Super Tuesday

The Stock Market didn’t seem to know it was Super Tuesday. Traders focused their attention instead on news that nonmanufacturing business declined in January to its lowest level since October 2001. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 370 points, its biggest daily plunge in nearly a year.

Popular interest in the capitalist elections is at its highest in decades. Revulsion against seven years of brutal Bush-gang rule has focused popular attention on the Democrats. And the unprecedented contest between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama has brought almost as much attention to Super Tuesday as there was to the Sunday's Super Bowl two days earlier. Facing all this, the market drop was like a cold shower of reality. The economic crisis will confront the working class no matter who wins these contests. And only a mass popular struggle stands a chance of moving the weight of that crisis off the backs of working people—of all nationalities, genders and races.

That latter thought should be firmly in the minds of working-class activists as they adjust to an election that it now appears will confront left organizations and individuals with challenges that go far beyond those thrown up by the usual presidential election: one between two more or less conservative white men, who ooze the utmost insensitivity if not outright racism, sexism, homophobia, and who have run for and been elected president for the more than 200 years of U.S. capitalist history.

Not that any essential class questions have changed because a woman or a Black man might for the first time become president. The Democratic Party and Republican Party are still the parties of the super-rich ruling class and serve these interests, including waging imperialist wars and attacking workers’ and oppressed people’s rights. No one running has indicated through their history or even their campaign rhetoric that he or she would try to do otherwise than to serve these same interests.

Super Tuesday’s results bear out the early indications from Iowa and New Hampshire. In most states, especially the more populous states like California, New York, Illinois and Georgia, twice as many people voted in the Democratic primaries as in the Republican. The population in general is fed up with Bush. Clinton’s crowds are enthusiastic. Obama’s crowds are even more enthusiastic and larger and younger than Clinton’s. While winning more than 80 percent of Black voters, Obama is running nearly even with Clinton in delegates in what is now a tight contest.

Increasing this election’s complications is that while a woman or a Black man might be elected president, both can’t be, and the corporate media uses this contradiction and Democratic Party infighting to pit African American people against white women, two oppressed groups with many common interests. It is noteworthy that the same corporate media have blanked out the “third party” candidacy of former Rep. Cynthia McKinney, who not only is an African-American woman, but has a program supporting the struggle for Black rights and women’s rights, anti-war and pro-worker and in solidarity with immigrants.

Also, when the Democratic candidates have said something progressive—for example, when Obama condemned the scapegoating of undocumented immigrants—he got thunderous applause from his large and enthusiastic audience. This also happens when either Obama or Clinton criticize Bush’s launching of the Iraq war, or speak of the hardships imposed by foreclosures or unemployment.

Young people in the U.S. most often have their first political experience not on a protest demonstration or a strike but in a presidential election. This election—and especially if Obama is nominated—has the potential of drawing millions of youths into political life. For the left this raises a danger whose other face is a possible opportunity.

These youth may well be drawn into the dead end of supporting the Democratic Party. But at a time of economic recession, this increase in electoral political activity might also lead to a potential for taking independent direct actions on absolutely essential issues: to stop foreclosures, to demand jobs and increased unemployment benefits, to fight for universal health care, to pull the troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan and to fight for the rights of African Americans, immigrants, women and LGBT people in the U.S. It is a time to stay alert.