Vol. 72/No. 3      January 21, 2008

Obama, a first-term senator from Illinois, garnered 38 percent of the 239,000 Democratic votes cast in Iowa. Clinton ranked third, behind former senator John Edwards.

The Obama victory is “a sign that most Democrats want to ‘move on,’ as some of them like to say, from the Clinton era,” the Wall Street Journal editorialized January 5. Obama, the paper said, promises a break “from the dynastic Presidential chain of Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton.”

The New York Times editors wrote January 5 that Clinton appearing in Iowa “with former President Bill Clinton behind one shoulder and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright behind the other felt like déjà vu—not what Iowa’s voters were looking for.”

While declaring himself a proponent of “change,” Obama’s political course has much in common with Hillary Clinton, and with the record of William Clinton’s presidency. Obama supports the death penalty, the use of which was stepped up substantially under the Clinton White House. As an Illinois senator, he refused to vote against two bills that would have banned a form of late-term abortion.

In August, Obama said he would have ordered U.S. forces to attack targets inside Pakistan in 2005 without first getting agreement from the Pakistani government.

Like Clinton, he has positioned himself as a strong “Homeland Security” candidate, voting to extend the USA Patriot Act and supporting the “Secure Fence Act,” which authorized the construction of hundreds of miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border. Clinton herself voted for a fence in the name of tightening the southern border.

Clinton calls for mandatory health insurance, requiring everyone to buy their own coverage. “Like other things that you buy, [insurance companies] will have to compete for your business based on quality and price,” she says on her campaign website. Obama’s plan is similar except that it would not be mandatory.  
 
McCain campaign rides Iraq ‘surge’
In winning the Republican primary in New Hampshire, Arizona senator John McCain is reaping the benefits of having been consistent in his war policy. He was an early critic of U.S. tactics in the early years of the Iraq war, calling for more troops there, and today backs the U.S. military offensive led by Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq. In the past three months, deaths of U.S. troops have fallen to the lowest point of any similar period since the U.S. invasion.

“I strongly disagree with the strategy employed by Secretary Rumsfeld… . I’m the only one at the time that said we’ve got to employ a new strategy and outlined what it was, which is the Petraeus strategy,” McCain said during a January 5 debate in New Hampshire. “We are succeeding now in Iraq,” he said.

“McCain’s assessment of the situation in Iraq appears to be the most realistic of anyone running,” the Detroit Free Press wrote in announcing its endorsement of McCain the following day.

Clinton, during Petraeus’s Senate testimony in September, insinuated that he was lying about the success of the offensive, a move that hurt her campaign.  
 
Candidates seize on economic worries
The day of the Iowa caucuses, the U.S. Department of Labor reported that unemployment had risen to 5 percent. Some of the candidates are appealing to those feeling the current squeeze and who will be most affected by an economic downturn.

“Two leading contenders from each party—Democrat John Edwards and Republican Mike Huckabee—have ramped up their anticorporate, anti-Wall Street rhetoric,” the Wall Street Journal reported. Edwards, the article continued, “is tapping into working-class appeals … as economic anxiety has intensified among voters.”

Edwards, a multimillionaire trial lawyer and former senator from North Carolina, said his message of fighting for “the middle class, jobs, and stopping corporate greed” is what carried him to second place in Iowa. He has won substantial backing among the officialdom of major labor unions. Former Green party presidential candidate Ralph Nader announced his support for Edwards just prior to the Iowa vote.

Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor and one-time Baptist preacher and businessman in TV and radio, won the Iowa Republican caucus. One of his ads said, “most Americans want their next president to remind them of the guy they work with, not the guy who laid them off”—a dig at his wealthy opponent Romney.

Despite this demagogy, Huckabee’s “fair tax” plan would replace the federal income tax with a national sales tax, a regressive move that would shift taxes even more heavily onto working people.

Huckabee’s platform is well to the right of many of his Republican competitors. He has voiced support for the teaching of creationism in public schools and for the criminalization of abortion. He said during his 1992 campaign for U.S. Senate that homosexuality is “aberrant, unnatural and sinful” and that “it can pose a dangerous public health risk.”
 
 
Related articles:
SWP candidates offer working-class proposals
Socialists call for a fighting labor party, independent of capitalist 2-party system
For a sliding scale of wages, hours
SWP candidate across the United States  
 
 
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