By Harry Targ
Professor, Purdue University

I confess. I have been a supporter of the presidential candidacy of John Edwards (particularly since Dennis Kucinich was made to disappear). I think his clear populist stance, his anti-corporate agenda, and his critique of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council represent an advance over the ambiguous and limited centrist politics of Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama and the way John McCain will reframe himself if he is the Republican Party nominee.

A cursory examination of media framing of national political life over the last thirty years would suggest that populist candidates, who verbalize even modest condemnations of corporate power, face public marginalization. It happened to Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich and it is happening to John Edwards. Corporate media vigorously oppose any political forces at home or abroad who are anti-corporate and who embrace a grassroots approach to policymaking. “The people” are not and cannot be seen as capable of shaping their own political destinies. In the end, it is the corporate elite who must rule.

Having admitted my political “biases,” I have some thoughts about the potential political significance of the Democratic Party primary election in South Carolina. First, the campaign tactics of candidate Clinton and particularly former President Clinton should finally put to rest the popular view that they are crusaders against racism in American life. President Clinton did everything he could to remind voters that Barak Obama was after all an African American and that this election was occurring in South Carolina. In a totally irrelevant response to a reporter’s question after the results were announced President Clinton reminded the reporter and the audience that Jesse Jackson carried South Carolina in the 1980s; i.e. the outcome on Saturday will not count and it will not count because Obama, like Jackson, is an African American.

Sharon Toomer, founder and managing editor of BlackandBrownNews.com, reminded Washington Post readers in an interview that President Clinton signed a so-called “crime control” act that led to a significant increase in the incarceration of Black Americans and a “welfare to work” law that hit Black families hard. Also, Clinton reversed his 1992 campaign promise and vigorously worked to get the North American Free Trade Agreement passed which in twelve years has led to almost one million lost jobs. These jobs, largely in manufacturing, have impacted particularly among minority workers, who have been the most recent to acquire them.

Toomer pointed out that Clinton’s tone toward Obama was “demeaning.” “He was calling him a boy, a kid, living in a dream land. I don’t think he deserves the title of being a friend or being the first Black president.”

As Senator Clinton moves on to Super Tuesday, now courting the Latino vote, South Carolina shows conclusively that she and her husband are not friends of racial justice. They rather represent one of the worst features of contemporary American political life, its amorality: that is that a candidate will do and say anything to get elected. And South Carolina will help progressive Americans reflect more clearly on the reality of public policy in the years of Bill Clinton’s presidency.

South Carolina is significant in another way. Candidate Obama is energizing youth, traditional non-voters. They seem to be inspired by the messages of “change” and “hope” (even if they are never clearly defined). They are energized as they see a youthful African American man and articulate partner stand before the nation and suggest by their presence that maybe something can be done to overcome war, and racism, and poverty. (And we on the left have not been able to excite young people for a very long time).

The public image that the Obama’s project reminded me of my youth. I did not come from a traditional left family background nor was I engaged in the civil rights movement. While I was initially not enthusiastic about the young John Kennedy during the campaign season, 1960, I was inspired by his youth, his vigor, his call for self-sacrifice, and his seeming internationalist sensibility. And, the Kennedy candidacy promised to represent the polar opposite of the corporate, military, bureaucratic class fractions that had served during the dark days of the 1950s. Here was something new.

Reflecting on media images of the Iowa and South Carolina primary celebrations, I was reminded of the victories of candidate Kennedy, and the passion with which young people, like me, embraced him. The young president inspired the youth to get involved in politics, to work to transform the economic and social fabric, and to help support a foreign policy that sacrifices for the good and is based on humanitarianism rather than empire.

The paradox of the Kennedy era was that the president, his leadership body, and the economic ruling class had no intention of promoting these policies, the ones the young candidate articulated as he was currying votes. But his victory contributed to setting in motion a mass movement of youth who would be committed to the struggles for economic and social justice, and against imperialism, a mass movement that President Kennedy would have opposed every inch of the way.

This suggests for me the other meaning of South Carolina. Barak Obama is a metaphor for youth, for change, for the radical reversal of racism, war, empire, and environmental destruction. Given the political economy of capitalism, he will not be able to deliver the promises his metaphoric presence represents. But his candidacy may be setting in motion a new mass movement that could be of the magnitude of the 1930s and/or the 1960s.

So, in the end, if the corporate media continues to marginalize the economic populism of John Edwards, progressives need to support Barak Obama, whose presence, and rhetoric, and constituency makes the construction of a new progressive majority possible.