Obama campaign in well-deserved crisis

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(Wed, 27 Aug 2008 10:00:35 -0500 (CDT)) ---
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Democratic convention meets with Obama campaign in crisis

By Patrick Martin
27 August 2008

The first two days of Democratic National Convention have been
dominated by a sense of foreboding and unease, with mounting concern
that the Obama campaign is losing ground in the polls, and that the
divisions opened up in the primary contest between Obama and Senator
Hillary Clinton have not healed, but rather have begun to fester.

The Obama campaign has suffered a palpable loss of political momentum
which elaborate attempts at media stagecraftthe candidates trip to
the Middle East and Europe, the hype over the vice-presidential
selection process, the convention itselfhave so far failed to
reverse. Polls show a tightening race between Obama and his
Republican rival Senator John McCain, despite overwhelming popular
hostility to the Bush administration and the Republican Party.

There has been complete silence in both the media and the Democratic
Party over the real source of this decline, which has little to do
with negative advertising or the supposed prowess of the Republican
attack machine. In fact, the falloff in backing for Obama is
sharpest among those layersthe young, self-described liberals, and
those most hostile to the Iraq war and the Bush administrationwho
were among his most enthusiastic supporters in the primary campaign.

Obamas lead in the polls has dwindled as he turned sharply to the
right following his primary victory over Hillary Clinton. His
campaign faltered not because of a Republican media blitzObama
continues to greatly outspend McCainbut because of the Democratic
candidates demonstrative efforts to disassociate his campaign and
prospective presidency from any semblance of progressive change.

The Democratic presidential nominee voted in the Senate for increased
wiretapping powers for the FBI and NSA, downplayed his past criticism
of the war in Iraq, positioned himself as the most fervent advocate
of military escalation in Afghanistan, and echoed the Bush
administrations saber-rattling over the conflict between Russia and
Georgia. He said little about the continued deterioration of the US
economy, reiterated his support for fiscal austerity policies that
effectively rule out any significant program of social reform, and
prostrated himself before the religious right in a joint appearance
with McCain at a fundamentalist church.

None of these positions came as a surprise to his most important
backers, billionaires like Warren Buffett and the Pritzker family
(Hyatt Hotels), other sections of the financial aristocracy and the
Democratic Party establishment. But Obamas emergence as an utterly
conventional and conservative bourgeois politicianculminating in the
selection of Senator Joseph Biden, a 35-year veteran of Washington,
as his running matehas deflated whatever there was of a popular
mobilization, however manipulated and misguided, behind his campaign.

Obama was never the candidate of a genuine oppositional movement
against the political establishment. On the contrary, his candidacy
was carefully planned by a section of that establishment, disaffected
from the foreign policy of the Bush administration, particularly in
Iraq, and the support for it from Democratic congressional leaders
like Clinton and Biden.

The Obama camp had no fundamental or principled differences with the
use of war as an instrument to secure the interests of US
imperialism. Its criticism of Bush was that he had waged war
ineffectively and to a certain extent needlessly, and that the
administrations obsessive focus on Iraq had become a diversion from
broader global concerns. Equally important, by defining his principal
difference with Clinton in terms of her original vote to authorize
the war in 2002, Obama was able to make at least a limited appeal to
antiwar sentiment, and channel the mass opposition to the war back
into the straitjacket of the Democratic Party.

The divisions over Iraq were of a tactical character. In the past
several months, however, a bipartisan consensus has emerged,
embracing virtually the entire political establishment, Democrat and
Republican, that the Bush administration escalation in Iraq has been
a success, and that the US occupation has been at least temporarily
stabilized at a level of violence acceptable to Washington (if not to
the Iraqi people themselves).

Now that the positions of Obama and Clinton on Iraq have largely
converged with those of Bush and McCain, what accounts for the
seemingly intractable divisions in the Democratic Party itself? As
the WSWS explained during the primary voting, while political
differences over foreign policy provided the initial impetus for
Obamas challenge to the presumptive frontrunner, the Obama-Clinton
contest began to split the Democratic Party along race and gender lines.

This was not merely due to the fact that the two finalists were the
first African-American and the first woman with a significant chance
of winning the presidential nomination of one of the two major
bourgeois parties. More fundamental was the historical transformation
of the Democratic Party over the past 40 years, the abandonment of
any, however modest, class-based political appeal, and the emergence
of identity politics as its central organizing principle.

In the last great crisis of American capitalism, the Great Depression
of the 1930s, the Democratic Party under Roosevelt forged a coalition
embracing more far-sighted sections of the ruling class, the trade
unions, including the newly formed industrial unions, the
professional middle classes, small farmers and urban middle-class
layers, from shopkeepers to intellectuals.

While American liberalism fervently supported the profit system, it
advanced in that period a reform agenda calling for a restructuring
of American capitalism in a way that would curtail the power of big
business, make a limited redistribution of wealth and achieve a
semblance of greater socio-economic equality.

This program ended in shipwreck in the 1960s, when the Democratic
Party had to choose between social reform and the war in Vietnam, and
it chose, as it had to as a capitalist party, the defense of
imperialist interests abroad at the expense of the working class.

More fundamentally, the protracted decline of American capitalisms
world position, throughout the 1960s and 1970s undermined the core
Democratic promise of rising living standards and expanded social
services for all. The party sought to refashion itself instead as the
dispenser of privileges to elite layers among various racial and
ethnic constituencies and among women, while the living standards of
the broad mass of working people, African-American and Latino as well
as white, women and men, stagnated or declined.

The embrace of identity politics was based on an evasion of the
fundamental class issues in American society. No Democrat politician
today could denounce the pernicious influence of the financial
oligarchs, as Roosevelt did, without suffering immediate political
oblivion.

This obsessive focus on secondary issues of race, gender, sexual
orientation, etc., was on display throughout the Democratic
convention, where speaker after speaker sought to avoid the
overriding social fact of deepening economic inequality, the
polarization of American society between a relative handful of multi-
millionaires and billionaires, and the vast majority who work for a
living.

The suppression of class issues is demonstrated in the very structure
of the Democratic Party. On Monday, for example, there were 16
meetings of Democratic caucuses based on various forms of identity
blacks, women, religious, Asian-American, Native American, Hispanic,
gays, seniors, youth, rural residents, even an ethnic coordinated
caucus. There is a labor caucus, consisting of highly paid union
bureaucrats whose interests are diametrically counterposed to those
of the workers. The working class, which comprises the overwhelming
majority of the American population, is unrepresented and virtually
unmentioned.

Typical was the speech of Michelle Obama on Monday night, where the
candidates wife engaged in a demeaning effort to disavow any hint of
a critical attitude to American society, portraying herself as an
ardent patriot and presenting her familys rise in social status as
the personification of the American dream.

In decades past, the American dream would have been defined as the
belief in each generation of working people that their children would
live better than themselves. But in Ms. Obamas formulation, the
American dream means that blacks as well as whites, women as well
as men, have the opportunity to join the privileged elite and escape
the working classas she and Barack Obama did.

Perhaps the clearest expression of this rejection of any class appeal
was Obamas selection of former Virginia governor Mark Warner as the
convention keynote speaker. It is the first time that a Democratic
Party convention keynote speech has been delivered by an individual
possessing a nine-figure personal fortune.

Warners speech Tuesday was both soporific and reactionary. He began
by celebrating his own success as a cell-phone capitalist (his wealth
is estimated at over $250 million). It was naturally impossible for
such an individual to make any genuine connection to the conditions
of life facing hundreds of millions of working people.

Appealing to economic nationalismas did many of the speakers Tuesday
Warner warned that the Bush administrations policies were opening
the door to international competitors of the United States,
particularly China, to seize the worlds economic leadership. Warner
declared that his biggest criticism of Bush was his failure to demand
sufficient sacrifices from the American people in the aftermath of
the 9/11 terrorist attacksan argument that suggests that a Democrat
in the White House would take such steps as slashing social spending
to boost the military and reintroduce the draft.

There were similar themes in Hillary Clintons speech late Tuesday
night, which concentrated on an appeal to her own supporters to rally
behind Obama as the Democratic presidential candidate. Although
overlaid with a greater degree of populist demagogy, of the type that
characterized the last few months of her unsuccessful campaign for
the Democratic nomination, Clinton placed her criticism of Bushs
economic policies in a nationalist framework, citing the export of
jobs to other countries, rather than the destruction of jobs by giant
corporations. And she fully embraced identity politics, presenting
herselfthe multimillionaire wife of a former presidentas the
personification of the struggle of generations of women against
oppression.

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