justgoodfolk replied: "No, the right wing praise of Obama is because they think he will be easier to defeat. Obama is a conventional bourgeois politician, dependent, like his rivals, on lavish financial support from corporate interests and the wealthy. He is not the product of any sort of genuine movement from below in American society, but rather the latest in a long line of demagogues employed to foster illusions that the big business-controlled political system can serve the interests of ordinary people. Working people have absolutely no stake in the outcome of the struggle between Obama and Clinton for the Democratic nomination. Neither has any answer to the social crisis affecting ever wider layers of the population, and both defend the use of military force to secure the global interests of the US corporate-financial elite. The Democratic Party, no less than the Republican Party, is an instrument of the financial elite that monopolizes the wealth and dominates the political life of the country But it is noteworthy that leading lights of the Republican right have joined in the praise for Obama. The editorialists of the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times’ Republican columnist David Brooks and such conservative media pundits as Peggy Noonan, William Bennett and Rush Limbaugh have all had good things to say about him. On the Republican side, the promotion of Obama is motivated in part by calculations that he will be easier to defeat in the general election than Clinton. No one should doubt that the Republican notables who are currently hailing the rise of an African-American candidate as a vindication of American democracy are prepared to conduct an unofficial campaign of virulent racism against him, especially in the South, should he win the Democratic nomination. Those representatives of the Republican right who have sought to boost Obama have praised, in particular, his attack on what he calls “the politics of division.” Similarly, the senator’s call for bipartisan unity figures prominently in the media hype of his campaign. The New York Times, in an extraordinary editorial postmortem of the New Hampshire primary headlined “Unite, Not Divide, Really This Time,” lashed out against Clinton, accusing her of unfairly attacking Obama and sowing divisiveness. “The last thing they [Americans] want,” the newspaper wrote, “is for either party to drag out the old playbooks of division and anger.” There is a common thread in the efforts of the media to promote Obama’s call for bipartisanship and the intervention of Boren, Bloomberg and company. In the 2008 elections, the politically explosive question of an unpopular war has been joined by a deepening economic crisis that is fueling growing anxiety over jobs, prices and living standards. A majority of voters in the New Hampshire Democratic primary said their chief concern was the economic situation. With unemployment sharply rising, food and gasoline prices soaring and home foreclosures at a record high and expected to hit another 2 million households over the next year, the ruling elite fears that a sharply contested and protracted election process could become a focus for rising social discontent. It wants, in the name of “unity,” to suppress any real discussion of the social crisis. In the complaint of the New York Times and the injunction handed down by the multibillionaire Bloomberg and his allies, the American oligarchy is seeking to lay down the law—to delegitimize any critique of the establishment political consensus behind militarism and imperialism, and proscribe any challenge to the ever-greater concentration of wealth at the very top of American society. The campaign for bipartisanship thus has a distinctly antidemocratic and sinister aspect. It is an effort to discipline the political squabbling within the US ruling elite in order to face a far greater danger: an eruption of social conflict produced by the increasingly desperate conditions facing the vast majority of the American people."