Below is abridged from a May 13 US Socialist Worker editorial, <htpp://socialistworker.org>.
The campaign for the 2008 presidential elections has moved on — almost — to a new phase. And that transition is bringing into sharper focus a development in US politics that runs much deeper than the presidential campaign — a general shift to the left, taking place in different ways and showing itself in different forms.
Barack Obama's strong victory in the North Carolina primary to elect delegates to an August conference to determine the Democratic presidential candidate, and his near-tie with Hillary Clinton in the Indiana primary, has all but settled the Democratic presidential nomination.
Afterward, the media establishment pivoted away from its stories about the embattled Obama campaign, and the stream of "super-delegates" (members of the Democratic Party machine who are automatic, unelected delegates with full votes at the conference) coming out for Obama grew to a pace that should give him a clear convention majority when the votes are counted after the next two primaries, even if Obama loses both.
Racist insults
Clinton has yet to accept this reality. Instead, she managed to disgrace herself again after the vote with a comment to USA Today that "Senator Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again".
No one missed the point. "There is no way", Boston Globe columnist Derrick Jackson wrote, "you can say in the same sentence, 'hard-working Americans, white Americans', without diminishing Black Americans as lazy".
It was the latest in a string of racist insults slung around by the Clintons and their subordinates. For several months, their only real hope for winning the nomination has rested on convincing the Democratic super-delegates who hold the balance of power at the convention that Obama was "unelectable" against Republican candidate John McCain.
Any argument, no matter how hypocritical or offensive, has been fair game — Obama is the "Black candidate" who can't win votes from whites; he's too radical; he's an elitist; he's too inexperienced.
This strategy has helped feed the conventional wisdom in the media that the hard-fought primary season is damaging Obama as the likely nominee and setting the stage for the Republicans to win in November.
But this misses the forest for the trees. If you look at the bigger picture, the Democrats remain poised at almost every level for an overwhelming victory in 2008 — even bigger than the 2006 landslide in which they took back control of Congress.
Sure, the Republicans are sharpening their knives, and they have the Clinton campaign to thank for dragging their lines of attack against Obama into the media.
But the claim that Obama has been shown to be vulnerable because he hasn't won "big" states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and California doesn't add up — the votes that went against Obama in the primaries aren't necessarily votes for McCain in the fall.
By November, voters' attitudes will have been shaped by conclusions drawn during the contest between Obama and McCain — a man who still supports the Bush administration on the Iraq war and whose response to the worsening recession is to call for more tax cuts for the rich.
Even the idea that Obama is weak among white working-class voters is more a media invention than anything else.
"It's true that there are some whites who will not vote for a Black candidate under any circumstance", New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote. "But the United States is in a much better place now than it was when people like Richard Nixon, George Wallace and many others could make political hay by appealing to the very worst in people, using the kind of poisonous rhetoric that Senator Clinton is using now."
Republican 'massacre'
As Jim VandeHei and David Paul Kuhn wrote in the Politico: "In case you've been too consumed by the Democratic race to notice, Republicans are getting crushed in historic ways ... it has been a massacre.
"In recent weeks, Republicans have lost a Louisiana House seat they had held for more than two decades, and an Illinois House seat they had held for more than three ... they are setting records (and not the good kind). The most recent Gallup Poll has 67% of voters disapproving of President Bush; those numbers are worse than Richard Nixon's on the eve of his resignation ... By comparison, 52% of the public has a favorable view of the Democratic Party."
Within the confines of mainstream politics and more broadly outside of it, a political shift to the left is occuring as a consequence of the crackup of the Bush administration and the right-wing agenda it pressed ahead with for the past seven years.
Obama's success in getting this far down the road to the White House in a country that was built on racism is, by itself, an indication of a change in US society. Polls today show that the number of people who would never vote for a Black candidate for president has fallen as low as 3%.
Other shifts have emerged because of the excitement built up around Obama's campaign. As the Indianapolis Star noted, "[W]hile many Democrats fear the sniping between Obama and Clinton will leave their party divided and weakened, imagine how many activists, volunteers and young supporters this process has created."
Then there's the crisis of the Republicans and Bush's utter irrelevance — supposedly the "most powerful man in the world".
Bush is treated like a lame duck because of the spiraling crisis of the economy, the disastrous Iraq occupation and the discrediting of the right's policies of divide and conquer.
The vast majority of people in the US — including a majority of the ruling establishment — expect something different from the next president.
No wonder McCain is trying in every way he can to distance himself from the Bush administration. The whole tone of the campaign is different from 2004, when Bush ran as a "wartime president" and Democrat candidate John Kerry continued the "Republican-lite" strategy of following them to the right.
Nevertheless, Obama's rhetoric, as appealing as it clearly is to millions of people, isn't matched by his actions or his political positions.
It's preposterous that Clinton — a multi-millionaire and as secure an inhabitant of the Washington political elite as anyone in US politics — can present herself as a "fighter" for working people. But Obama never challenged Clinton's pose — because he is in basic agreement with Clinton on almost every issue.
Obamania's contradiction
For many Obama supporters, even those working for his campaign, the contradiction between their candidate's rhetoric and his actual politics is understood. They will vote for Obama, but in many cases will be open to discussions about this gap, and what else needs to be done to win the changes they want to see.
The impact of political developments outside mainstream politics is even more important to understand. Grassroots struggles never stop completely for elections and they are even less likely to now, when the issues that people want to organise around are so urgent.
The last several weeks alone have seen important protests and fightbacks, some small and some not-so-small — May Day immigrant rights marches around the country, a rapid response protest against immigration raids in San Francisco and outbursts of protest in New York City against the not-guilty verdict in the trial of the police officers who killed Sean Bell.
But even where the sentiment for change doesn't find an immediate expression in activism, there are openings for dialogue and debate — in other words, the building blocks of the struggles to come, no matter who sits in the White House.
Many people who are looking forward to the end of Republican-rule will vote for Obama with enthusiasm, but their political interests don't begin and end with that vote.
The crackup of the right-wing political agenda and the impact of the social and economic crisis must inevitably open up new questions for greater numbers of people as they become radicalised by the world around them.