Why Shelby Steele Thought Barack Obama Couldn't Winbr The Hoover Institution - Hoover Institutionbr Shelby Steele asserts that Barack Obama won the presidential election by successfully basing his candidacy on race, "Obama's special charisma … always came … from the racial idealism he embodied. … This was his only true political originality."Steele holds that whites voted less for real "change" than for documentation of a change that has already occurred in race relations in America.