One year since the election of Barack Obama

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One year since the election of Barack Obama
4 November 2009

One year ago today, on November 4, 2008, Barack Obama won the US
presidential election in what was, for all practical purposes, a
political rout. The Democratic candidate defeated his Republican rival
by a margin of 10 million votes, the biggest victory for a
non-incumbent candidate in more than 50 years. He carried 28 states
and won 338 electoral votes, while the congressional Democratic Party
won its largest majorities in 30 years in both the House and Senate.

The election result constituted a popular repudiation of the
right-wing policies pursued by the Bush administration over the
previous eight years. Tens of millions turned out at the
polls—including an unprecedented number of first-time, minority and
youth voters—to express their opposition to the war in Iraq, the
deepening recession, attacks on democratic rights, and a government
that openly favored the rich while demonstrating indifference to mass
suffering, expressed most starkly in Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina.

Within the framework of the two-party system in the United States,
hatred for the Republican administration could find mass expression
only in a victory for the Democrats, despite the fact that the
Democratic congressional leadership had collaborated with the Bush
White House and provided the support it needed to pursue its policies
of war and social reaction.

Many who voted for Obama undoubtedly believed that an African-American
president, by virtual of his ethnic background, would be more
sympathetic to the needs of working and poor people, and that the
victory of the candidate of “change” would signal a break from decades
of political reaction and the initiation of progressive policies.

One year later, these illusions are turning to anger, frustration and
a sense of having been sold a bill of goods. Millions of workers are
making a fundamental experience not only with the Obama
administration, but with the entire political and economic system.
What is emerging in response to the administration’s servility to Wall
Street and indifference to the social crisis facing the working class,
as well as its continuation of a foreign policy based on imperialist
war, is a dawning recognition that the entire political system serves
the class interests of a financial oligarchy.

The 2008 election reflected a movement of the working population to
the left. Obama, however, was not the standard-bearer of this
movement. Rather, he was the instrument of the most powerful sections
of the ruling elite. They threw their support to Obama in order to
make certain tactical changes in foreign policy and improve the
international image of the United States after the debacle of the Bush
years, and to derail growing domestic opposition to the program of big
business.

As the World Socialist Web Site wrote one week after the election:

“To deal with the protracted and visible decline of American
capitalism, whose iconic banks and industrial firms are verging on
collapse, these sections sponsored and financed the campaign of Obama,
with an eye to installing a more popular and at the same time entirely
reliable representative of the class interests and global aims of
American imperialism. American industry may be all but bankrupt, but
America remains the world’s leader in marketing. A well-oiled and
lavishly funded marketing campaign was launched to give American
imperialism a new brand, in the form of the young, African-American
senator from Illinois.”

Obama’s victory in the contest for the Democratic presidential
nomination was in large part due to his professed opposition to the
war in Iraq. His main rival, Hillary Clinton, had voted for the Iraq
war authorization in the Senate. But once elected, Obama quickly
scrapped his pledge to bring change to Washington, filling top White
House and cabinet posts with a combination of leading congressional
Democrats, such as Clinton and Rahm Emanuel, and Bush administration
holdovers such as Robert Gates, who, as Bush’s defense secretary, had
overseen the military “surge” in Iraq.

Obama filled his key economic and budget posts with investment bankers
or those, such as New York Federal Reserve President Timothy Geithner,
who had longstanding ties to Wall Street.

The past year has featured certain cosmetic changes in style, but in
substance the reactionary policies of the Bush administration have
been continued.

In foreign policy, Obama has continued the US occupation of Iraq,
adhering to the troop levels decided on by Bush before he left the
White House. He dispatched an additional 21,000 US troops to
Afghanistan, and is on the brink of deciding on a further escalation
of the war in the “Afpak” theater.

In domestic policy, Obama embraced the most important decision of the
Bush administration, the $700 billion bailout of the banks, and
greatly expanded it, making available up to $23.7 trillion in loans,
guarantees, subsidies and cash infusions to Wall Street. The stock
market plunged during the transition period from Bush to Obama,
reaching its low in early March, but rallied when the big financial
interests became certain that the new administration would make
unlimited resources available through the Treasury and Federal
Reserve. Since the low point, the Dow Jones average has risen by 50
percent—a vote of confidence by Wall Street—even as the economic
crisis has wreaked havoc with the jobs and living standards of working
people.

Subsequent domestic initiatives have flowed from the fundamental class
nature of the Obama administration as a government of Wall Street: the
forced bankruptcy and wage-cutting at General Motors and Chrysler, a
restructuring of health care to cut costs for business and the
government at the expense of millions of workers and retirees, a
continuation of the Bush administration’s offensive against democratic
rights and civil liberties.

These measures have been carried through with, until now, relatively
little open popular opposition. That is the critical service rendered
the ruling elite by Obama. A McCain-Palin administration would have
likewise bailed out Wall Street at the expense of working people,
escalated the war in Afghanistan, and demanded wage cuts for auto
workers, but with far greater risk of provoking a social and political
explosion, especially as unemployment rocketed towards 10 percent.

This process has definite limits, however. Despite the adulation on
Wall Street and in the media, the economic policies of the Obama
administration have neither resolved the global economic crisis nor
reversed the long-term historical decline of American capitalism.

On November 4, 2008, an ounce of gold was worth $741.85. A year later,
the price of gold has hit a record $1,085.07 an ounce, representing a
47 percent decline in the value of the dollar. This figure, not the
Dow Jones Industrial Average, indicates the real state of affairs for
American capitalism. The massive Treasury outlays to prop up Wall
Street are bankrupting the US economy, and the price will be paid by
working people, through inflation, wage-cutting and the slashing of
federal spending on social necessities like health care, education and
Social Security.

The erosion of popular illusions in Obama is reflected in a limited
way in opinion polls, which show growing disgust with both the big
business parties, and in the off-year election results, where there
was a disproportionate collapse in the Democratic vote as a result of
widespread disappointment in the administration.

The clearest signal of the shifting sentiments in the working class
came in the vote by rank-and-file Ford workers on the concessions
contract demanded by the company and backed by the United Auto
Workers. More than three quarters of those voting rejected a contract
that would have imposed on them the same cuts inflicted on GM and
Chrysler workers by the Obama administration.

While the working class is moving into opposition, middle class
liberals and ex-radicals have closed ranks with Obama. His
administration has become the political vehicle through which these
political forces have moved further to the right, lining up behind a
right-wing, anti-working class government and defending the interests
of American imperialism abroad. Their evolution is bound up with their
rejection of class as the fundamental social category and their
embrace of politics based on race, gender, etc.

Meanwhile, Obama is providing an object lesson that the fundamental
divisions in society are those of class, not race. The outcome of his
election underscores the futility of seeking genuine change through
the existing political system and its official institutions, all of
which are dominated by the class that owns and controls the means of
production.

The day after Obama’s election, the World Socialist Web Site declared:

“Whatever satisfaction the Democratic Party draws from its victory is
tempered by the realization within President-elect Obama’s inner
circle, the party leadership and the political establishment that the
mass expectations and hopes aroused by the election will not be easily
contained. The outcome of the election sets the stage for a new and
protracted period of intense class conflict in the United States.”

This forecast will be vindicated in the coming weeks and months as
working people take up the struggle to defend their jobs, living
standards and social benefits, and to oppose imperialist war. That
struggle requires a new political strategy. The working class must
make a conscious break with the Democratic Party and take the road of
political struggle against the capitalist profit system, based on a
socialist and internationalist program.

Patrick Martin

The author also recommends:

The election of Barack Obama
[5 November 200]

One week since the election of Obama
[11 November 2008]

Copyright © 1998-2009 World Socialist Web Site - All rights reserved

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/nov2009/pers-n04.shtml

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