Obama Effect Quotes

Barack Obama makes me feel good to be a black man.

The day Obama got into office, rap was less important because Obama gave kids an alternative. But will rap ever go away? No. There will always be a need for poets.

It took President Obama to make America lead like America again.

Aspiring black leaders are often asked to transcend race, even though no one ever asked, say, Hillary Clinton to transcend gender. This is a precarious race straddle that most members of the breakthrough generation seem to reject. Even the most well meaning white Obama supporters seem to take deep satisfaction in this idea. Obama, they insisted, could be raceless, a reasurringly optimistic view of America's deepest burden that ignores countless peices of evidence to the contrary.

Obama's presence opened a new field for writers, and what began as curiosity about the man himself eventually expanded into curiosity about the community he had so consciously made his home and all the old, fitfully slumbering questions he'd awakened about American identity.

The thing is that it's always a constant reminder of how violent this country has been, always has been, you know. I'm still frustrated with these conversations: [Barack] Obama is black so that means this, that things are better, or it means that you voted for him because he's black.

I can't do Christopher Walken impressions anymore, thanks [Barack] Obama.

As a man of colour, I've spent my life asking people to see me for who I am. With Obama in the White House, it feels like people have finally caught up to where I've been most of my life.

Barack Obama has domesticated the left in such a way that we feel as if we have no alternative but him...I refuse to accept that.

I am so used to having two faces. A face that I had for black America and a face for white America. When Obama became president, I lost both faces. Now I only have one face.

Obama seems to inspire a bizarre personal loyalty among his advocates, particularly among young people who should by all rights be concerned with their fading futures and collapsing prospects.

Obama has made America cool again - and more than that, he's made his own brand arguably the most powerful the world has ever known.

I've said the election of Obama has made the hustler less relevant. People took it in a way that I was almost dismissing what I am. And I was like, 'No, it's a good thing!'

I was a political junkie, and it just exhausted me, and after Obama won, I just kind of unplugged from all of that for a while.

For so long, black conservatives have not been able to have a voice; people who have bi-racial children, people in bi-racial relationships, it has been so black and white. I blame Obama. His eight years in office did a lot of damage in terms of race relations in this country.

The Democrats were losing elections everywhere, except when Obama was on the ballot - and that is the racial component.

I can personally feel the relief myself in my audiences when I bring up Obama because there was a lot of anti-Obama sentiment out there before the capture of bin Laden.

I go out on publicity tours for my books, and, you know, Latinos, they bring everybody in the family to everything, even little kids. So I always ask the kids, 'Who wants to be the first Latino President?' It used to be no hands went up, or maybe one or two. Now, with Obama, many of the little hands go up. It will happen in my lifetime.

Among the many international consequences of Barack Obama's stunning victory in the United States is worldwide introspection about whether such a breakthrough could happen elsewhere. Could a person of color win power in other white-majority countries?

I can't tell you, I couldn't put a number on it, but it's big, the number of white voters in America that voted for Obama thinking it was the end of racial strife. Thinking by electing a black, that America would be stating, "We're not racist anymore." And I warned everybody, "It's not gonna happen, it's gonna get worse. It's going to get worse." And it was, it did become worst.

I am surprised with the reelection of Mr. Obama. The S&P is only down, like, 30 points. I would have thought that the market on his reelection should be down at least 50%.

I can't negate the theory that the Huxtables on 'The Cosby Show' may have helped pave the way for the Obama family. People enjoyed watching that black family.

Obama's ascendancy unhinged the radical right, offering a unified target to competing camps of racial, nativist and religious animus.

Mr. Obama is particularly well positioned to challenge Hollywood because of his special relationship with the media world's elites. They might be more likely to heed criticism coming from Mr. Obama than from any other president or member of Congress.

Everyone who has a pair of eyes in this country understands the racial tensions and the issues we have are very serious and they're not going away. Just because we had Barack Obama as our president and, on paper, everything looks equal, it's very clearly not.