This was never more evident than last November, when Barack Obama, running as the candidate of change against a widely unpopular Republican-led administration, scored a sound and groundbreaking win.

The victory wasn’t Obama’s alone. For the first time in 15 years — and for only the second time since the 1970s — the majority of the electorate gave the Democrats full control over Washington, from the White House to the Congress.

But fewer than six months into the new administration, we’re finding out just what kind of “change” that Obama and the Democrats have in mind.

As usually happens in the U.S.’s corporate-controlled political system, the atmospherics of “change” belie a reality in which there is a lot more continuity between administrations than the election rhetoric — and what people thought they were voting for — predicted.

Take the related issues of Obama’s announced intention to close the Guantánamo Bay prison camp and his repudiation of Bush-era policies of torture. On these issues, the media whipped themselves into a frenzy when former vice president and torture defender Dick Cheney and Obama staged dueling May 22 speeches intended to justify their respective views on these issues.

One could ask why someone as thoroughly discredited and unpopular as Cheney receives a hearing at all. And yet after all the hot air dissipated, we were left with the result that Obama had accepted many Bush policies — military tribunals to try detainees and indefinite detention based on presidential fiat, among them — as his own.

Coupled with his double-speak on torture — Obama repudiated the Bush policies as illegal, but wouldn’t actually prosecute anyone who executed them — you have the makings of a presidential betrayal.

In fact, it’s not out of the question to ask if a more full-fledged capitulation to Bush-Cheney is in the offing — as in the Obama administration deciding to keep Guantánamo open. Democrats in both houses of Congress already made that possibility more likely by voting in overwhelming numbers to deny funding for closing the camp.

Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, attended a meeting with Obama and major human rights groups held prior to Obama’s Guantánamo speech.

He wasn’t satisfied, telling reporters: “The president was very open to hearing CCR’s concerns on a range of Guantánamo policy issues, but I came out of the meeting deeply disappointed in the direction the administration is taking, and I don’t see meaningful differences between these detention policies and those erected by President Bush.”

On the issue of climate change, congressional Democrats are in the initial stages of passing a “cap and trade” bill that would cap carbon-based emissions and allow corporate polluters who exceed that limit to buy government-backed credits to cover the gap.

In theory, this “free market” solution — forcing business to buy credits to pollute–would give businesses the incentive to lower their emissions. As Budget Director Peter Orzag told Congress in March: “If you didn’t auction the permit, it would represent the largest corporate welfare program that has ever been enacted in the history of the United States.”

Yet as the Wall Street Journal’s David Wessel pointed out in an analysis of the bills passing through liberal House Rep. Henry Waxman’s committee, 85 percent of the energy credits would be given away to business through 2026. The remaining 15 percent up for auction are those that are meant to fund programs to help low-income people pay their energy bills!

Nevertheless, even though the cap in trade legislation is shaping up to be a massive corporate welfare program, Obama hailed the bill as a “historic leap.”

When we turn to foreign policy, we find an even bigger shift taking place. Here, Obama made no secret of his desire to break with the Bush administration’s obsession with the war in Iraq and its “neglect” of Afghanistan. And the administration appears largely to be following through on its promises.

The problem is that the promises embody a policy of “rebooting” the imperial project that, if it has any chance of succeeding, will plunge the U.S. into a multi-year commitment in Southwest Asia that may end up being an even bigger disaster than the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.

As one ticks off this list of Obama administration policies, it would be easy to make the case that last November’s election didn’t really change anything. But that would be the wrong conclusion.

There’s little doubt that we are living through a different political era than what we’ve known for much of the last 30 years. Most opinion polls place support for the Republican Party — still identified as the main representative of American conservatism — at somewhere near Watergate-era levels.

And a widely reported April poll by the respected but right-leaning research firm Rasmussen Reports found that only a bare majority of Americans said they supported “capitalism” over “socialism.” One out of three Americans under age 30 said they preferred a socialist system, according to Rasmussen.

A Pew Center for People and Press comparison of political attitudes in 1987 and today shows that Americans are much less conservative on social issues, and far less religious, than they were two decades ago.

This sea change at the level of ideas indicates that most Americans are interested in a break from the past. If the U.S. government enacted a bold new health care reform or a commitment to help homeowners or job seekers, it is likely to find much more public support than conservative, moderate (or even many liberal) politicians are willing to grant. Yet those politicians will not grant reforms on their own. Only a powerful movement from below can force them to.

Unfortunately, those movements have not yet developed. And until they do, popular aspirations will continue to be frustrated by backroom deals between corporate lobbyists, the Obama administration and members of Congress. Moreover, if our side allows its “friends” in the administration and Congress to define the limits of what’s possible, we will always come up short.

The likely defeat of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), a measure that would make it easier to organize unions if a majority of workers in a workplace signs cards in favor, is a testament to this. As the Los Angeles Times’ Tom Hamburger reported May 19, despite the key role that labor union mobilization for Obama played in his election:

Once [Obama] was elected, labor leaders made a fateful decision. Originally, they had planned to keep in place their extensive network of field organizers, who had just worked to elect Democratic candidates, and ask them to build pressure on lawmakers to vote for card check.

Instead, they changed course. The labor groups scaled back, partly to give Obama time to get his bearings amid the deepening economic crisis. Business groups, meanwhile, had started work well before the election and did not stop.

The result of this decision is the likely defeat of EFCA without its even coming to a vote in Congress.

The vicious corporate assault on EFCA — and Democrats’ fleeing from support for it — should give us a taste of the type of opposition that we’re up against. And it should tell us that for whatever reform we want–from health care for all, to an end to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq–a different approach is essential.

What’s needed isn’t a better lobbying strategy or flashier media, but a broad, independent and militant movement that won’t be placated with empty rhetoric or allow its demands to be ignored.

A case in point was Obama’s May 10 announcement, which much fanfare and press hoopla, of a pledge from 10 major health industry interest groups to cut the growth of health care spending over the course of the next decade. The $2 trillion in health spending saved could help the administration enact a comprehensive health care reform bill, administration officials noted.

But some liberals weren’t so sure that this announcement was good news. It had the aspect of a behind-the-scenes deal in which the administration won an industry promise in exchange for making some unknown “compromise.” Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, writing in his blog at the Talking Points Memo Web site, noted:

The only troubling thing about the President’s statements today concerning health care reform was what he did not say: that he wanted any health plan that emerges from Congress to include a public insurance option for Americans who do not want to buy private insurance. But without this option, there will be no pressure on private insurers to adopt all the other reforms to control costs or give all Americans access to affordable care.

Did Obama trade away the “public option” to win support from the health industry? We’ll soon find out.

But this modus operandi is becoming a bit of pattern. Already, the administration’s policies to address the financial crisis — from the bank bailouts to the rigged “stress tests” — appear to have been designed to disrupt Wall Street’s business as usual as little as possible. For this reason, liberal economists like Nobel Laureates Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz have denounced the administration’s policies as, at best, keeping “zombie banks” on life support — or, at worst, robbing taxpayers.

All of this dismays liberals who believe that they have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to enact overdue reforms. Instead, they see the administration compromising with big business that has interests in making whatever reforms are passed as toothless as possible.

For example, if the administration was truly interested in a health care system that would contain costs and cover every American, the simplest and most cost-effective solution would be to do what virtually every other industrialized country does: cover the population through a government-run “single payer” system.

Instead, the health care reform that is likely to emerge from this Congress will be a jerry-built compromise designed to provide enough incentives for health industry “stakeholders” (to use the parlance in vogue in Washington today) not to sabotage the plan. But this deal with the devil will make whatever reform is passed weaker and more inefficient as a result.

The standard arguments for explaining these capitulations to big business include everything from parliamentary excuses (“we’ve got to get 60 votes in the Senate”) to the fact that Obama and congressional Democrats have pocketed millions in corporate cash. While these explanations tell part of the story, they avoid a bigger picture that places today’s pressure toward reform in the context of American liberalism’s history as one of the two main philosophies (along with conservatism) for governing American capitalism.

Despite what conservatives are shouting these days, liberalism is not a version of “socialism,” or even social democracy. It’s one way to run a capitalist economy in the interests of capital. We can see this even when we look at liberalism’s “high tide” — the New Deal era of the 1930s and 1940s, under Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The Democratic Party’s brand of liberalism in that period was pretty mild stuff.

First, it refused to countenance large-scale government intervention into labor markets or the operation of the economy. Unlike European social democracy, American liberalism didn’t support nationalization of industries or “cradle-to-grave” social welfare policies. Liberals accepted that the paramount aim of American economic policy was to maintain conditions for corporate-led economic growth.

Even in the New Deal’s halcyon days, Democratic programs fell far short of working-class demands or welfare policies in other advanced capitalist countries. As historian Kevin Boyle noted, “In 1949, after four full terms of Democratic Party rule, the United States ranked last among industrial capitalist states in social welfare expenditures.”

Second, liberals did not — and still do not — question the necessity of a massive military machine or the imperialist aims for which it is deployed. In fact, “Cold War liberalism” rested on expanding the Pentagon. By the 1960s and the presidency of John F. Kennedy, the liberal commitment to the war in Vietnam was helping to starve domestic “war on poverty” programs. Obama’s growing commitment to a wider war in Afghanistan and Pakistan may have the same impact today.

Liberalism remained the postwar era’s guiding economic and political ideology because it served the needs of an expanding capitalism. U.S. economic expansion depended on increased investment in technology (and in a technologically sophisticated workforce). Moreover, economic growth pulled larger numbers of workers on the margins of the U.S. labor market into paid labor.

Liberal government policies helped to facilitate these changes required by the postwar economy. Federal programs like the G.I. Bill of Rights and the National Defense Education Act of 1958 subsidized an expansion of higher education and the creation of a technologically equipped workforce. These programs were justified as part of the Cold War need to “keep up with the Russians” — which only added to their appeal.

Government programs such as Head Start, Medicare, Medicaid and child nutrition programs added to the working class’ “social wage,” underwriting the expansion of the postwar workforce. State expenditures on some roles formerly left to women in families–caring for the elderly, assuring adequate nutrition for kids–helped increase the numbers of women available to enter the paid labor force.

Liberals championed and won these reforms — all of which aided U.S. capitalism.

Today, Obama makes many of the same pitches for his policies: arguing, for instance, that health care reform will help U.S. business compete against firms from countries whose governments cover health care costs.

This may be true. But when the policies are crafted from the point of view of the interests of big business, they are just as likely to be curtailed or jettisoned if Corporate America feels it doesn’t need them. That was big business’ attitude through most of the previous political era, when free-market ideology ruled the day. Democrats, as much as Republicans, abetted the process of counter-reform.

As political scientist Thomas Ferguson once remarked, this factor explains why the Democratic Party “left ordinary Americans alternately confused, perplexed, alarmed or disgusted, as they tried to puzzle out why the party did so little to help unionize the South, protect the victims of McCarthyism, promote civil rights for Blacks, women or Hispanics, or in the late 1970s, combat America’s great ‘right turn’ against the New Deal itself.”

“To such people, it always remained a mystery why the Democrats so often betrayed the ideals of the New Deal. Little did they realize that, in fact, the party was only living up to them.”

This is testament to the desire of the majority of the U.S. public to stick with the decision it made last November — to break with a generation of conservative rule.

Support for Obama among the population surely stands out as his first few months in office has raised criticism from different quarters of the media and political establishment, as well as from liberals who would normally count themselves in his corner.

The opposition from the right so far has been unfocused and largely ineffectual. The motley crew of “tea-baggers” who turned out April 15, radio yakker Rush Limbaugh, and second-rate politicians like Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Texas secessionist Gov. Rick Perry are a pretty sorry excuse for an opposition.

On the other side of the spectrum, most liberals remain strong supporters of Obama’s plans, despite their reservations about the administration’s kowtowing to Wall Street bankers and its half-heartedness in advancing priorities like the Employee Free Choice Act and health care reform.

Obama’s first three months in office should also remind anyone who harbored illusions otherwise that, as the president of the United States, Obama — by definition — is there to preserve the status quo. Even if the status quo has to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century.

Obama has taken some steps to renovate U.S. policy, from ordering the closure of the Guantánamo Bay prison camp to scrapping the global “gag rule” on abortion counseling. In contrast to the Bush administration’s denial of global climate change, the Obama administration is acknowledging that this is an issue the U.S. government should tackle.

But on a number of his most important actions, his administration showed much more continuity with the Bush regime than many of his supporters would have predicted.

First, the array of programs that his chief economic adviser Larry Summers and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner have hatched to rescue the banking system are extensions of the pro-Wall Street bailout policies of their predecessors under Henry Paulson, Bush’s treasury secretary and the former head of Goldman Sachs. These plans amount to a huge transfer of wealth from working people to the banking establishment that is largely responsible for the economic crisis.

Obama and his advisers have swatted away liberal critics of their coddling of Wall Street, like Nobel Prize-winning economists Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz. They have even tried to deflect outrage aimed at Wall Street titans who used taxpayers’ money to pay themselves outlandish bonuses.

Obama told a group of bankers at the White House that he was “the only thing [standing] between you and the pitchforks” of angry people demanding an end to Washington’s favoritism to Wall Street, according to the Washington-based newsletter Politico. If that quote is accurate, then Obama is quite conscious of his role in fronting for Wall Street, while saying that he “feels the pain” of Main Street.

Second, it was largely predictable that Obama would reaffirm a number of the most heinous Bush policies from the “war on terror.”

Presidential power is cumulative. Once one president seizes it, his successors don’t give it up willingly. From refusing to prosecute authors of the recently released “torture memos” to intervening on behalf of secrecy and against civil liberties in a number of “war on terror” court cases left over from the Bush years, the administration is signaling to the U.S. national security establishment that it has no intention of rolling back policy to a pre-September 11, 2001 state.

Coupled with plans to step up intervention in Afghanistan and increase the military budget (carping from conservatives about the “cuts” in the military aside), the military certainly has nothing to fear from the Obama era.

Obama’s election was a part of a general move among the U.S. population to the left, or at least away from the dominant right-wing ideology that shaped American politics for a generation. This evolution is likely to continue, independently of what Obama does or doesn’t do.

Witness, for instance, the gathering support for equal marriage rights across the country. Only a few years after conservatives used gay marriage as a “wedge issue” to wind up their base, two rural states — Iowa and Vermont — recently legalized gay marriage after activist campaigns put the issue on those two states’ agendas. Now, even some Republicans, like McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt, are calling for the Republicans to dump gay-bashing.

And Obama’s recent suggestions that the U.S. may be open to changing its bone-headed policies toward Cuba has brought forth far less wailing and gnashing of teeth among all but a handful of anti-Castro diehards.

Where do we go from here? Given the mound of crises that Obama inherited, it’s pretty remarkable that he appears to be in as strong a position as he is. But the future may not be as kind to him, and the public’s patience may wear thin.

Right now, Obama has the advantage of having put into place a number of programs to address the economic crisis, without the results of any being visible. So people are giving him the benefit of the doubt.

Nevertheless, it’s a sure bet that unemployment and economic desperation will increase over the next year or more. Obama’s policies are most likely not strong enough to really arrest the economy’s decline. And the risk of the U.S. being drawn deeper into a long and unpopular war in Afghanistan is inherent in Obama’s drum-beating against al-Qaeda.

So there is much that could undermine Obama’s current standing. And his political opposition will not be as clownish is at appears today.

This puts a premium on what SocialistWorker.org has argued consistently since Obama emerged as the Democratic favorite to win the presidential nomination more than a year ago — that is, the shift in mass consciousness has to translate into mass organization that pressures the government on behalf of working people.

The yardstick of judging a new administration by its actions in its first 100 days dates, of course, from the early days of the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. Between March 9 and June 16 of that year, Roosevelt proposed, and Congress enacted, 15 major pieces of legislation, including the repeal of Prohibition, creation of the National Recovery Administration, establishment of federal unemployment insurance, jobs programs, foreclosure relief and banking regulation (the Glass-Steagall Act, whose repeal in 1999 contributed to the current crisis).

Compared to this output of legislation, Obama’s stimulus package and budget resolutions don’t even seem to compare.

But it’s important to remember that none of these pieces of legislation in the 1930s — the beginnings of the New Deal — would have had the impact they did if ordinary people hadn’t organized themselves to demand more.

Historian Thomas Sugrue’s recent commentary in The Nation is well taken:

Whether Obama can tame the Great Recession, whether his mostly seasoned, Clinton-era circle of advisers will boldly experiment, and whether his presidency will ultimately be compared favorably with Roosevelt’s, remains to be seen. It pays to recall that the New Deal was the result of presidential leadership and policy innovation, but also that the drama of the Great Depression and the New Deal played out in places far from the nation’s capital — on New York City’s streets, in Nebraska’s cornfields, in Flint’s auto factories and in California’s shipyards.

Perhaps the biggest difference between 2009 and 1933 is that Obama has not, at least yet, been seriously tested by organized pressure from below. That might ultimately be what distinguishes FDR’s administration from Obama’s.

It’s up to those who want to see more fundamental change than Obama is willing to contemplate to get on with creating that “organized pressure from below.”

Following Obama’s first press conference as president-elect, New York Times business reporter Joe Nocera wrote a November 7 column titled “75 Years Later, a Nation Hopes for Another FDR.” Others, like the writers and editors for the liberal Nation, openly endorse a “new New Deal” from the Obama administration to help working people.

None of this is surprising. Roosevelt’s New Deal is remembered today for signature programs that seem very relevant in light of the economic disaster spreading from Wall Street through the rest of the economy.

The New Deal is synonymous with Social Security; with the “alphabet soup” agencies like the WPA (Works Progress Administration, which created jobs for the unemployed constructing public buildings); and with the government’s recognition of the right of workers to join unions.

But the New Deal didn’t come about because of some hitherto hidden enthusiasm among American political leaders for giving working people new rights and programs. The New Deal was, first and foremost, a program to save a U.S. economy in crisis. That American workers made gains was the result of huge struggles that gave a radical content to that program.

The 1929 stock market crash and the onset of the Great Depression followed a decade-long employers’ offensive against the labor movement that reduced union membership from 19.4 percent of the nonagricultural workforce in 1920 to 10.2 percent in 1930.

The labor movement seemed dead, with no new strategies in place and nowhere to turn for new members. By 1933, when Roosevelt took office, unemployment hit one-quarter of all workers.

Roosevelt didn’t run for president with the intention of championing workers’ rights or creating a welfare state. For much of his campaign against the incumbent president, Herbert Hoover, he attacked the Republican for “reckless” spending and pledged to balance the budget by cutting federal spending by 25 percent.

The 1932 Democratic Party platform affirmed the call for a balanced budget and huge cuts in federal spending, and it included a call for the states to follow suit. In words that would be familiar from today’s free-market ideologues, it also called for “the removal of government from all fields of private enterprise, except where necessary to develop public works and natural resources in the common interest.”

The depth of the economic crisis forced a different response. Roosevelt enlisted the help of some of the country’s leading businessmen, including General Electric’s Gerard Swope and Walter Teagle of Standard Oil of New Jersey, who argued that deteriorating business conditions required state intervention to control the excesses of private capitalism.

The “New Deal capitalists” also urged Roosevelt to adopt reforms modeled on private-sector benefit and insurance plans. The Social Security Act, passed in 1935, took as its inspiration a number of “welfare capitalism” programs established in the 1920s by some of the country’s leading corporations.

Despite some capitalists’ complaints that the New Deal represented a step toward “socialism,” Roosevelt and the New Dealers had no such intention. In fact, Roosevelt wrote in one letter about “the failure of those who have property to realize that I am the best friend the profit system ever had.” In campaign speeches when he ran for reelection in 1936, he proclaimed himself the “savior” of “the system of private profit and free enterprise.”

Roosevelt’s “New Deal” coalition was launched in this context. While popularly perceived as an alliance of Blacks, labor, urban dwellers and other “popular” constituencies, behind it all was a fundamental recasting of the alignment of business forces in American politics. The New Deal coalition, wrote political scientists Joel Rogers and Thomas Ferguson, involved not:

[T]he millions of farmers, Blacks and poor that have preoccupied liberal commentators, nor even the masses of employed or striking workers who pressured the government from below . . . but something else — a new power bloc of capital-intensive industries, investment banks and internationally-oriented commercial banks.

Roosevelt’s first tentative steps toward addressing the crisis in the economy bore a number of similarities to initiatives the discredited Hoover administration had taken. But circumstances forced Roosevelt’s hand.

Though it represented, in essence, a political rearrangement of American capital, the New Deal could only succeed by striking a new arrangement with the system’s traditional victims. Thus, included in the National Recovery Act (NRA), the New Deal’s first major economic plan, was Clause 7a, which allowed workers to bargain collectively with their employers.

Clause 7a had the unintended consequence of spurring an explosion of union organizing. “There was a virtual uprising of workers for union membership,” the American Federation of Labor (AFL) executive council reported to the federation’s 1934 convention. “[W]orkers held mass meetings and sent word they wanted to be organized.”

The consequences of this new period of union organizing ushered in by the NRA’s Clause 7a was immense. Existing unions tripled, quadrupled or quintupled in size. New unions seemed be formed overnight. Between 1933 and 1937, the number of workers who were union members jumped from 2.7 million to more than 7 million.

Driving these numbers upward was a quantitative and qualitative leap in the class struggle.

The number of strikes jumped from 1,856 in 1934 to a peak of 4,740 in 1937, with the number of strikers involved leaping from 1.1 million to 1.9 million in the same period. A large number of the stoppages were for union recognition against employers who refused to follow Clause 7a’s recognition of collective bargaining. A further number of these strikes, especially the three 1934 general strikes in Toledo, San Francisco and Minneapolis, took on a near-insurrectionary character.

Roosevelt responded to the pressure of the rising class struggle by legalizing collective bargaining rights for workers who were using the strike weapon to demand them. But he didn’t do so enthusiastically.

Liberal Democratic Sen. Robert Wagner introduced what became the National Labor Relations Act in 1934. The bill aimed at creating permanent procedures so that union recognition and employer-union relations would be something regulated by the government, instead of fought out on the shop floor between workers and bosses.

Industry opposition to the bill made FDR withhold his support, causing Wagner’s legislation to stall in Congress. But the 1934 strike wave “confirmed Senator Wagner in his conviction that the nation needed a new labor policy,” as one history put it. Wagner reintroduced the bill, and it won overwhelming support in Congress. Roosevelt then backed it as a way to rein in a labor movement that showed signs of getting out of control.

Roosevelt did succeed, ultimately, in reining in the struggle. But it wasn’t a one-way proposition. He had willing collaborators among union leaders whose vision for organized labor offered them a “seat at the table” alongside the nation’s policymakers.

Even before the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO)–a newly formed coalition of unions in the mass industries that served to challenge the conservatism of the AFL–a labor leader like Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers represented “a labor statesman in waiting, waiting for a movement to represent and a regime to accept that representation,” as his biographer put it.

This observation isn’t to take away from the initiative and courage that top CIO leaders like Hillman and John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) exhibited when they launched the CIO.

But it does make clear what they, or at least what New Deal loyalists like Hillman, ultimately wanted from the industrial union movement. Rather than seeing it as a means by which workers could organize an independent voice to win their demands, these union leaders saw it as a means to give labor leverage in the halls of power.

Thus, the leadership of the CIO was “connected by a thousand threads to a newly emergent managerial and political elite, an elite which in collaboration with the CIO would foster a permanent change not only in the national political economy, but in the internal political chemistry of the Democratic Party and in the prevailing politics of production in basic industry,” commented labor historian Stephen Fraser .

It wasn’t long before these leaders’ commitment to remain credible in the halls of power rendered them opponents of rank-and-file initiatives.

Roosevelt shrewdly used his power to cement the loyalty of the trade union officialdom to the New Deal and to the Democratic Party. That’s why mineworkers’ leader Lewis complained about the difficulty of organizing a labor-based opposition to the administration:

[FDR] has been carefully selecting my key lieutenants and appointing them to honorary posts in various of his multitudinous, grandiose commissions. He has his lackeys fawning upon and wining and dining many of my people…

In a quiet, confidential way he approaches one of my lieutenants, weans his loyalty away, overpowers him with the dazzling glory of the White House and appoints him to a federal post under such circumstances that his prime loyalty shall be to the President and only a secondary, residual one to the working-class movement from which he came.

Rank-and-file union activists — especially those on the front lines of the class struggle–were far less loyal to the Democrats, or even to Roosevelt.

By 1933, pressure began to mount among unionists for the creation of labor’s own political party to end the unions’ collaboration with both Democrats and Republicans. Calls for a labor party reflected a newly confident working class and its desire to fight on its own.

CIO leaders Lewis and Hillman made a priority of garnering CIO support for Roosevelt in the 1936 election. But in order to do so, they had to squelch pro-labor party sentiment among CIO members. This meant sabotaging unionists’ own initiatives independent of the Democrats.

When the newly formed United Auto Workers (UAW) voted in 1936 to support the creation of a national farmer-labor party, CIO leaders threatened to remove funding for organizing the rest of the auto industry if the union didn’t rescind the vote and back Roosevelt. The UAW caved and endorsed Roosevelt. From then on, organized labor has been a loyal lieutenant of the Democratic Party.

The New Deal left behind a set of programs that, while certainly an advance over the pre-Depression lack of social provision, fell far short of erecting a European-style “welfare state.”

The Social Security Act established a divide between “social security” and “welfare.” Unemployment and old-age insurance would not be paid out immediately, but only after employer and employee taxes had been collected in federally managed funds for workers. A regressive payroll tax, capped at a fixed amount, assured that workers would pay more to finance the system than would the rich–despite the fact that the rich also would be eligible to receive benefits from the old-age pension program.

Nevertheless, the “universalism” of Social Security–on offer to every worker–accounts for its enduring and widespread support ever since.

By design, the New Deal set up a distinction between those who “deserved” old-age or disability benefits because they worked, and the “undeserving poor” who were viewed as too lazy to work. Millionaire FDR himself called welfare “a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.”

For a generation, the memory of the New Deal sustained the Democratic Party as the majority party of American capital. This political order began unraveling in the 1960s and 1970s as the turmoil of the period, the war in Vietnam and the struggles of the era fractured the Democratic Party. This opened the door to the conservative period of the last generation, which seems, finally, to have run its course.

What Else to Read

* Lance Selfa’s The Democrats: A Critical History examines the two-party system in the U.S. and focuses on a socialist history of the Democratic Party.

* To learn more about the labor struggles that have shaped U.S. history, Sharon Smith’s Subterranean Fire: A History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States is an excellent history of the working class movement.

* For an account of the 1934 Minneapolis Teamster strikes that ushered in the high point of 1930s struggle, see Teamster Rebellion by Farrell Dobbs, who became a socialist through his participation at Minneapolis.

* Labor’s Giant Step by Art Preis gives an account of the first 20 years of the CIO, starting with the federation’s roots in the turbulent 1930s. Jeremy Brecher’s Strike! is the place to start for a survey of U.S. labor history.

That’s because, they say, the US is a “center-right” country whose population isn’t interested in those left-wing European (or even Canadian) ideas like national health care. Consider the following:

* Jon Meacham, Newsweek editor: “It’s just this side of possible that Obama will be able to govern what I believe is largely a center-right country.”

* NBC elder statesmen Tom Brokaw: “And this country, even with the election of Barack Obama last night, remains a very centered country, or maybe even center-right in a lot of places.”

* And, not to be outdone, Republican strategist Karl Rove: “Barack Obama understands this is a center-right country, and he smartly and wisely ran a campaign that emphasized that.” (Question for Rove: If you believe this, why were you advising John McCain to attack Obama as a terrorist and socialist?)

Of course, many of these were the same people who assured us after the 2004 election that the Republicans were on their way to building a permanent majority in Washington. But let’s put aside their failures as prognosticators and ask if their premise that the U.S. is a “center-right” society is even true.

There are several ways to look at the question.

First, there is the partisan split in the electorate. Given that most mainstream commentators equate support for the Democrats with support for the “center-left,” it’s worth noting that the Democrats represented 39 percent of the electorate on November 5, compared to 32 percent identifying themselves as Republicans. The Associated Press called this result “the biggest partisan shift in a generation.”

Beyond 2008, it’s also worth noting that the Democrats have won the popular vote over the Republicans in four of the last five presidential elections.

In his review of the 2008 turnout, Curtis Gans of the Center for the Study of the American Electorate pointed out: “Democratic turnout increased by 2.6 percentage points from 28.7 percent of eligible [voting age Americans] to 31.3 percent. It was the seventh straight increase in the Democratic share of the eligible vote since the party’s share dropped to 22.7 percent of eligibles in 1980.”

If anything, this is evidence of a nation moving away from the “center-right.”

Second, there are the policy preferences of Americans, as expressed in opinion polls. Here again, there isn’t much support for the idea that the U.S. is comfortably “center-right.” As a March 2007 Pew Research Center for the People and the Press report on social attitudes over the last twenty years explained:

Increased public support for the social safety net, signs of growing public concern about income inequality, and a diminished appetite for assertive national security policies have improved the political landscape for the Democrats as the 2008 presidential campaign gets under way.

At the same time, many of the key trends that nurtured the Republican resurgence in the mid-1990s have moderated, according to Pew’s longitudinal measures of the public’s basic political, social and economic values. The proportion of Americans who support traditional social values has edged downward since 1994, while the proportion of Americans expressing strong personal religious commitment also has declined modestly.

A Democracy Corps poll conducted after the 2008 election found that voters most consistently chose the more progressive of the two choices when they were given a “liberal” and a “conservative” description of a problem and solution on issues like trade, health care and Social Security.

When asked to list in order of priority a list of policies, voters put ones like “repealing the Bush tax cuts” for the rich, providing affordable health care and ending the war in Iraq at the top of their lists.

Third, there is the evidence from the 2008 election campaign. Despite the fact that the two parties of American business can be ideologically flexible, the contest between McCain and Obama took on some ideological tones.

Obama was fond of saying that his election would be the “final verdict” on a failed conservative philosophy. In his convention acceptance speech, he mocked the Republicans’ “ownership society” idea as a cover for telling working people that “you’re on your own.” On the other side, McCain tried to rally his base by warning against Obama’s “redistributionist” ideas — even calling Obama’s proposals “socialist.”

Even though McCain’s attacks on Obama were based on grotesque exaggerations and fabrications, they still didn’t do him any good. When the votes were tallied — even in supposed “red” states like Indiana and North Carolina — it appeared that the public chose the “socialist” Obama over the tax-cutting, anti-redistributionist McCain.

The exit polls showed that 51 percent of the voters said they wanted government “to do more” rather than less, and 76 of that group voted for Obama. In contrast, 43 percent said it thought that government was doing “too much,” and 71 percent of them voted for McCain.

While these facts shouldn’t lead us to conclude that the US is unambiguously left-leaning, we can say for sure that they contradict the claim that the US population leans to the “center right.”

For those who continue to insist that the U.S. is a “center-right” nation, at least one of these two things must be true: either they didn’t observe the same election that the rest of us did; or they did observe it, and have decided to ignore it.

Of these two choices, the latter is the most likely explanation. The entire elite punditocracy that has grown up over the last two to three decades was schooled in an era of conservative dominance that has come to a close. But old habits die hard.

By the same token, many of these pundits are mouthpieces for an American ruling class that has done quite well for itself in the last political era. It has no desire to see the kind of social change and redress of inequality that millions of Americans want to see. But because advocating openly for the rich is somewhat frowned upon, they appeal to the democratic notion that social change isn’t possible or desirable because the majority of Americans is predisposed against it.

Many of these voices for do-nothingism come from within the Democratic Party itself — and they are vying to define what’s “possible” under an Obama administration.

Those of us who want to see fundamental social change are going to have to organize to demand it. And we would do well to ignore those who tell us “no we can’t” because the U.S. is a center-right nation.

Not worried about whether Obama will live up to the hopes that millions of people have placed in him. Instead, they’re worried about the possibility that McCain could make a comeback. And so they’re pulling out all stops to convince anyone who might be wavering to vote for Obama.

What has unfolded is a two-pronged approach. On the one hand, minimize or ignore Obama’s gestures or actions that fly in the face of progressive values. On the other, accentuate the differences between him and McCain, no matter how small they might be on particular issues.

A good example of the former was the reaction of Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) to the recent Wall Street bailout bill and Obama’s support for it.

To its credit, PDA opposed the legislation as a “sellout to greedy fat cats,” as PDA National Director Tim Carpenter called it in an October 2 press release. Carpenter pointed out that Senate changes to the bill (what he called “lipstick”) and renaming it a “rescue plan” didn’t change its essence as a “blank check bailout.”

Yet two days later, Congress passed that blank-check bailout. The administration’s efforts to round up support got a boost from Obama, who campaigned for the bill and persuaded leading members of the Congressional Black Caucus to switch from “no” to “yes.”

In many ways, Obama and the congressional Democratic leadership led the way to the bill’s passage. And what did PDA say about that? Nothing. Its next official press release, dated October 10, quoted Carpenter as saying, “We’re stepping up our efforts during these closing weeks to elect Obama and a more progressive Congress. We’ve already started. New-voter registration coordinator Bruce Taub and a team of Massachusetts volunteers just returned from a four-day trip to Pennsylvania.”

Given that PDA and other progressive Democrats are invested in an Obama win and substantial Democratic coattails, it’s unlikely they would have taken the opportunity to denounce Obama or the Democrats.

But then, that’s not their modus operandi anyway. Progressives for Obama initiator Tom Hayden even explained: “I have no problem with Barack Obama supporting the bailout package as long as it keeps him on track to the presidency. He needs to be critical, to offer amendments, and to promise to return to the crisis the day after November 4.”

Groups like PDA and Progressives for Obama pose themselves as a sort of conscience of the Democratic Party. They uphold values like single-payer health care and immediate withdrawal from Iraq that mainstream Democrats won’t support.

And when the mainstream Democrats cross them — to accept Obama’s lousy “individual mandate” health plan or vote to continue the occupation of Iraq — progressives express disappointment, while noting how many votes they received for their liberal alternative proposal. Then they move on to getting out the vote for Democrats, including those who just sold them out.

This is the way “progressive” politics oriented on the Democratic Party is played — because when all is said and done, it is no more than liberal gloss on the politics of the “lesser of two evils.”

A good example of how this works was Hayden’s response to Nation writer Robert Dreyfuss, when Dreyfuss criticized Obama’s hawkish posture on foreign policy. It’s a good representation of the second prong described above: magnify the differences between the Democrats and Republicans.

Reviewing the first McCain-Obama debate, Dreyfuss wrote:

If, God forbid, foreign policy had to be the deciding factor in choosing between Barack Obama and John McCain, then last night’s terrible showing by Obama would make me a Ralph Nader voter in a heartbeat. Obama’s performance was nothing short of pathetic, and only Democratic-leaning analysts and voters with blinders on could suggest that Obama won the debate. More important, he utterly blew a chance to draw a stark contrast with John McCain on America’s approach to the world.

Responding to his “respected friend” on the Progressives for Obama blog, Hayden criticized Dreyfuss for concentrating on all the places where McCain and Obama agreed (at least eight, by my count) rather than the crucial “Iraq difference.”

As Hayden wrote, “Obama’s pledge to withdraw combat troops in 16 months, while not the ‘out now’ demand of the anti-war movement, is generally supported by most Americans and most Iraqis, and leaves Bush-McCain isolated in their opposition to deadlines.”

Thus, a vote for Obama will be, according to Hayden, a “peace mandate.” As Hayden continued:

Belittling the Iraq difference reflects a much greater omission, ignoring the gaping differences between the two candidates with 36 days until the election. On the basis of what he’s written, Dreyfuss ignores this context.

It is as if frustration with Obama is greater than anything some people on the left can feel towards McCain. I feel their pain, but let me offer this formula: no candidate will move further left than their base demands and public opinion allows.

In other words, it all boils down to the central lesser-evil logic. Obama may not be what we want, but McCain would be so much worse. And just to make sure we got the point, Hayden ended his response to Dreyfuss by calling up that old standby: the Supreme Court. “[W]hen the faith-based right has been promised a Supreme Court majority by McCain-Palin, I think the left should be in full battle mode” instead of, presumably, writing articles criticizing Obama’s shortcomings.

In other parts of the response to Dreyfuss, Hayden proposes that Obama’s hawkishness is just a political strategy intended to “close off any possible attacks from the right or the media on his national security policies and credentials.”

Yet anyone who has been paying attention to Obama’s foreign policy statements over the last two years (as Hayden has) can see that what he’s saying today is pretty much consistent with what he was saying then. If that’s the case, then why pretend that Obama’s hawkishness is just a stratagem, with the implication that the “real” dovish Obama will emerge after he’s safely elected?

Setting aside the objective fact that Obama agreed with McCain on foreign policy far more than he disagreed with him during the debate (which was Dreyfuss’ point), would a vote for Obama really be a mandate for peace? Couldn’t a victorious Obama also say, “The American people have endorsed my calls to launch missile strikes in Pakistan without the consent of the Pakistani government, to base withdrawal from Iraq on ‘facts on the ground,’ to kill Osama bin Laden, to stand up to Russia in Georgia, etc.”?

In other words, couldn’t Obama claim that a vote for him is really a “war mandate”?

Time will tell, but progressives for Obama shouldn’t deceive themselves into believing that they will have a secret ally in the White House.

Some of these statements of agreement were rhetorical tricks, as when Obama agreed with McCain that “the earmark process is abused” — and then went on to point out, in his often professorial tone, that $18 billion in earmarks is nothing compared to McCain’s plans to give away $300 billion to the rich in tax cuts.

Another was a mere evasion, agreeing with McCain that the government needs more “responsibility” to hold Wall Street accountable. Coming in the context of both candidates’ attempts to sidestep taking a firm position either for or against an unpopular bailout of bankers and financial firms, Obama’s support for “responsibility” had the all the conviction of his agreeing with McCain that the sun rises in the east.

And he agreed with McCain on the “importance of energy,” which no politician with the hope of getting elected these days would deny. He went on to attack McCain for failing to vote for a single legislative initiative to fund “alternative” energy sources. But perhaps lost in this joust was Obama’s definition of “alternative,” which, in addition to “green” technologies like solar and wind, included nuclear power.

So Obama appears ready to sign on to a large increase in the use of unsafe nuclear power under the guise of combating global climate change.

The only dispute between McCain and Obama on this score was over where nuclear waste would be stored. In one of Obama’s characteristic pulled punches, he looked set to point out McCain’s hypocrisy in supporting the burying of nuclear waste in Nevada, instead of his home state of Arizona. But Obama let moderator Jim Lehrer move on to the next topic, instead.

That topic turned out to be whether the U.S. was safer since 9/11. Again, Obama and McCain agreed that the U.S. was safer, but then moved on to elaborate a few differences between them.

In the midst of his remarks, Obama slipped in this aside, which may have come as a surprise to his supporters: “We are spending billions of dollars on missile defense. And I actually believe that we need missile defense, because of Iran and North Korea and the potential for them to obtain or to launch nuclear weapons.”

Say what? Obama had endorsed one of the most sacrosanct articles of faith among neoconservatives in Washington, and few commentators even noted it.

Yet if Obama’s endorsement of nuclear power and missile defense — certainly two of the Bush administration’s top policy goals as well — didn’t raise eyebrows, neither did some of the more fundamental areas on which Obama said he agreed with McCain.

At the top of that list was “We cannot allow a nuclear Iran.” After McCain raved that an Iran with nuclear weapons would precipitate a second Holocaust, with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad standing in for Hitler, Obama didn’t disagree with either of these preposterous claims.

The debate bogged down into a rather obscure dispute over what McCain adviser Henry Kissinger meant by saying the U.S. should be willing to meet with Iran “without preconditions.” But the key point was that Obama was committing the U.S. to years of confrontation with Iran, albeit carried out in a less ham-handed way than McCain would.

Even Obama’s refusal to back down from his earlier pledge to meet with Iran came with a caveat that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (and the professional liar Kissinger) would agree with: “[I]t may not work, but if it doesn’t work, then we have strengthened our ability to form alliances to impose the tough sanctions that Senator McCain just mentioned.”

So in a circuitous way, Obama’s disagreement with McCain ended up as agreement with McCain!

Just after their consensus on policy toward Iran was their policy toward Russia and Georgia. After McCain blasted Russia’s recent invasion of Georgia and reaffirmed his commitment to bringing most of the rest of the former USSR into NATO, Lehrer asked Obama if he had any disagreements with McCain. Obama responded: “No, actually, I think Senator McCain and I agree for the most part on these issues.”

In effect, Obama endorsed a policy of continued confrontation with Russia, and the flashpoint could be the pro-U.S. government of Georgia, whose attacks on South Ossetia and Abkhazia actually precipitated the Russian invasion. Had Georgia already been a full NATO member, the U.S. would have been treaty-bound to go to war with Russia!

Even though many people might feel more secure with Obama rather than John “Bomb Bomb Iran” McCain and Sarah “I can see Russia from my front window” Palin in charge, they shouldn’t expect much change in U.S. foreign policy. In fact, among the strongest disagreements between Obama and McCain came when Obama struck the more hawkish pose of the two: pledging to “take out” Osama bin Laden even if it meant carrying out an attack on Pakistani territory without that government’s consent.

What about the main foreign policy difference between McCain and Obama — the issue that has been the subject of the hopes of millions over the last two years — namely their attitude toward the war in Iraq?

Obama’s best barbs against McCain were the series of “you were wrong” charges Obama flung at McCain’s predictions that Iraq possessed “weapons of mass destruction,” that the U.S. occupation would be welcomed and so on.

But that’s about the past. Regarding the future, Obama noted that “in 16 months, we should be able to reduce our combat troops.”

Perhaps lost on most listeners, Obama’s choice of the word “reduce” rather than “withdraw” may be a tip of the hand. Formerly, Obama had pledged to withdrawal “combat troops” from Iraq, which would have still left thousands of support troops and mercenaries deployed in Iraq. On September 26, he pledged only to lower the number of combat troops in Iraq.

We’ll see if this was merely a rhetorical misstep in the heat of a debate. But if it isn’t, Obama may be laying the ground for backing off even his original promise to withdraw combat troops within 16 months once he is president.

At that point, opponents of the Iraq war who voted for Obama may ask themselves just why they voted for him.

Paul was the only Republican to raise more money in the third quarter of this year than the second quarter. In fact, with a haul of more than $5 million in the quarter, he has more cash in the bank than former front-runner Sen. John McCain.

If this were only a question of an obscure matter in some corner of the Republican universe, socialists probably wouldn’t give it any notice. However, Paul has managed to attract support from a wider layer of people, including those opposed to the Iraq war. To them, Paul comes off as a straight shooter who speaks unpopular truths against a two-party establishment that would rather not listen.

Indeed, that is probably one of Paul’s strongest qualities. Whatever one thinks of his politics–and most of this column will be sharply critical of them–he’s not a phony. He believes what he says, and he has a record of many congressional votes when he stood alone or with single-digit minorities against a tide of opinion. He’s no hobnobber or power broker. He annually returns to the U.S. Treasury money unspent by his staff.

But why would opponents of the war–generally thought to be on the left side of the political spectrum–be open to the appeal of one of only four members of Congress to endorse Ronald Reagan for president in 1976?

When it comes to the war, Paul does take a number of positions that put him to the “left” of Democratic Party liberals. While Democratic leaders were outraging their base supporters in approving the $124 billion war-funding bill last May, Paul voted against it. Antiwar activists would certainly find little to disagree with Paul’s explanation for his vote:

Only with the complicity of Congress have we become a nation of preemptive war, secret military tribunals, torture, rejection of habeas corpus, warrantless searches, undue government secrecy, extraordinary renditions, and uncontrollable spying on the American people. The greatest danger we face is ourselves: what we are doing in the name of providing security for a people made fearful by distortions of facts. Fighting over there has nothing to do with preserving freedoms here at home. More likely, the opposite is true.

Paul supports repealing the USA PATRIOT Act and dismantling U.S. military bases overseas. He opposes a U.S. attack on Iran. On the domestic side, he opposes gun control, the Real ID Act and calls on the U.S. government not to discourage the use of natural remedies and supplements that the big pharmaceutical companies oppose.

Taken separately, each of these positions would find a hearing among those who consider themselves on the left. But these stands can’t be separated from the rest of his transparently reactionary agenda.

That is because Paul’s positions, no matter how left-sounding, flow from a fairly (although not totally) consistent conservative worldview.

On the one hand, he promotes a libertarianism that verges on fantasy: he seems to advocate a pre-20th century world of rugged individualism, with minimal government and an economy based on the gold standard. On the other hand, a strong strain of “America First” nationalism runs through his positions.

According to Paul, “Property rights are the foundation of all rights in a free society.” So the “freedom” he advocates is a society with no income taxes, little or no government programs for the poor or disadvantaged, and no regulation of occupational safety and health or food and drug standards.

Interestingly, one exception to his views is abortion. Paul touts himself as anti-abortion, apparently seeing no contradiction between his views on personal privacy and the right of women to control their own bodies.

What should be equally disturbing to progressives is the “America First” character of Paul’s foreign policy, which bears a strong resemblance to right-wingers like Patrick Buchanan–or the even farther-out fringes of the nationalist right in the U.S.

A handwritten fundraising letter Paul sent to supporters earlier this month sounds as if a member of a right-wing militia or an old right outfit like the John Birch Society could have written it:

I don’t need to tell you that our American way of life is under attack. We see it all around us–every day–and it is up to us to save it.

The world’s elites are busy forming a North American Union. If they are successful, as they were in forming the European Union, the good ol’ USA will only be a memory. We can’t let that happen. The UN also wants to confiscate our firearms and impose a global tax. The UN elites want to control the world’s oceans with the Law of the Sea Treaty. And they want to use our military to police the world.

A substantial part of Paul’s foreign policy emphasizes “border security,” cracking down on “illegal aliens” and saving the U.S. from a NAFTA-based attack on U.S. sovereignty.

For this reason, Paul voted to bar the U.S. government from informing the Mexican government of the location of border outposts of the racist Minuteman Project vigilantes. And, belying his image as a down-to-earth country doctor, he voted in favor of reporting to law enforcement undocumented people who seek hospital care.

There’s no getting around the fact that the Ron Paul who is attractive to antiwar activists is the same Ron Paul who believes that the UN threatens “U.S. sovereignty” and that U.S. borders are being overrun by illegal immigrants.

This should lead us to a couple conclusions about the nature of Paul’s politics.

First, libertarianism–at least the type that Paul, the 1988 Libertarian Party candidate for president, upholds–provides no way forward for people who lean left. Those who are impressed by Paul should recall that Milton Friedman, the archconservative economist whose free-market ideology has devastated millions of lives, also opposed the military draft.

Second, while traditional conservatives have criticized U.S. expansionism and interventionism, this doesn’t make them allies of the left. One of the strongest opponents of NATO and the Marshall Plan in the 1940s was Republican Sen. Robert Taft, the leading conservative of the day and chief sponsor of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act.

Those on the left who admire Paul’s stands against the Patriot Act and the war should recall the old adage that “even a broken clock is right twice a day.” They should take a deeper look at the rest of his politics–because most of them wouldn’t want to live in the kind of society that Ron Paul wants.

At rallies in Oakland, Calif., and Austin, Texas, Obama drew tens of thousands who treated him like a rock star. And when his early 2007 fundraising totals showed him outraising Democratic frontrunner Sen. Hillary Clinton and drawing on tens of thousands of donors, it appeared that Obama had the potential to upend the presidential race. Polls even suggested he was challenging Clinton for the top spot.

Yet months after those heady days, the Democratic nomination race has settled into a familiar and seemingly static pattern. Clinton has established a steady lead in the polls of Democratic voters. Obama remains 15 to 20 points behind. Clinton has broadened her appeal in the Democratic electorate while Obama’s support appears most concentrated in the younger, more middle-class segment of the Democratic electorate.

At this (admittedly early) stage of the Democratic primary race, it’s looking like Obama will be classed with Howard Dean and Bill Bradley as runners-up to the Democratic establishment candidate.

What happened? No doubt one of the reasons is that Clinton’s A-team of campaign advisers has managed to draw Obama into dust-ups that have raised questions among Democratic voters about whether Obama is ready to be president.

Even though Obama’s statement pledging dialog with leaders of Iran and Venezuela was entirely sensible, the Clinton team, with the help of a pliant media, turned it into an illustration of Obama’s “naiveté”–hitting on the underlying theme that Obama is too inexperienced to be trusted with the presidency.

All of this was predictable from Clinton, but Obama’s response compounded his problems. Only a few days after the flap with Clinton, Obama boldly proclaimed that he wouldn’t hesitate to invade Pakistan if he had “actionable intelligence” that would lead to the capture of al-Qaeda leaders.

This was another gift to Clinton. On the one hand, it gave her team the opening to chastise him for recklessness. On the other hand, it dismayed the audience–antiwar voters–that Obama has tried to cultivate.

Lest we get too wound up in the machinations of the campaigns, we should ask why Obama–the self-proclaimed candidate of “change”–felt compelled to reaffirm his credentials on fighting the “war on terror” in the rhetoric of a neoconservative.

Those watching closely will also note that Obama’s views about the war in Iraq–his opposition to which being his single-best argument for trusting him over Clinton, who voted to authorize it–have also become fuzzier as he campaigns to be “commander in chief.”

Case in point: Obama’s questioning of Gen. David Petreaus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee dog-and-pony show in early September.

Instead of using his time to make a sharp case for ending the Iraq disaster, Obama, wrote the Chicago Sun-Times’ Lynn Sweet, “used about six minutes of his time to lecture Petraeus and Crocker that the surge is of modest success given the cost and the Iraq central government is ineffectual–points he has been making in speeches and debates. As Obama was wrapping up, he said, ‘That, of course, now leaves me very little time to ask questions, and that’s unfortunate.’”

Then, in a heavily promoted speech this month announcing a new direction in Iraq, he pledged to have all combat brigades out of Iraq by the end of 2008. But this was hardly a bold stroke, since he had earlier proposed legislation that would have had combat brigades out of Iraq by March 31, 2008.

As the Nation magazine’s David Corn summarized: “This week, there was little in Obama’s speech that would not–or could not–appear in a Clinton speech (though Obama’s advisers might argue otherwise). Until Obama delivers a speech that Clinton cannot deliver–on Iraq or any other major topic–he will have a tough time portraying himself as a necessary alternative to the leader of the pack.”

This isn’t merely the fault of advisers who are urging a more cautious course versus a candidate who wants to be a maverick–because Obama is no maverick.

Obama’s moves on the war are very much in line with his stated views on foreign policy, as developed in the July/August, 2007 Foreign Affairs. The Foreign Affairs article places him squarely in the center of the Clintonite liberal interventionist Democratic foreign policy developed in the 1990s.

In other words, despite his attempt to position himself as a new voice, he remains what he always was–a pretty conventional, even cautious, politician.

That’s obvious when you consider who Obama’s advisers and financial supporters are.

They are high-priced political consultants connected to Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, and major corporations like Goldman Sachs, Exelon (the leading operator of nuclear power plants), J.P. Morgan Chase, Henry Crown and Co., among others. His campaign finance chair is Penny Pritzker, a member of the billionaire family that owns the Hyatt Hotel chain, whom Forbes magazine named number 89 on the “most powerful women in America” list in 2005.

According to Sweet, “While Obama talks about transforming politics and touts the donations of ‘ordinary’ people to his campaign, a network of more than 100 elite Democratic ‘bundlers’ is raising millions of dollars for his White House bid. The Obama campaign prefers the emphasis be on the army of small donors who are giving–and raising–money for Obama. In truth, though, there are two parallel narratives–and the other is that Obama is also heavily reliant on wealthy and well-connected Democrats.”

It’s Obama’s close connection to these mainstream, pro-business forces that explains his support for the Bush administration’s “reform” of civil lawsuits (which even Clinton opposed) and his weak, “pro-market” health care reform plan.

Many Obama supporters wonder why he hasn’t asserted bolder leadership on any number of issues. While it’s easy to blame cautious advisers for playing it safe, it’s more often the case that candidates can’t be something that they’re not.

If Obama hasn’t capitalized on the real feeling among voters for a truly new direction and for “authenticity,” it’s because he really isn’t a visionary or a leader–or at the least, he’s not willing to challenge the mainstream conventions of U.S. politics.

If he won’t challenge these conventions, he won’t give the majority of Democratic primary voters a reason to vote for him over of the tried-and-true Clinton. And that may be the ultimate explanation for why Obama’s star seems to be floating back to earth.