If Obama loses to the arch-reactionary McCain-Palin ticket, it won't be only because of racism. Among other things, it will also be because he and his campaign were unwilling or unable to make an aggressively populist case for voting Democratic to the American working class.
And that will be a monument to the absence of change in America's corporate-managed one-and-a-half party system" (Sheldon Wolin's term), where the Democrats persistent role is to function an "inauthentic opposition."
It's nothing new. Given the closeness of the 2004 race and the unpopularity of the heavily plutocratic George W. Bush administration by the summer of 2004, Kerry could have won the last election if he'd run just a little bit further to the populist left.
Kerry's failure to do that followed in accord with Thomas Frank's important and widely read but commonly misunderstood book on why many working class Americans vote Republican instead of following their supposed natural "pocketbook" interest in supporting the Democrats - What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America.
Released just before Bush defeated Kerry with no small help from working class whites, Frank's book has often been taken to have argued that Democrats lost "heartland" (working-class) voters with excessive liberalism on "cultural issues" like abortion, gun rights, religion, gay marriage, and gender roles, letting the clever GOP conjure working-class voters away from their "real economic interests" with such "diversionary" concerns.
At the end of his book, however, Frank made it clear that that he blamed the corporatist shift of the Democratic Party to the business-friendly right and away from honest discussion of and opposition to economic and class inequality for much of Republicans' success in winning over white working class voters:
The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the organization that produced such figures as Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, and Terry McCauliffe, has long been pushing the party to forget blue-collar voters and concentrate instead on recruiting affluent, white-collar professionals who are liberal on social issues.
The larger interests that the DLC wants desperately to court are corporations, capable of generating campaign contributions far out-weighing anything raised by organized labor.
The way to collect the votes and --- more important --- the money of these coveted constituencies, 'New Democrats' think, is to stand rock-solid on, say, the pro-choice position while making endless concessions on economic issues, on welfare, NAFTA, Social Security, labor law, privatization, deregulation, and the rest of it.
Such Democrats explicitly rule out what they deride as 'class warfare' and take great pains to emphasize their friendliness with business. Like the conservatives, they take economic issues off the table.
As for working-class voters who were until recently the party's very backbone, the DLC figures they will have nowhere else to go; Democrats will always be marginally better on economic issues than Republicans.
Besides, what politician in this success-worshipping country really wants to be the voice of poor people?"
...The problem is not that Democrats are monolithically pro-choice or anti-school prayer; it's that by dropping the class language that once distinguished them sharply from Republicans they have left themselves vulnerable to cultural wedge issues like guns and abortion and the rest whose hallucinatory appeal would ordinarily be overshadowed by material concerns.
We are in an environment where Republicans talk constantly about class - in a coded way, to be sure - but where Democrats are afraid to bring it up.
Today, as in 2004 and during previous candidate-centered corporate-crafted presidential election extravaganzas, the Democrats' problem is not just that workers are diverted from their real economic interests by racism, liberal cultural elitism, and devious Republicans (Karl Rove et al.) who know how to press "cultural issues" to get working class folks to vote "against their own pocketbooks."
It is also that Democrats collaborate with Republicans in taking class injustice and the workers' material and (I would add moral-) economic issues "off the table," thereby encouraging lower-class resentment (which abhors a vacuum) to flow into reactionary channels.
Clinging to God and Guns
Obama thinks and functions well within the moral, ideological, and policy parameters set by the economic elite.
As Alexander Cockburn noted last March, "Wall Street has nothing to fear from Clinton or from Obama, who floats on vast contributions from Wall Street."
The left business and political observer Doug Henwood made a similar point in early April of 2008, noting that possessors of "big capital would have no problem with an Obama presidency.
"They like him because they're socially liberal, up to a point, and probably eager for a little less war, and think he's the man to do their work. They're also confident he wouldn't undertake any renovations to the distribution of wealth."
This was the deeper elitism that "mainstream" (corporate) media coverage deleted when Obama helped provoked charges of class and cultural snobbery with some revealing comments to an elite gathering of fundraisers in San Francisco prior to the April 22nd Democratic primary - won decisively by Hillary Clinton with large support from white working-class voters - in Pennsylvania.
"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone for 25 years and nothing's replace them...And it's not surprising," Obama told his wine-sipping West Coast listeners.
"They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them." Later, in clarifying his comments, Obama said that poor white small town Americans simply "don't vote on economic issues," turning instead to things like guns, gay marriage, abortion and religion.
This sounded like very much like the official version of the "Thomas Frank Kansas thesis," technically incorrect since working class whites actually vote more on the basis of economic concerns than do affluent whites.
The bigger difficulty was that it deleted the deeper Tom Frank argument on how the Democrats lose working class voters by clinging to the corporate center on economic issues, taking the workers' material concerns largely "off the table," and running (unlike Edwards' 2007-08 campaign) from "the class language that once distinguished them sharply from Republicans."
Left-leaning workers didn't like it when Obama went off on the cultural alienation of the proletariat in San Francisco. As one put it:
"The guys I work with would like to vote more on economic issues," McCoy told me: "OUR economic issues. And that's not really what the Democrats are about anymore, if they ever were.
"It's like they can't be bothered to come off their high horse to get dirty and really make the case for voting for them.
"Naw, they're too good for that old time shit. It's like we're just supposed to automatically get it: ‘Hey the Democrats are OUR party. Whooppeee - ain't this some good shit? Happy days!'"
So, we are still waiting for Obama to comment in the source of the bitterness that leads him to cling to the guns of America's corporate-military empire and to a faith in God he propounds before right-wing evangelicals while the nation sinks deeper into the socioeconomic, spiritual and ecological swamp produced by unchallenged structures and doctrines of Empire, Inequality, and Dollar Democracy.
"Presidential elections," Cockburn noted last March, "are mostly about keeping important issues off the agenda, whether it US complicity in Israel's atrocious crimes in Gaza or the funds voted by Clinton and Obama for the Iraq War, now arriving at its fifth anniversary, or impeachment of a President destroying constitutional protections."
Or the growing misery imposed by "free market" capitalism on American middle-, lower-, and working-class communities of all colors across America, the "beacon to the world," according to U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-TX), "of the way life should be."