These are hard times to be a socialist in America. And not just because there's a bourgeois-bloated Starbucks on every other corner, thumbing its capitalist nose at the proletariat.
No, it's tough these days because you've got politicians on the right, the same guys who just helped nationalize the banking system, derisively and inaccurately calling the presidential candidate on the left a socialist. That's enough to make Karl Marx harumph in his grave.
Local communists, rarely tapped as campaign pundits, say Sen. Barack Obama and his policies stand far afield from any form of socialism they know.
John Bachtell, the Illinois organizer for Communist Party USA, sees attempts by Sen. John McCain's campaign to label Obama a socialist as both offensive to socialists and a desperate ploy to tap into fears of voters who haven't forgotten their Cold War rhetoric.
"Red baiting is really the last refuge of scoundrels," Bachtell said. "It has nothing to do with the issues that are confronting the American people right now. It's just a big diversion."
Of course that's just one man's opinion. (And everyone knows you can't trust a communist.)
The "s-word" bubbled up from the McCain campaign after Obama said, in his chat with Joe the Plumber, that he thinks "when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody."
Well, that certainly sounds like the words of a Red Menace. But is it socialist?
There are about as many definitions for socialism as comedian Jeff Foxworthy has for the term "redneck."
So, how do you know if you're a socailist?
Generally, it involves espousing government control over a country's basic industries, like transportation, communication and energy, while also allowing some government regulation of private industries.
"Obama is about as far from being a socialist as Joe The Plumber is from being a rocket scientist," said Darrell West, director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution. "I think it's hard for McCain to call Obama a socialist when George Bush is nationalizing banks."
And this from Bruce Carruthers, a sociology professor at Northwestern University: "Obama is like a center-liberal Democrat, and he is certainly not looking to overthrow capitalism. My goodness, he wouldn't have the support of someone like The Wizard of Omaha, Warren Buffet, if he truly was going to overthrow capitalism."
Bottom line: pure capitalism and socialism can be a difficult mix.
Which hits at the heart of the problem. Right now, with the economy in the tank, the idea of a little wealth sharing doesn't sound so bad to people whose 401k plans are worth less than the contents of their coin jars.
"The idea of closing that wealth gap, I think, is a concern for many, many Americans," said Teresa Albano, editor of the Chicago-based People's Weekly World, a communist newspaper. "I don't think people are going to respond negatively to the idea of spreading around the wealth."
Which is not to say that, by electing Obama, the country will gamely head down the path of socialism.
"The whole point of his policies don't really represent the political economy of the working class," said Robert Roman, who edits the newsletter of the roughly 250-member Chicago chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. "Obama's going to be a person who represents all of us, he's going to be representing the interest of the capitalists as well as the working people. He's not really talking about transforming society beyond capitalism."
But don't worry, Sen. Obama. You're still likely to win the vote of avowed socialists.
"Having Obama as president would be greatly superior, from our point of view, than having McCain as president," Roman said.
And you can expect to see that quote in a McCain ad in 5, 4, 3, 2....
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-obama-chicago-socialist,0,4048540.story
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Is Obama A Socialist? Not if You Ask One
And then there are the suggestions that his versions of universal health care and other nationalizing projects are essentially socialist projects. While speaking recently at Columbia University, he spoke of a national volunteer program that many have called socialist in nature.
And his tax plan, whereby he’d raise taxes for the richest 5% and redistribute that income to the rest of the country, has also earned focused allegations of socialism. Bill O’Reilly told Obama to his face it was socialist during their much-discussed interview.
Indeed, “socialist” has become one of the many dirty words of this exceedingly loquacious campaign season, and it’s an arguably useful one, inciting the kind of fear we saw during the McCarthy hearings and imaginably back in a little town called Salem a couple centuries earlier.
But if we look more closely at Barack Obama’s proposals, do they really make him a socialist? Well, not if you ask one. Hold on, though -- this shouldn’t be reassuring to the moderate left, undecideds or independents. He’s much, much worse.
I asked a few experts to weigh in, and their analysis is both enlightening and alarming:
Greg Pason, National Secretary of the Socialist Party USA: “Barack Obama's programs are not socialist. The vast majority of his proposals are anti-worker (or he might say ‘pro-business’). His health care proposals are more to save the for-profit insurance industry and do not have the goal of ending for-profit insurance. He has refused to support a Senate version of HR676, which would create a single-payer program (not socialist but much better than we have, and [which has] the support of labor and community organizations across the US). Many of his other economic proposals are pro-corporate.
A socialist program (even a reformist one) would not be a program that props up capitalism when it fails, but one that transforms the economy. None of Senator Obama's proposals do that. Senator Obama’s tax plan is regressive and even less ‘progressive’ than programs put forward under such conservative administrations like the one of Richard Nixon.”
F.N. Brill, National Secretary of the World Socialist Party (US): “Obama is as much a socialist as the Pope is an atheist. Income redistribution isn't a socialist act. It might aid in ameliorating income disparities within a capitalist economy for a limited time. But the logic of capitalism demands the rich grow richer (more capitalization is needed) and the poor grow poorer (their work creates the needed capital used by the rich).”
David Schaich, Socialist Party Campaign Clearinghouse Coordinator: “The idea that Barack Obama is socialist, or quasi-socialist, or semi-socialist, or socialist-light, or anything of the sort, is far-right nonsense. Barack Obama, like John McCain, is very much a ‘politician as usual,’fully committed to the continuation of the capitalist system and the expansion of its empire.”
Barack Obama, the pious, messianic hero of the Left, is thrice denied by the socialist movement itself. Some say his proposals are in fact bad for working America, and others suggest he is just as much a dirty capitalist as the rest of us.
Rea Hederman, assistant director at the Heritage Foundation’s center for data analysis, adroitly draws our attention to the real problem with Obama’s proposals, specifically his tax plan:
“I wouldn’t call the plan socialist. I have concerns anytime that the tax code is made more complex or used as a tool for social policy. Ideally, the tax code should be made as efficient as possible to maximize economic growth and minimize the distortions that arise from taxation.”
We may want to switch gears as the final weeks of this election tick on. Socialism is just a red herring…we don’t have to go nearly that far to criticize the senator’s many flawed proposals, which are anemic, impractical, naïve, and pure, unadulterated politics. But not socialist.
Indeed, let’s forget about the S-word. The hope and change promises of the Obama campaign are the real weak spots, as once again he reveals himself to be nothing more than a politician in community organizers’ clothing.
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=28645
The untruths live on after election
Saturday, November 8, 2008
(11-08) 04:00 PST Phoenix - --
Even after hearing John McCain's election night concession speech - described as gracious by many inside and outside his Arizona Biltmore Resort party - the tone among some of his core supporters in Phoenix was anything but. To some there, President-elect Barack Obama was still a "socialist," the "liberal media" was still "hiding" stories, and others wished that the campaign had hammered Obama harder for "palling around" with 1960s domestic terrorist Bill Ayers.
In other words, many of the distortions and half-truths repeated by the McCain-Palin campaign - even after being disproved by independent fact-checkers - still packed a powerful half-life.
"The McCain people were reprehensible in some of the things they said," said Joseph Tuman, a professor of political and legal communication at San Francisco State University and author of "Political Communication in American Campaigns." "But I don't think this was any worse than a lot of campaigns."
The difference, Tuman said, was that the media landscape has changed. The 24-hour online world - where anybody with a hand-held camera can publish a campaign video - has created a hyperbolic environment where every tidbit is spread globally within seconds. And repeated and relayed endlessly. Voters are drowning in information, much of it rich with distortion.
Now, politicians distort the truth or their opponent's record or positions all the time. It's a tradition as old as the republic, and the Obama-Biden ticket did its share of truth-bending, too. But the McCain-Palin camp transformed this tradition into a dark art form in the final weeks of the campaign. Their smears not only distorted their opponent's policy positions, analysts said they played to the worst xenophobic fears of Americans in a way that no campaign had since President George H.W. Bush used the image of convicted felon Willie Horton to smear Democratic challenger Michael Dukakis in 1988.
They or their surrogates implied or said that Obama was a terrorist, a socialist, a communist or someone who, as Gov. Sarah Palin put it "is not a man who sees America like you and I see America."
Many not deceived
Most voters were able to see through the attacks. According to a CNN exit poll, 64 percent of voters believed that McCain attacked Obama unfairly. By comparison, 49 percent believe that Obama attacked McCain unfairly.
"To me, that indicates that people paid attention to fact-checking," said Bill Adair, editor of Politifact.com, a nonpartisan fact-checking operation. "There were more fact-checking operations than ever before in this election. More than ever, voters got the opportunity to see what was accurate and what was not."
The degenerating tenor of the campaign is a main reason that The Chronicle started a continuing feature on its online Politics Blog and in the Sunday edition of the newspaper called "Lies, Half-Truths Outed."
The rhetoric in this campaign had an unusual staying power, most graphically shown when supporters attending McCain-Palin rallies yelled "socialist" "terrorist" "liar" and "kill him."
Words matter
In the hazy afterglow of the two-year campaign, it would be easy to dismiss all this as campaign hyperbole. Nobody really believed that Obama was a terrorist, right? But they did. "Words matter" as McCain often said on the campaign trail, in an attempt to use Obama's eloquence against him.
Indeed, as the vote count mounted Tuesday night for Obama, many of the true believers at the Arizona Biltmore Resort recounted some distortion they had heard recently.
Carolyn Rogers said she hated early voting. The Arizonan said people should be able to remember that voting day is the first Tuesday of November. What if, she said, some late-breaking news broke about a candidate? If that happened, she said, the voter wouldn't have a chance to take back their vote.
"Like Obama saying he wanted to bankrupt the coal industry," Rogers said. "That just came out on Sunday. The coal miners in Ohio and Pennsylvania never got to hear that story."
They could have. Palin distorted Obama's remarks about coal technology that were made in January during an interview by editorial writers and reporters at The Chronicle.
"But," Rogers said, paraphrasing what Palin said on the stump days before, "the media kept it hidden."
No. The Chronicle wasn't shy about promoting the 48 minutes and 33 seconds of the interview sitting on its Web site since January. If McCain supporters wanted to make an issue of it - and they didn't until two days before the election - well, that's on them.
After McCain conceded, Jonathan Stonham spoke of how gracious McCain's speech was. Then, as did many others who saw the speech at the Biltmore, he began to process his feelings after the long campaign. As any supporter of a losing candidate would be, he was frustrated, angry, sad and a bit apprehensive of the future.
"I can't believe this guy is going to be president. He's a socialist," said Stonham, a 31-year-old software engineer from Phoenix. "He wants to turn us into a western European socialist state."
This smear was first voiced by the accidental hero of the GOP, Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, a.k.a. Joe the Plumber. Then Palin picked it up, replacing her previous Obama smear - that he liked to "pal around with" with terrorists like Ayers - a charge disproved by several independent fact-checking organizations. So Palin kept quoting Joe the Plumber calling Obama a socialist, as though the unlicensed plumber's name was Joe the Political Theorist.
A real socialist, as Gloria LaRiva, the Party for Socialism and Liberation presidential candidate, told The Chronicle, does not pal around with capitalists - like Warren Buffet, the man at the top of Obama's Transition Economic Advisory Board.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/08/MN6H140BL0.DTL&tsp=1Barack Obama the Socialist
 | James Joyner | Tuesday, April 15, 2008 |
We were pretty sure this was the case after he made his remarks about how bitter people in small towns cling to religion. As Bill Kristol points out, this is very similar to Karl Marx’ line about religion being the opiate of the masses, if not as eloquent as the original German “Die Religion … ist das Opium des Volkes.” Senator Joe Lieberman reinforced this, observing, “I’d hesitate to say he’s a Marxist, but he’s got some positions that are far to the left of me and I think mainstream America.”
Now, we learn that in 1965, when Obama was 4 years old, his dad, writing as “Barak H. Obama” (the Communist-preferred spelling) wrote an essay on “African Socialism and its Applicability to Planning in Kenya” that wasn’t particularly critical of socialism.
Q.E.D.
Now, it’s true that Obama has been quiet about his plans to nationalize all industry, removing it from the hands of the capitalists and moving it under the control of the proletariat. Also, if elected president, he’ll probably not be too eager to see the state wither away, at least for the next eight years. On the other hand, he does have a cult of personality, just like many famous Communists like Mao, Lenin, and Stalin. And some staffers in one of his Texas offices had Che Guevara flags hanging on their walls. It pretty much balances out.
In all seriousness, I think Lieberman’s on the right track, if rather disingenuous in his soft dismissal of the “Marxism” label. Obama’s a liberal Democrat who wants more government regulation of the economy, more redistribution of wealth, more deference to international institutions, more nationalization of medicine, and so forth and so on. Some of his policies — although probably none of his goals — are indeed “far to the left … of mainstream America.” He’s as close to a socialist as it gets in serious contenders for the presidency; but that’s not very close.
He’s part of a long movement that has adopted some of the tools of socialism in an effort to make society better, with decidedly mixed results. The state hasn’t taken over the means of production, but it has created layers of bureaucracy to oversee them. The tax code has more than a smattering of “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” And we’ve instituted speech codes and a thought police in our schools and institutions, ostracizing those who dare to speak other than the orthodox Truth.
Again, this is mostly, if not all, well-intentioned. These were all reactions against real injustices, if often over-reactions, that had negative unintended consequences. But Obama’s not talking about cleaning up these messes but rather moving further in that direction.
Ideally, we’d be discussing the policy preferences of the candidates and their likely consequences rather than bandying about silly labels. But that’s not how the game is played.
