For someone who is marching across Nevada

and South Carolina calling working-

and middle-class Americans to “get fired up”

and “stand up” for democracy (and for him),

Obama sure likes to spend a lot of time

groveling before the white ruling elite

Obama Starts to Sweat [Guardian]

Barack Obama sharpened his attacks on Hillary Clinton last night, accusing her of speaking disingenuously about their senate records and campaign proposals.

The heightened criticism, which came less than 48 hours before Nevada Democrats choose their presidential nominee, was a marked departure from Obama's rhetoric in Iowa and New Hampshire, where he rarely mentioned Clinton by name.

Obama told a rally at a Las Vegas high school that Clinton had misrepresented his views on social security and a proposed nuclear waste dump in Nevada.

He also poked fun at a remark Clinton made during a debate this week, in which she acknowledged voting for a bankruptcy bill even though she said she was glad it did not pass. "What does that mean?" he asked. "If you didn't want to see it pass, then you vote against it."

Clinton, Obama and John Edwards are in a virtual dead heat ahead of the caucuses. But Obama's failure to mention Edwards by name suggests his campaign is happy to present it as a two-person race.

Obama and Clinton split victories in Iowa and New Hampshire, respectively, and both hope a win in Nevada will generate momentum to propel them through South Carolina next week and into February 5, when more than 20 states vote in Super Tuesday.

The campaign in Nevada has also turned into a proxy battle among the state's strong labour organisations.

The state chapter of the Service Employees International union and the powerful Culinary Workers' union have endorsed Obama. The Carpenters' union, which has a large membership in Nevada, backs Edwards.

The Nevada State Education Association, the teachers' union, has not endorsed a candidate, but some in its leadership have ties to the Clinton camp.

The teachers' union also sought unsuccessfully to block the Democratic party from holding special caucuses for Las Vegas casino workers, a bid to temper the culinary workers' endorsement of Obama.

Obama's criticism of Clinton is in large part a defence of his own proposals, such as his plan to shore-up social security.

At a debate last year, Clinton referred to Obama's plan to lift the wage cap on payroll taxes as a "trillion-dollar tax increase".

Currently, income under $97,500 per year is subject to that tax. Obama said only 3% of Nevadans make more than that.

"Maybe she thinks that's middle class," he told the rally. Obama said Clinton's remark was a distortion that turned voters off the political process.

Those kinds of tricks, that kind of approach to politics is what has to stop. What happens is then nobody believes anything. The voters don't believe what politicians say."

A senior strategist with the Obama campaign said that Obama's criticism of Clinton was the result of lessons learned during political battles with Republicans.

"We're not going to let some of these assertions go unchallenged," David Axelrod said of Clinton's statements about Obama.

"She's distorted his record. Part of this process is straightening that out. Abraham Lincoln once said, 'If they don't stop telling lies about us we're going to have to tell the truth about them.'" The Clinton campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The rally-goers revelled in Obama's fighting words, cheering when he jabbed at Clinton and laughing when he poked fun at her. "He can attack Hillary. He doesn't have to take this stuff," said Angela Robinson, a Las Vegas art gallery owner.

"But he's being a real diplomat and a real statesman. He's not telling you what's wrong with her, he's telling you what's right about him."

As always, Obama's self-love shines through.

Obama Is Deeply Conservative [Znet]

Beneath peaceful and populist sounding claims to the contrary, he’s largely on the dark and neoliberal side of power when it comes to each of what the democratic socialist and anti-imperialist Martin Luther King called “the triple evils that are interrelated”: racism, economic exploitation/inequality (capitalism), and militarism.

It is nauseating to see Obama’s disturbing statements of fawning respect for the predominantly white capitalist economic elite – the top 1 percent that owns more than a third of U.S. wealth and a probably higher percentage of its politicians, policymakers, and opinion-makers.

Given his dependence on super-rich “election investors” to run a viable presidential campaign under the plutocratic rules of the United States’ self-negating “market democracy”, it’s not surprising that he would wish to avoid offending the nation’s leading corporate power-brokers.

But Obama goes beyond the call of class-deferential duty when he praises the arch-plutocratic Ronald Reagan for embodying “American’s longing for order” and when he pens the following sickening paean to aristocratic rule in The Audacity of Hope:

“The Founders recognized that there were seeds of anarchy in the idea of individual freedom, an intoxicating danger in the idea of equality, for if everybody is truly free, without the constraints of birth or rank and an inherited social order…how can we ever hope to form a society that coheres?”

How’s that for commitment to the democratic and egalitarian ideals to which the United States so often lays special claim?

The technically biracial Obama’s campaign and persona are perfectly calibrated for this era of victim-blaming neoliberal racism.

He allows whites to assuage their racial guilt and feel non-racist by liking and perhaps even voting for him while signaling that he won’t do anything to tackle and redress the steep racial disparities and systemic racial oppression that continue to deeply scar American life and institutions.

“What . . . me and my country racist? You can’t be serious: we’re thinking seriously about voting for a black man as president. My wife and son just love Oprah and Jamie Fox”

The remarkable success of power-respectful, bourgeois, non-threatening “good” blacks like Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey and Colin Powell helps white Americans believe that blacks have only themselves to blame on the whole for black America’s persistently separate and unequal status in the U.S.

For many whites, loving national media stars like Oprah and Barack is the nice reverse side of hating inner-city Darnell and Lakisha.

The sophisticated and opportunistic Obama knows this very well.

He’s not going to complicate his comfortable funding relationships with the likes of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Henry Crown and Co. and General Dynamics et al by substantively criticizing empire and/or class inequality at home and abroad.

In a similarly calculating and power-seeking vein, he’s not about to undermine his favorable post-Civil Rights situation with the white electoral majority by making strong public reference to the persistently powerful and pervasive role of anti-black racism in American life.

He’s going to try to ride white America’s self-serving racial confusion and denial as far as he can — all the way, he hopes, to the White House.

“HE’S NOT ALL THAT BLACK”

Part of Obama’s appeal to white America has to do with the widespread Caucasian sense that Obama “isn’t all that black.”

Many whites who roll their eyes at the mention of the names of Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton — former presidential candidates who behave in ways that many whites find too African-American — are calmed by the cool, underplayed blackness and ponderous, quasi-academic tone of the half-white, Harvard-educated Obama. Obama doesn’t shout, chant, holler or drawl.

He doesn’t rail against injustice, bring the parishioners to their feet and threaten delicate white suburban and middle-class sensibilities. He stays away from catchy slogans (like Jackson’s “Keep Hope Alive”) and from emotive “truth”-speaking confrontations with power.

To use Joe Biden’s revealing terminology, Obama strikes many whites as “clean” and “articulate” — something different from their unfortunately persistent image of blacks as dirty, dangerous, irrational and unintelligible.

Obama has no moral or political obligation to shed his biracial identity, “multicultural” background and elite, private school education to “act [more classically and stereotypically] black.”

But whites’ racial attitudes are less progressive than might be assumed when their willingness to embrace a black candidate is conditioned by their requirement that his or her “blackness” be qualified.

When ingrained gender sensibilities lead you (all other things equal) to prefer your “straight-acting” gay uncle over your outwardly “effeminate” gay nephew, your tolerance for non-traditional sexual orientations might be less enlightened than you think.