Vol. 72/No. 36      September 15, 2008

In his speech to the Democratic Party national convention, Obama made it clear if he is elected U.S. president he will escalate the war on “terror,” especially in Afghanistan and along the Pakistan border.

“John McCain likes to say that he’ll follow [Osama] bin Laden to the Gates of Hell,” Obama said, “but he won’t even go to the cave where he lives.”

While Obama attacked the Republican candidate for promoting a philosophy of “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps—even if you don’t have boots”—his proposals show that he, like McCain, plans to go after the social wage won by working people in the historic union battles of the 1930s and the two-decades-long fight for Black rights beginning in the late 1950s.

The Democratic nominee put forward a nationalist approach of looking out for “American” workers. He said he would give tax breaks to “companies that create good jobs right here in America,” not to those that ship jobs “overseas.”

“Ours is a promise that says government cannot solve all our problems,” Obama said. “But what it should do is that which we cannot do for ourselves.”

Obama gave an insight into what he meant in an interview at Orange County’s Saddleback Church the week before the convention.

Asked by Pastor Rick Warren what position he held in the past that he saw differently today, Obama said he had made a mistake in opposing then-president William Clinton’s plans “to end welfare as we know it,” which kicked hundreds of thousands off the welfare rolls.

Obama said it “worked better than I think a lot of people anticipated.”

In 1996 Clinton signed a new welfare law that ended federal guarantees of cash assistance for children of working people thrown into poverty, put a five-year lifetime limit on receiving welfare, required adults to get a job after two years or lose benefits, and denied most benefits—including food stamps—to anyone who is not a U.S. citizen.

While Obama says he is for a woman’s right to choose abortion, during his convention speech in Denver he said that those who are for that right and those who are against it should come to agreement on “reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies in this country.”  
 
Obama stakes out the ‘center’
A July 10 article in the Los Angeles Times titled “Democrats take Obama shift in stride,” reported that “a chorus of anger and disappointment has arisen” from the left-wing of the Democratic Party over a perceived move to the “center” by Obama, although it calls the reaction “notably mild.”

The article points to Obama’s vote in the U.S. Senate to give legal immunity to phone companies that took part in warrantless wiretapping of their customers after Sept. 11, 2001—a reversal of a previous pledge to oppose it—along with his support to overturning the District of Columbia’s handgun ban, support for public funding of social programs run by religious groups, and his at least half-decade-long support for the death penalty in “heinous” cases.

In recent months, Obama has also made more explicit that as president he would not immediately withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq.

His positions are “not something new,” Obama said, pointing to numerous statements he has made both on being “careful” in withdrawing from Iraq and on shifting responsibility to individual families and away from government aid programs.

The week before the Democratic convention, Obama selected Sen. Joseph Biden as his running mate. A six-term senator from Delaware, Biden in 2001 voted to authorize the war against Iraq, unlike Obama who says he would have voted against it.  
 
McCain: Republicans for ‘change’
In a move designed to paint his as the campaign of “change” and “reform,” McCain announced his pick of Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential running mate.

Palin, 44, is the first woman named to a Republican presidential ticket. McCain describes Palin as a maverick like himself. She is put forward as someone who took on the oil companies to get more revenue for the people of Alaska, a fighter against corruption and “special interests,” and someone who “knows what it’s like to worry about mortgage payments and health care and the cost of gasoline and groceries,” said McCain.

In her speech accepting McCain’s offer to be on the ticket, Palin highlighted that her husband is an oil worker and “a proud member of the United Steelworkers union.”

With McCain standing by her side, Palin saluted Sen. Hillary Clinton’s failed run for the Democratic Party nomination. Repeating comments made by Clinton and Michelle Obama, Palin said, “Hillary left 18 million cracks in the highest, hardest glass ceiling in America.”

Palin is also known for opposition to a woman’s right to choose abortion—an issue that McCain has emphasized more and more—and flaunts her membership in the National Rifle Association. For a time she backed ultrarightist Patrick Buchanan’s 2000 run for president.  
 
Liberals’ anti-worker bias
The selection of Palin drew howls of scorn from liberals who found it unbelievable that a mother of five would dare run for vice president. Article after article in the liberal capitalist press talks about her pregnant 17-year-old unmarried daughter and her daughter’s “high-school dropout” boyfriend. The New York Times claims that the “revelation” that Palin’s husband was arrested on drunk-driving charges 22 years ago “complicated the rollout” of her campaign.

In the midst of all this Biden joked that his “obvious difference” with Palin is that “she’s good looking.”

The reaction by the liberals exposes the anti-working-class arrogance and bias of the “progressive” Democratic Party. It is no better than the rightist positions Palin has promoted.

While basking in the boost that selecting Palin gave his campaign, McCain continued to hammer on the theme that Obama does not have the experience to be commander in chief and that Obama’s proposed withdrawal from Iraq would weaken the efforts of U.S. imperialism around the world.

“Both candidates in the election pledge to end this war and bring our troops home,” McCain told a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention August 18. “The great difference, the great difference, is that I intend to win it first.”

Republicans scaled back the opening of their national convention September 1 in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, due to Hurricane Gustav; they wanted to avoid the bad taste left in the mouth of many working people due to the deadly lack of preparedness by both the Democrats and Republicans to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
 
 
Related articles:
SWP approved to be on ballot in Minnesota
In Denver, Calero says legalizing immigrants is life-or-death question
SWP senate candidate demands: Stop the raids!  
 
 
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