Clinton plays race card against Obama
When the race opened for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton was the clear favourite. She’s very visibly right-wing: supports the war; is in the pocket of AIPAC, the Zionist lobbying organisation; supports nuclear proliferation to US proxy regimes like Israel and Pakistan and has even fought attempts by the Bush administration to cut some military programmes.
When Senator Barack Obama announced his candidacy, the sense of entitlement, complacency and arrogance of the Clinton camp dismissed his chances: after all, just how much bother could this young, inexperienced upstart black candidate be? Then Obama won Iowa, which is 94% white … and has gone on to win many States and more delegates than Clinton to the nominating convention.
The Clinton campaign has responded by taking the gloves off and throwing all the dirt they can at Obama. Son of a white working-class American mother and Kenyan father, born in Hawaii, schooled in Indonesia, experimented with drugs in adolescence, community organizer in Chicago, first black president of the Harvard Law Review, State Senator and Senator, Barack Hussein Obama’s evolution is at once a classic ascent from obscurity story of the so-called ‘American Dream’ and simultaneously a rich source of racial stereotypes. Clinton has wasted no time to play on prejudice: asked if Obama was a Muslim (he’s not), Clinton responded with equivocation: ‘there is nothing to base that on. As far as I know.’ We’ve had videos of Obama’s pastor condemning US genocide, pictures of Obama wearing a turban (traditional dress in his father’s heritage), mutterings about his middle name.
Clinton – the underdog – has generously suggested that Obama go take a seat at the back of her bus and be her Vice Presidential running-mate – a move that has universally angered the black community. After agreeing with the Democratic National Committee that the Florida and Michigan primaries be excluded because they were held early, Clinton has reversed her position and is trying to claim their delegates as hers. She has even said that Republican war criminal candidate, John McCain, would make a better candidate than Obama!
Obama’s youth, calm demeanour, and inspiring, if empty, rhetoric about ‘change’ have made him attractive to younger voters and others who want something different – particularly an end to the war.
The black community was initially lukewarm for a complex of reasons. Some didn’t believe he could get enough support to be the nominee; a few wondered if he was ‘black enough’; many understand that, if Obama is the Democratic candidate, he is also the prime target of racist assassins, and have considered a vote for Obama as passing a death sentence. However, his evident success, combined with the Clinton campaign’s playing of the race card, have encouraged far wider black participation in the primaries than in the past. Latinos, previously assumed to be safely in the Clinton camp, have shown support for Obama.
What is going on here has nothing to do with actual change: although he opposed the war, Obama’s stated policies are not very different from Clinton’s. He supports Israel, ‘free markets’ and the rest. Bourgeois commentators invoke ‘charisma’ and other psychological factors to try to explain Obama’s success and the bitterness of the struggle between the two candidates.
However, the differences reflect the crumbling of the old coalition which was the basis of the Democratic Party and correspondingly different strategies for winning the general election. In past articles we have emphasised that the Democratic Party was an uneasy coalition of sections of the better off middle class, the US labour aristocracy, black and Latino minorities and working women. The electoral strategy has been to win the so-called ‘Reagan Democrats’ – the more backward sections of the labour aristocracy who have supported the Republicans. Yet the decline in size of the traditional white working class, the split in the US trade union movement, the growing importance of Latinos, the dissatisfaction of younger workers and the disaffection of blacks has split that coalition. The Clinton campaign is scared of losing the Reagan Democrats and expects the rest of the Democrat constituency to join Obama at the back of the bus. The Obama campaign is counting on attracting dissatisfied younger voters and on catalysing previously under-represented groups, like the black community into political action, and dragging some of the Reagan Democrats behind them.
American working people are deeply opposed to this war, anxious about their economic future and hungry for change. They have had enough of the open imperialism of the Republican Party. The job of the Democratic Party is to offer empty but soothing promises about meeting these concerns while changing absolutely nothing. Clinton is too tied to the coalitions and messages of the past to throw enough sand in everyone’s eyes. Obama is much more plausible as the future face of the Democratic Party: seeming to offer a progressive alternative while actually blunting and diverting real opposition.
Steve Palmer
FRFI 202 April / May 2008
