families need to be "knocked across the head every once in a while" to realize how much more work their partners are putting into child-raising, President Obama says, and the Obamas are no exception. "There's no doubt that our family, like a lot of families out there, were ones in which the men are still a little obtuse about this stuff," he told an NBC interviewer last night. More»

(NEWSER) - President-elect Barack Obama addressed the country and the world for the first time tonight, vowing to unite a nation beset by trouble at home and abroad, the Chicago Tribune reports. "Change has come to America," Obama told a crowd of tens of thousands at Chicago's Grant Park and millions more watching around the world. "Our stories are singular, but our destinies are shared." More»

Electing Obama will replace America's battered image with one of equality

(NEWSER) - Skin color is no reason to vote for anybody, Nick Kristof writes in the New York Times, but there's no denying that electing a black president would give America's image abroad a much-needed boost—"redefining the American 'brand' to be less about Guantánamo and more about equality." Almost half of people abroad polled by the BBC said a President Obama would "fundamentally change their view of the US." More»

Racism will play a factor, but might not boil down to simple dishonesty

(NEWSER) - Much has been made of the so-called Bradley effect in this year's election—the propensity of white voters to tell pollsters they've got no problem voting for a black candidate but to change their tune in the privacy of the voting booth. Patt Morrison cautions in the Los Angeles Times that the phenomenon is probably exaggerated. After all, Tom Bradley’s 1982 California gubernatorial run was complicated by a gun-control proposition, which turned out many rural voters who hadn’t been polled as heavily. More»