Barack Obama’s revival of old-style populist Democratic rhetoric may win him some working class voters. But his policies cannot change their lives for the better, and need to be exposed
Barack Obama’s campaign to become the Democratic Party’s candidate for the US presidential elections has upset the experts’ calculations. In three short months since his surprise victory in the 3 January Iowa primary, Obama has become the front runner in the campaign, with a slight edge over Hillary Clinton in delegates for the August Democratic convention which will decide the candidate. More than this, he has emerged as a political “phenomenon” with a youthful movement behind him on a scale not seen since the 1960s.
Both Democratic candidates are increasingly making populist appeals to working class voters, in order to tap the deep vein of anger and frustration in the US over the Iraq quagmire, stagnating wages and now the collapsing economy. A New York Times poll (April 3) found that 81% of Americans believe the US is “seriously” on the wrong course, skyrocketing from 35% in 2003 and the highest since the poll began in 1993.
But they have run very different campaigns. Hillary Clinton has emphasised her experience as a reliable, establishment politician with eight years of experience in the White House during Bill Clinton’s presidency. The continuity is underlined by her double-act campaign, where the ex-president is campaigning as actively for her as Hillary herself. She seeks to win voters who have strayed to the Republicans by portraying herself as competent and “hard” on national security issues.
In contrast Obama, a US Senator since only 2004 and relative newcomer, has looked left beyond this demographic to win potentially millions of new, young voters. He presents himself as a candidate who began as a grass roots community campaigner in his early days in Chicago, who is against climate change and the war in Iraq, and for economic and social justice.
In mass rallies he has captivated audiences with calls for wholesale “change” and the urgency of the present moment, underlining the sense of crisis felt by many Americans. He makes appeals to “heal the nation” and “change how business is done in Washington”, for unity to end division between conservative, Republican- supporting “Red States” and Democrat-supporting Blue States, and building “a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old”.
This is aimed at a deep disgust with establishment politics, where elections see the Republicans and Democrats slug it out with weeks or months of non-stop nasty advertising campaigns only to produce the same big-business policies once in office. The Democrats in particular have alienated millions with their cynical “triangulation” strategy pioneered by Bill Clinton, aimed at regaining power after twelve years of Reagan and Bush Senior.
Triangulation meant bending the knee to the Republicans and taking for granted the vote of workers, women and ethnic minorities, who would be unlikely to vote Republican and had no other alternative. Meanwhile the Democrats made themselves “more Republican than the Republicans” on issues like welfare reform and balancing the budget at the expense of social programmes, in order to win back the support of big business. Hillary Clinton, “Mrs Triangulation” as one pundit dubbed her, has made a career of this unprincipled strategy in the Senate. But it met with disaster in the Democrats’ bid for the White House in 2004, where John Kerry triangulated himself into defeat, supporting the Iraq war with the claim he would run it better than Bush had.
In contrast, Obama’s campaign rhetoric, his “message”, along with the historic possibility of a black president, has created skyrocketing illusions among youth, black voters and anti-war activists. Thousands of volunteers give his campaign the trappings of a grass roots movement and seriously helped him mobilise enough forces to beat Hillary Clinton, who throughout 2007 was seen as the “inevitable” Democratic nominee.
Instead, after his shock landslide in Iowa, Obama has gone on to win a majority of Democratic primary contests, giving him 1,418 delegates to Clinton’s 1,250. Now more and more heavyweights of the Democrat Party establishment are signing up to his campaign. This includes Senator Ted Kennedy, who has compared him to the mythical JFK as a once-in-a-lifetime, historic figure.
On 4 March, Clinton’s campaign was thrown a lifeline as she won primaries in Texas, Ohio and Rhode Island all in one day, breaking a string of Obama victories throughout February. Now the campaigns are gearing up for the Pennsylvania primary on 22April, a big state worth 188 delegates and a vital contest for both candidates to win.
Clinton needs to reverse Obama’s momentum and show she remains a viable candidate; Obama, who has eaten into Clinton’s base among women and Latino workers, needs to prove he can win white workers in key states like Pennsylvania which will prove crucial to winning the presidency on November. White male graduates favour Obama, but white males without degrees favour Clinton, giving her an edge in the old industrial rustbelt states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania.
But polls now show Clinton’s 15 point lead over Obama in early March have shrunk to 5% as Obama brings his massive war-chest to bear. He has raised $40 million in March (twice as much as Clinton), partly through small Internet donations but also because in reality he, even more than Clinton, receives millions from big business and Wall Street financiers. Behind the army of volunteers lies a sophisticated, well-oiled campaign machine, able to fund a non-stop barrage of radio and TV ads. It is this machine just as much as his message and movement that has allowed him to take the lead.
The real Obama
So underneath the message of change and skilful rhetoric, what does the real Obama stand for and will he fulfil the mass illusions that his youthful activists place in him?
For the last year the main debate has focused on Iraq, as a touchstone for supposedly different approaches to foreign policy. In 2002 Obama, then a member in the Illinois state senate, spoke out against the Iraq war while Clinton famously voted in favour of it, giving Bush a “blank cheque for war” in his words. But Obama has since stated in interviews that if he had seen US intelligence reports he might have thought differently concerning the invasion – hardly showing consistent opposition to the War on Terror!
Obama has been just as quick to sign the cheques for Bush’s requests to fund Iraq’s occupation, with a voting record identical to Clinton on national security issues. He is upping his rhetoric to compete with Clinton, stating his support for Israel against “the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam,” and is committed to leaving thousands of US troops in Iraq while ramping up the war in Afghanistan.
Obama has even held a press conference stuffed with flags and retired generals and admirals to rebut Clinton’s assertions that he is not “commander in chief” material, to prove to the wider US capitalist class that he is a safe pair of hands for US imperial interests abroad, and to allay any fears about his populist rhetoric and support by much of the anti-war movement such as MoveOn.org. For all his rhetoric, Obama’s presidency clearly will not entail any significant withdrawal from the US occupations in the Middle East.
It’s the economy again, stupid
Since the Wall Street crisis in mid-March and with the contest looming in Pennsylvania, both Clinton and Obama have swung to tap into voters’ concerns about the coming recession. The latest figures show 80,000 jobs lost in March alone and unemployment rising to a three-year highpoint of 5.1%, while home repossessions and arrears in mortgage payments are skyrocketing.
While Obama and Clinton have bashed “Bushonomics”, they have so far done little more than support the timid measures of the government. The US government has bailed out Wall Street investors with nearly a trillion dollars in cheap loans or more direct support, such as the $29 billion extended to guarantee Bear Stearns’ dodgy investments so that JP Morgan could take over the bankrupt firm.
Clinton and Obama have made populist speeches demanding that the government help the millions of ordinary Americans losing their jobs and homes, not just the rich and big business. In Obama’s words, “If we can extend a hand to banks on Wall Street, we can extend a hand to Americans who are struggling through no fault of their own.”
But neither has put forward a viable solution to the crisis. Clinton proposes a freeze on foreclosures and a government fund to buy up the mortgages and bail out the bankers along with the homeowners. Obama’s policies are even more moderate, favouring government support for a private sector solution and proposing greater regulation of the financial sector – but without clamping too tight a hand on economic innovation. These policies amount to peanuts compared to the largesse handed over to Wall Street in recent months, and will neither dampen the crisis nor ease the pain of workers facing a meltdown in the economy.
The mealy-mouthed plans for immediate relief are, like Obama’s ticket as a whole, dwarfed by promises of things to come, if only he is elected president. He promises tax cuts for “working families” and retired workers, along with affordable healthcare, rebuilt infrastructure, and schools and colleges. Where the money for this would come from, when he has also promised to balance the budget, remains unanswered.
Obama’s presidency would be caught between the recession and the $9.4 trillion debt racked up by the Bush presidency, so that any redistribution to the working class would mean hitting profits of the capitalists hard. After 35 years of stagnating profit rates in which US capitalism has continuously fought to offshore jobs, slash pensions and healthcare, hold down wages and push through tax cuts for the rich, the capitalists will not stand aside and see these policies reversed without a fight. But this is a fight that the populist Obama is neither willing nor able to lead.
US capitalism cannot be reformed to benefit the majority of Americans, while also keeping the ruling class happy and their profit rates up. Obama’s promises to transform politics and usher in a new era are based on this kind of illusion, and they do not add up. And his calls for tolerance and unity sound quite empty when, for example, he refuses interview with the gay press to avoid touching a dangerous subject.
Phenomenon or Con?
Obama is no less a triangulating Democrat than Clinton. Neither one can bite the hand that feeds them – the majority of big business funding has shifted from the Republicans to the two Democratic frontrunners. Both lead the way in contributions from banks, hedge funds, private equity firms, and other finance houses responsible for the mess in the first place. For US capitalism a Democratic government is the best way to reverse out of the impasse created by Bush and Iraq.
Obama is winning the favour of ever increasing sections of the Democratic establishment, who need the mobilising power of his message to win. They also need it to confuse, misdirect and stall the working class – to sow the illusion that their lives are about to change for the better while they are made to pay for the painful process of recession that the US is about to undergo.
Socialists must struggle throughout 2008 to expose the Obama con to the tens of thousands of progressive activists and supporters of the Obama campaign – black, Hispanic, youth, labour. We must explain clearly why Obama does not deserve our support, and prepare to lead all those inevitably disillusioned in the coming years to renewed struggle and the building of a new, mass workers party that can lead a socialist revolution in the USA