> After Marvin's brief and bright analysis of the election he ruins it with
> by saying that Obama's "campaign for change" is "promising" (What does it
> promise?) and that we should be "encouraged" on the basis of the
> "promise." I simply don't know what this means..what bothers me is the
> illusions so many people on the "left" seem to
> have in Obama. There are certain fundamentals that he will not change.
>...I say that the Obama candidacy is not "promising"
> because the social forces behind him are the same ones that were behind
> Carter in 1976 and the electorate behind him (as Doug's post pointed out)
> is the same as that behind Kerry in 2004
> ...Obama is the preference of the big
> corporate law firms, i.e. the law firms that act as the negotiators and
> diplomats for the large corporations. He also seems to have large amount
> of support from Wall Street and the Insurance industry. Why this should
> be so I am not completely sure...
===================================
Julio, Charles and others have already commented at length on the
significance of the Obama campaign, so I'm not sure there is much I can add.
But here goes...
1. The campaign is the vehicle which liberal Americans have presently chosen to express their opposition to racial divisions and the war in Iraq, and I support it on that basis. In case there is any doubt that these are the issues driving the campaign, it's telling that the Clintons, in their increasing desperation to halt it's progress, were thrown back to appealing to the most chauvinistic and racist forces in the Democratic party, evoking the same reactionary themes and engaging in the same bellicose posturing as the Republican politicians they were mimicking. I don't think we can be neutral in relation to conflicts over these issues when they occur inside or between the parties.
2. Like all such movements which regularly appear in and outside of the electoral arena, the Obama campaign holds the promise of developing further, irrespective of the intentions of its leaders and of how it's participants initially define their objectives. However, it wouldn't surprise me also if Obama's supporters are ultimately frustrated by what their efforts have not been able to accomplish. But if that's the criterion, we might as well abstain from supporting any movement since the great majority fall well short of the goals they set for themselves.
3. We can debate, and have done so, whether such failures are primarily due to the "treachery" of the leaders of such movements, or to the prevailing relationship of forces with the ruling class and the level of political consciousness which the leaders for the most part share in common with their members. Each case has to be analyzed independently, but I believe the notion of misleadership has congealed into such a hardened dogma on the small socialist left that it has now become commonplace for many to blame the leaders even BEFORE the movements have been defeated, in anticipation of the inevitable "betrayal". That's how I understand the distance of yourself and others from the Obama campaign.
4. I don't agree this is a repeat of 1976 or of 2004. The constituencies which make up the DP are the same, but the party is more deeply divided, and the society is more polarized. Kerry was the choice of the party establishment; Carter a modest maverick without a movement. Obama is a black man around whom a rank-and-file insurgency unexpectedly developed against the DLC's once "inevitable" candidate. His campaign seems more like a hybrid offspring of the electoral movements around Eugene McCarthy and Jesse Jackson than a clone of the ones run by Carter and Kerry.
5. I don't know the details of Obama's ties to different industries, but this should also come as no surprise, justifying disavowal of the movement which has formed behind him. Every politician - liberal, conservative, and social democratic - cultivates such ties in order to win election and to take part in the administration of the capitalist system. To take it even a step further, I don't believe any reform is possible without at least the tacit consent of the ruling class, which has to see some convergence of its interests with the change being sought from below. Certainly, on fundamental questions of property and power, where there can be no such convergence or consent, the result is repression or revolution, depending on the balance of forces, but such questions are no longer posed since the demise of the socialist movement.
In this case, many of the liberal reforms presently being sought by the Obama (and Clinton) campaign in foreign and domestic policy correspond to the needs of the system because of a ruling class crisis in both spheres. I think chances are good -even under McCain -for a staged withdrawal of the main body of the occupation forces from Iraq, which the bipartisan defence and foreign policy establishment favours on strategic grounds, and for some degree of income support and regulation which the economic conjuncture demands in the context of the housing, credit, and health care crises. How far such changes go will depend, as I suggested elsewhere recently, on whether there are "tens of millions of Democratic supporters emboldened by victory and pressing for change rather than dispirited by defeat". The historical precedents are the Democratic administrations under FDR and FK - each President more conservative and patrician than Obama, to be sure -which STIMULATED rather than thwarted the movement for change from below.
6. I have to say also that even if there were little possibility of forward movement under a Democratic administration, it's my view that support for the party against the Republicans would still be warranted in defence of existing legislative, regulatory, and judicial gains. What is your answer, for example, to the Democratic activist who asks for your vote simply to block McCain's election because of his declared intent to create a Supreme Court conservative majority bent on overturning Roe v. Wade? That it's unnecessary because the women's movement and its allies can defend the right to abortion in the streets? Is that the position of the women's organizations themselves? Is it false consciousness or a correct assessment of their interests that keeps the unions and other representative organizations of gays, environmentalists, Hispanics, blacks, etc. connected to electoral politicals and the Democratic party? Such questions ought to be the proper starting point for any discussion of the Democratic party, IMO, not the truism that it has a pro-capitalist leadership and program, as do all of the mass parties vying for political office today.