2 December 2019
The first votes for the
Democratic presidential nomination will be cast in two months’ time, in the
Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary. With former President Barack Obama
taking the lead, the Democratic Party is moving to ensure that issues of social
inequality and wealth distribution are excluded from the elections.
An article in Politico last
week (“Waiting for Obama”) reported that the “Democratic establishment is
counting on [Obama] to stop Trump and, perhaps, stave off Bernie as well.”
While noting that Obama’s
public position is that he will support whatever candidate is nominated, the
article states, “There is one potential exception: Back when Sanders seemed
like more of a threat than he does now, Obama said privately that if Bernie
were running away with the nomination, Obama would speak up to stop him.”
The report conforms to what
Obama has said in statements over the past two weeks to party donors and
fundraisers in Washington, DC and California. He claimed that the American
people were opposed to any radical change. “This is still a country that is
less revolutionary than it is interested in improvement,” Obama said. “They
like seeing things improved. But the average American doesn’t think we have to
completely tear down the system and remake it… They just don’t want to see
crazy stuff.”
He continued, “We also have to
be rooted in reality and the fact that voters, including the Democratic voters
and certainly persuadable independents or even moderate Republicans, are not
driven by the same views that are reflected on certain, you know, left-leaning
Twitter feeds. Or the activist wing of our party.”
While he did not name them,
the meaning was clear, as the New York Times noted: “His comments
offered an implicit critique of Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren…”
The concern of the Democratic
Party establishment is not over Sanders and Warren, both of whom are tested
political operatives. Rather, they do not want to run an election that appeals
even in a limited way to the class-based concerns of the vast majority of the
population.
Beginning with Obama’s
statement that the 2016 election was an “intramural scrimmage” between two
sides of the same team, the Democrats have sought to redirect popular hostility
to Trump behind their militarist, anti-Russia campaign, the focus of the
impeachment drive. This will be combined with efforts to promote divisions
based on race and gender.
Obama was only the most
prominent spokesman for a right-wing campaign throughout the month of November,
including commentaries and editorials in the Times and the Washington
Post (owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos), an op-ed from former
Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, and public statements from billionaires
Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Mark Cuban and Leon Cooperman, all attacking
proposals by Warren and Sanders for a tax on accumulated wealth.
Billionaire Michael Bloomberg
went even further, officially announcing himself as a belated candidate for the
Democratic presidential nomination and funding a $30 million advertising blitz
that began last week.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
joined in with an attack on the health care proposal identified with Sanders
and Warren. “I’m not a big fan of Medicare-for-all,” she said on Bloomberg TV,
the cable network controlled by the billionaire now-candidate. She claimed that
“there is a comfort level that some people have with their current private
insurance.”
Both Warren and Sanders have
responded by shifting to the right. Warren has backpedaled on
her “Medicare for All” proposal, releasing a “Plan B” that backtracks on the
main component of her campaign.
For his part, Sanders was
queried in last month’s Democratic presidential debate about Obama’s repudiation
of revolution. “Is President Obama wrong?” the moderator asked Sanders. The
Vermont senator shelved his rhetoric about “political revolution” and meekly
replied, “No, he’s right. We don’t have to tear down the system, but we do have
to do what the American people want.”
Both Sanders and Warren accept
the fraudulent presentation of the Obama administration as a “progressive”
government that laid the basis for further social reforms. They make no
criticism of Obama’s bailout of Wall Street, his wage-cutting attacks on auto
workers, or his slashing of federal support to public education and other
social programs. They do not address the undeniable political fact that it was
the alignment of the Obama administration with corporate America that drove
sizeable sections of workers to turn their backs on the Democratic Party and
either vote for Trump or stay home on Election Day in 2016.
Most critically, they support
the foreign policy consensus in the Democratic Party that underlies the
campaign to impeach Trump, not for his real crimes against immigrant workers
and the democratic rights of the American people, but for his transgressions
against the demands of the military-intelligence apparatus in relation to
Ukraine, Russia and the Middle East.
Warren has publicly embraced
the Trump administration’s efforts to strangle Venezuela with financial
sanctions, while tacitly supporting the overthrow of Bolivian President Evo
Morales by a right-wing US-backed campaign in which the Bolivian military
played the central role. Sanders has referred to the overthrow of Morales as a
“coup,” but offers no alternative to the aggressive assertion of US imperialist
interests around the world, which is supported by both the Democrats and
Republicans.
And like most Democrats,
Sanders has criticized Trump’s trade war policies towards China from the right,
demanding even more aggressive protectionist measures that would only add fuel
to the mounting global tensions that bring with them the danger of a third
world war.
The working class cannot
defend its social rights to good-paying jobs, decent schools, medical care and
other social services, or fight the growing danger of imperialist war, by means
of the Democratic Party. This requires the independent mobilization of the
working class in both industrial and political struggle, through strikes, mass
demonstrations and the building of an independent political movement directed
against the capitalist system based on a socialist program.
Patrick Martin
The author also recommends:
Obama joins
effort to push Democratic primary campaign to the right
[18 November 2019]
[18 November 2019]
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