Is Obama to the Left of Clinton?
There is no question that many of Obama’s voters and active supporters were well to the left of either Bill or Hillary Clinton. Especially during the primaries, Obama won support because he appeared to be left of Hillary Clinton on the wars, economic and health care policies, immigration, and a myriad of other questions.

However, even a cursory examination of what Obama himself wrote and said during the 2008 campaign revealed that he was well within the mainstream of the Clinton-Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) wing of the Democratic Party. African-American radicals at the Black Agenda Report (http://www.blackagendareport.com/) constantly hammered away at the huge gap between popular perceptions of Obama and his actual politics, as did the left-wing historian Paul Street in his Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Paradigm Publishers, 2008).

The record of Obama’s first “hundred days”[2] only confirms Obama’s fundamentally neo-liberal politics. Obama’s cabinet not only includes re-cycled Clinton administration figures, but important representatives of major Wall Street investment houses and big Information Technology capitalists. The list of Obama’s proposals to revive US capitalism at the expense of working people, people of color, women and queer people are too numerous to catalogue completely. Among the highlights:

* Obama’s plan to restructure the auto industry on the backs of auto workers.

* The administration and Congressional Democrats waffling on EFCA.

* Outsourcing the torture of “suspected terrorists” from Guantanamo to other countries.

* The refusal to discuss revising NAFTA, and backpedaling on global environmental regulations.

* The embrace of John McCain’s proposal for immigration reform, including guest worker programs.

* The Obama “national health insurance plan” which will provide massive subsidies to private insurers.

As the world economy either continues to stagnate or grows at extremely slow rates in the coming years, we can expect even more pro-capitalist, anti-working people policies from the Obama administration. In the absence of significant movements from below—built independently, and if necessary, in opposition to Obama and the Democrats—any hopes of a new “New Deal” will be sorely disappointed.

Nor is it true that those on the left who did not support Obama’s campaign are hopeless sectarians who reject any partial struggles that do not directly strike at the heart of capitalist rule. This is clearly not true of Solidarity, the International Socialist Organization, the Greens, or the comrades around Black Agenda Report. While these groups differed about the importance or effectiveness of third party campaigns like that of Cynthia McKinney , none reject struggling for reforms—the end of US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, for single-payer health care, for amnesty and an easy road to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, in defense of affirmative action and social programs. We did not support Obama because neither he nor the pro-corporate, neo-liberal Democratic Party support these struggles.