BOSTON, June 12 — President Obama campaigned in Roxbury today for liberal Ed Markey, candidate for a seat in the U.S. Senate. The campaign rally was held in Boston’s main black neighborhood in order to take advantage of Obama’s appeal among black workers. Of the many thousands who lined up to hear Obama speak, more than half were black, Latino and/or immigrant. In a silent vigil, a small group of environmentalists held up signs protesting the Keystone oil pipeline, but it was left to a small but bold group of PL’ ers and friends to directly attack Obama as the manager of racist U.S. capitalism. 
We held a banner and passed out a leaflet that exposed Obama for maintaining racist unemployment and mass incarceration of black workers and youth; increasing the deportation of immigrants; killing and terrorizing civilians with unmanned drones in Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan; continuing to kill for oil and bailing out the bankers while working-class families lose their homes.
Although the people who had come to hear him were not a representative cross-section of the population, there were large numbers willing to read our leaflet and consider the merits of our politics. Most of them, however, continued to defend Obama as having well-meaning intentions. Several dozen reacted with hostility, crumpling the leaflet or returning it to us. One woman was personally offended when we called Obama a “tool of the U.S. ruling class,” a puppet rather than a free agent. Her black nationalism and racial pride prevented her from seeing that Obama is no different from any other president, except that he has a slicker cover. An old friend waiting on the line said that when Obama was elected, she was able to feel proud of being an American for the first time in her life. This revealed the ruling class’s real purpose for backing Obama — to win more people (especially black and young people, two of the most potentially revolutionary groups) to actively or passively support U.S. imperialism abroad and vicious anti-working-class attacks at home. The broad acceptance of the fascist lockdown after the Boston Marathon bombing shows that to a large degree the ruling- class’s strategy has been successful. 
What we did today took courage, especially for the two young black women students among us who had voted for Obama. Armed with a class analysis, our multi-racial group was able to penetrate the patriotism and nationalism that fuels the hero worship of a dangerous enemy of the international working class. We introduced many people to the truth about Obama and U.S. capitalism, thereby loosening the grip that the ruling class has over working people. We communists need to seize every opportunity to do this until we can directly challenge the bosses’ rule in a working-class revolution.