For the last six months, it would seem that the entire United States – and much of the world – has been mesmerized by the charade being enacted on the stage of U.S. bourgeois politics.

The main drama was in the Democratic Party, where Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton slugged it out. The fact that a black man and a woman were the leading contenders in one of the major parties of U.S. capitalism certainly marked a shift in American politics. Yet both represented the interests of the imperialist would-be masters of the world against working people, women and oppressed minorities.

On the Republican side, the field was narrowed to professional POW John McCain or the immigrant-bashing Bible Belt bigot Mike Huckabee. And now the primary season is over and we have the presumptive nominees: Obama vs. McCain.

The candidacy of Barack Obama has been causing waves, particularly among college students and black youth generally, but also among antiwar liberals fed up with the Clinton “New Democrats.” Obama claims to “transcend race,” but the centuries-old oppression of black people can only be overcome by smashing the racist capitalist system. And the fact that Obama’s appeal for “color blind” politics has raked in big bucks from Wall Street, Hollywood and Silicon Valley points to the key fact about his campaign.

In the 2008 elections, U.S. imperialism wants to put on a new face. The more far-sighted rulers of this “sole superpower” want to change the image of “America,” to replace that of the torture photos of Abu Ghraib. That’s why for the first time a black candidate has a very well-financed election machine and a real shot at the presidency. Barack Obama has been drafted as the better war candidate.

Look at the realities. Well over 100,000 Iraqis – maybe 600,000 according to one estimate – have been killed in five years of bloody U.S. war and occupation. The toll among the imperialist occupation forces (U.S. and allied military plus mercenary security “contractors”) in Iraq is over 5,300 since the 2003 invasion, with last year the deadliest yet, plus well over 30,000 severely wounded. In Afghanistan, the U.S./NATO occupiers have been losing ground to the Taliban Islamic fundamentalists, while American planes regularly massacre civilians with their “surgical” bombing. Yet the horrendous U.S. slaughter in the Middle East just about disappeared from the debates, and nightly TV. In the first six months of 2008, there were less than 200 minutes of news from Iraq on the three major networks, about 5 percent of the total time and one-sixth the coverage in 2007 (New York Times, 23 June).

On the home front, some two million foreclosures are predicted for 2008 as a credit crunch and stock market plunge turns into a deep recession. Banks slashed lending no matter how much the Federal Reserve lowers interest rates and how many billions it pumps into the U.S. economy. The dollar is dropping like lead, while the cost of oil and of basic foods is skyrocketing. At well over $4 a gallon, gasoline costs double the price at the pump last year. Working people are being ground down by rising costs, while unemployment is escalating. Yet none of the candidates will do a damn thing about millions of people losing their homes and jobs. All their health care plans are based on soaking working people to fill the pockets of the insurance companies. And on economics, Barack Obama, the admirer of Ronald Reagan, was the most right-wing of all the Democrats.

Meanwhile, black-uniformed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) police have been carrying out Gestapo-like raids across the U.S., rounding up undocumented workers, brutally separating children from their parents. According to one study last year, at least 13,000 children have seen one or both parents deported in the last two years (New York Times, 17 November), and the raids have escalated sharply since then. Naturally, none of the leading candidates opposed this rising tide of reaction, while several seek to lead it. In the Republican primaries, certified police state reactionaries like Rudolph Giuliani and Milt Romney tried to make up for lack of born-again credentials by clashing in a CNN/YouTube debate over who was “soft” on “illegal” immigrants. The former NYC mayor told an interviewer that he would have had 400,000 undocumented New Yorkers deported.

While the Republican rightists were whipping up an anti-immigrant frenzy, the liberal Democrats are not much better. When she was a partner with husband Bill in the White House in the 1990s, Hillary Clinton went after undocumented immigrants with a vengeance pushing through the 1996 “Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act” and militarizing the border. Barack Obama? He wrote in his campaign autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, that he feels “patriotic resentment” when “I see Mexican flags waved at proimmigration demonstrations.” He, too, supports the 700-mile border fence. And when the specter of lynching reared its head in Jena, Louisiana, Barack Obama deliberately didn’t march. His response was that “Outrage over an injustice isn’t a matter of black and white. It’s a matter of right and wrong..” Yet lynching is all about white racism and black oppression, and you can’t duck or “transcend” that fundamental issue.

So obsessed are the capitalist media and politicians with the two-ring presidential campaign circus that President George W. Bush has been virtually forgotten. After years of denouncing “Bush’s war,” the ABB (Anybody But Bush) liberals have dropped the issue of Iraq. First, because U.S. casualty figures have reportedly been falling. But second, and more important, because with the Democrats in control of both House and Senate, they now hold the purse strings on the war. Despite getting elected in November ’06 by voters fed up with the war, the Democratic Congressional leaders’ grandstand plays of holding up the Pentagon budget have come to naught and exactly nothing has changed on the ground. The House just pushed through a bill for $162 billion to fund the war through the end of Bush’s presidency.

Hillary Clinton was widely hated in the antiwar movement because of her October 2002 vote for the “Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution.” Everyone understood that another Clinton in the White House would mean an indefinite continuation of U.S. war and occupation in the Near East. What is not so well understood is that the same is true of an Obama presidency. In a speech last September, Barack Obama laid out his policy: pull out some combat brigades “immediately” (i.e., in 2009, when they will have to be rotated out anyway), but leave an thousands of U.S. troops “in country” for “humanitarian” missions, to “protect U.S. diplomats” and go after Al Qaeda. Obama was introduced at the speech by his chief foreign policy guru, Cold War hawk Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Obama’s main claim to be antiwar is that he didn’t vote for the 2002 declaration of war. Of course, he wasn’t in the Senate at the time, but in a 2 October 2002 speech in Chicago, he made his rationale: “I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.” In an article in the house organ of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, he spelled out his positions: “To renew American leadership in the world, we must first bring the Iraq war to a responsible end… Iraq was a diversion from the fight against the terrorists who struck us on 9/11” (Foreign Affairs, July-August 2007). Now that he is the de facto Democratic nominee, Obama is vowing to escalate the “war on terror,” which is really a war to terrorize the world into submission.

In the U.S. Senate, Obama repeatedly voted billions to pay for the Iraq war. With the advice of Brzezinski, the architect of the 1980s U.S. proxy war against the USSR in Afghanistan, in his Foreign Affairs article Barack Obama looks back to U.S. imperialism’s anti-Soviet crusade as a model: “To defeat al Qaeda, I will build a twenty-first-century military and twenty-first-century partnerships as strong as the anticommunist alliance that won the Cold War.” When he talks of using force unilaterally, he is specifically talking about military strikes inside Pakistan (“If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf will not act, we will” [1 August 2007]). In that same speech, titled “The War We Need to Win,” he made clear that “I was a strong supporter of the war in Afghanistan” from the beginning, and he called for increasing the number of U.S. troops there. The first plank of his war strategy, he summed up, is “getting out of Iraq and on to the right battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

Barack Obama is no antiwar candidate. He is pushing for a “smart war” in Afghanistan instead of the “dumb war” in Iraq. In reality, sending American troops into nuclear-armed Pakistan could be an even more colossal miscalculation by Washington that would backfire big time. But this is what the second war party of U.S. imperialism has been pushing for, and Obama can be valuable to them to build support for their next military adventure. The endorsement by Obama by Ted Kennedy and others of the Kennedy clan was a tip-off. Recall that John F. Kennedy’s candidacy for president in 1960 was touted as a breath of fresh air after McCarthyism. So Kennedy gets elected and what happens? First there was the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, and soon he sent U.S. military “advisors” to Indochina, leading to more than two million Vietnamese deaths and 50,000 U.S. dead.

Ruling-class politicians, pundits and powers that be see in Obama a figure that can play the same role. Andrew Sullivan writing in The Atlantic (January-February 2008) argued that the “generally minor policy choices” between the candidates and parties couldn’t explain the “hyperventilation” of the debate. After all, he says,  no one is actually going to withdraw from Iraq and everyone is for keeping U.S. forces in Afghanistan, threatening Iran and supporting Israel. All their health care plans are similar. Even on abortion the differences are not so great. So why all the heat? Sullivan is suggesting that with all the talk of “transcending” divisions, of “bringing America together,” Obama can “bridge the partisan gulf” in the “culture war” that has bedeviled U.S. bourgeois politics since the 1960s. At the same time, he argues that Barack Hussein Obama, a “brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy” can undercut Islamic hostility to the U.S.:

“What does he offer? First and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan. Such a re-branding is not trivial – it’s central to an effective war strategy…. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close.”

It is this crude appeal to “rebrand” the U.S. internationally that has won significant bourgeois support for Obama. His backers are the same forces that were floating a possible candidacy of New York’s billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg as a kind of Democratic/Republican “fusion” candidate. It is their money that launched Obama’s campaign with a fundraiser a year ago hosted by Holywood mogul David Geffen and his movie studio partners Steven Spielberg and Jeff Katzenberg. During the primaries, Obama far out-fundraised Clinton and now he is beating McCain by $47 million to $22 million. Obama brags about the small donations he receives over the Internet. But Obama received nearly $10 million in contributions from finance, insurance and real estate. Goldman Sachs is his top donor (“Subprime Obama,” Nation, 11 February).

Obama’s conservative economic policies and pro-“smart war” stance are part of his appeal to this influential layer of the bourgeoisie. His advisors include “free-market” economists who served in the Clinton Administration. In addition to Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s former national security advisor, his foreign policy advisors include Anthony Lake, Bill Clinton’s former national security advisor, Richard Clarke, former counterterrorism “czar” under Clinton and Bush, a bevy of retired generals, and one Dennis Ross, Clinton’s Near East envoy and link to the Zionist lobby. Again, this is no accident. Obama has made clear that he is a hard-line supporter of Israel. Last year he spoke at the convention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The liberal Israeli Zionist paper Haaretz reported that, “At least rhetorically, Obama passed any test anyone might have wanted him to pass. So, he is pro-Israel. Period” (quoted in Ali Abunimah, “How Barack Obama Learned to Love Israel,:” Electronic Intifada, 4 March 2007).

Disgust over the endless war in Iraq and concern over the economy are so intense that this election is the Democrats’ to lose. But they’ve pulled it off before, and one can’t underestimate the racism of U.S. bourgeois politics. So far Obama has weathered the mudslinging, mainly by condemning his former pastor Rev. Jeremiah White for saying things about the crimes of U.S. imperialism that are not to be uttered in “acceptable” political discourse. But the basic line of the Democratic nominee is to pretend that it is possible to “transcend” racial divisions by ignoring racism. Thus in his March 18 Philadelphia speech on race, he went out of his way to show “understanding” for white racists “when they are told to bus their children to a school across town” and “when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced.”

In the South Carolina primaries, Obama supporters chanted, “race doesn’t matter.” But it does: in capitalist America, every major social and political issue is about race, and always has been. The struggle against black oppression goes back to slavery, and fanning racial fears and prejudices continues to be the main way the ruling class keeps its exploited and oppressed wage slaves divided. Legal equality does not begin to deal with the racial oppression that is part of the bedrock of U.S. society, as the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement showed. Half a century after Brown vs. Board of Education eliminated formal segregation, American schools are more racially segregated than ever. And they’re still trying to exclude black voters.

The liberal integrationism of Martin Luther King failed because it did not address the social and economic roots of the oppression of black people, who for centuries have been segregated at the bottom of U.S. society. As revolutionary integrationists, we insist that the only road to black liberation is through socialist revolution. While many black and white youth see the Obama candidacy as a sign of hope, we say straight-out that if elected he will act on behalf of the capitalist oppressors to squelch black struggle and to suppress opposition to imperialist war.

In the current election, some left groups are trying to sidle up to Obama by soft-pedaling their opposition to this imperialist warmonger. Others are supporting the Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney, the former Congresswoman from Georgia who was twice defeated by racist gerrymandering and a campaign by the Zionist lobby because of her support for Palestinians. McKinney, too, is a capitalist politician, a “homeless Democrat” who frankly says that she didn’t leave the Democratic Party but instead it left her.

The war on Iraq and Afghanistan and U.S. imperialist attacks around the world will not be ended by any capitalist party or politician. While the “peace movement” vainly tries to pressure the Democratic Congress, we have emphasized the need to mobilize the working class in struggle to defeat the imperialist war abroad and the capitalist war on immigrants, poor, black and working people “at home.” To wage this class struggle we seek to forge the nucleus of a revolutionary workers party, as part of the struggle for a reforged Fourth International, the world party of socialist revolution. ■