It is impossible, however, to explain the performance witnessed by 70 million Americans by focusing solely on the political tactics devised by Democratic Party spin doctors or the personality traits of the nonentity in the White House. Like any significant political event, the course of the US presidential election can be grasped only through an analysis of the social forces at work. Only by considering the essential class role of the Democratic Party can Obama’s failure to take the offensive against Romney be understood.
The Democratic Party, like the Republican, is a political instrument of the financial aristocracy that rules America. It has not the slightest independence from the capitalist ruling elite. That does not, however, make the two parties identical. They play distinct, albeit complementary, political roles.
The Republican Party asserts the barely disguised appetite of the ruling elite for the greatest possible accumulation of wealth in the shortest possible time. While claiming, as Romney did Wednesday night, that policies of cutting taxes on corporations and the wealthy will “create jobs” and improve conditions of life for working people, this pretense has very little credibility with the American people. After all, the US is now in the fifth year of the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression, with Wall Street profits returning to record levels, but working class living standards thrown back a generation.
The Democratic Party poses as the advocate of ordinary working people, supposedly concerned with jobs, social programs and raising living standards, while occasionally criticizing the excesses of Wall Street. Its substantive policy differences with the Republicans in relation to working class interests, however, remain minimal, and it competes with them in currying favor with the bankers and billionaires.
In a period of ever more acute social tensions, such as today, the contradictions posed in this political division of labor can reach a paralyzing level. The Democratic Party seeks to play its role as social safety valve, as the Obama reelection campaign has done for several months, adopting a populist posture with denunciations of Romney as a vulture capitalist whose private equity firm, Bain Capital, raided companies and destroyed jobs.
But this populism is empty and cynical. The Obama administration remains the instrument of big business. It carried through the Wall Street bailout, begun under Bush, as well as the bailout of the auto companies, in the course of which the White House pushed through a 50 percent cut in wages for new hires, setting an example for the whole of corporate America to slash working class living standards using mass unemployment as a club.
If Obama were a genuine opponent of Wall Street privilege and criminality, having Mitt Romney as his challenger would be a godsend. As the longtime proprietor of a major private equity firm, Romney is the personification of the social layer that wrecked the US and world economy and plunged millions of workers into unemployment and destitution.
But Obama is a political servant of that same social layer. Face to face with Romney, he cannot indict him for the 2008 crash, because that would entail indicting the financial aristocracy itself, and making an appeal to social forces that all the bourgeois political establishment, Democrats and Republicans alike, regard with hostility and fear.
via www.wsws.org
In terms of the Republican-Democratic complement, it almost sounds as though Obama's role is to keep the productive proletariat happy and compliant within the current set of social forces, while Romney's role is to energize both ends of the non-productive lumpenproletariat (finance aristocracy above and the those angry about being left behind, below) in order to validate an acceleration of those same forces and further upward redistribution. But that's probably too simple ;)
Posted by: Daniel Greene | October 05, 2012 at 11:21 AM