Obama's No Socialist. I Should Know. By Billy Wharton Sunday, March 15, 2009; Page B01
The question "Is Obama a socialist?" spread rapidly through a network of rightwing blogs, conservative television outlets and alarmist radio talk shows and quickly moved into the mainstream. "We Are All Socialists Now," declared a Newsweek cover last month. All this speculation over whether our current president is a socialist led me into the sea of business suits, BlackBerrys and self-promoters in the studio at Fox Business News. I quickly realized that the antagonistic anchor David Asman had little interest in exploring socialist ideas on bank nationalization. For Asman, nationalization was merely a code word for socialism. Using logic borrowed from the 1964 thriller "The Manchurian Candidate," he portrayed Obama as a secret socialist, so far undercover that not even he understood that his policies were de facto socialist. I was merely a cudgel to be wielded against the president -- a physical embodiment of guilt by association. The funny thing is, of course, that socialists know that Barack Obama is not one of us. Not only is he not a socialist, he may in fact not even be a liberal. Socialists understand him more as a hedge-fund Democrat -- one of a generation of neoliberal politicians firmly committed to free-market policies. The first clear indication that Obama is not, in fact, a socialist, is the way his administration is avoiding structural changes to the financial system. Nationalization is simply not in the playbook of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and his team. They favor costly, temporary measures that can easily be dismantled should the economy stabilize. Socialists support nationalization and see it as a means of creating a banking system that acts like a highly regulated public utility. The banks would then cease to be sinkholes for public funds or financial versions of casinos and would become essential to reenergizing productive sectors of the economy. The same holds true for health care. A national health insurance system as embodied in the single-payer health plan reintroduced in legislation this year by Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), makes perfect sense to us. That bill would provide comprehensive coverage, offer a full range of choice of doctors and services and eliminate the primary cause of personal bankruptcy -- health-care bills. Obama's plan would do the opposite. By mandating that every person be insured, ObamaCare would give private health insurance companies license to systematically underinsure policyholders while cashing in on the moral currency of universal coverage. If Obama is a socialist, then on health care, he's doing a fairly good job of concealing it. Issues of war and peace further weaken the commander in chief's socialist credentials. Obama announced that all U.S. combat brigades will be removed from Iraq by August 2010, but he still intends to leave as many as 50,000 troops in Iraq and wishes to expand the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. A socialist foreign policy would call for the immediate removal of all troops. It would seek to follow the proposal made recently by an Afghan parliamentarian, which called for the United States to send 30,000 scholars or engineers instead of more fighting forces. Yet the president remains "the world's best salesman of socialism," according to Republican Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina. DeMint encouraged supporters "to take to the streets to stop America's slide into socialism." Despite the fact that billions of dollars of public wealth are being transferred to private corporations, Huckabee still felt confident in proposing that "Lenin and Stalin would love" Obama's bank bailout plan. Huckabee is clearly no socialist scholar, and I doubt that any of Obama's policies will someday appear in the annals of socialist history. The president has, however, been assigned the unenviable task of salvaging a capitalist system intent on devouring itself. The question is whether he can do so without addressing the deep inequalities that have become fundamental features of American society. So, President Obama, what I want to know is this: Can you lend legitimacy to a society in which 5 percent of the population controls 85 percent of the wealth? Can you sell a health-care reform package that will only end up enriching a private health insurance industry? Will you continue to favor military spending over infrastructure development and social services? My guess is that the president will avoid these questions, further confirming that he is not a socialist except, perhaps, in the imaginations of an odd assortment of conservatives. Yet as the unemployment lines grow longer, the food pantries emptier and health care scarcer, socialism may be poised for a comeback in America. Obama a socialist? By Scot Lehigh Globe Columnist / March 11, 2009 OF ALL THE inane accusations about President Obama, the silliest has to be this: The president is a socialist. Obama's plans are "one big down payment on a new American socialist experiment," asserts House minority leader John Boehner. He's "the world's best salesman of socialism," says Republican Senator Jim DeMint. "Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff," declares Mike Huckabee. Sean Hannity derides his agenda as "socialism you can believe in." Obama is "a radical communist," warns kooky Alan Keyes. "Epithets are substituting for thinking," observes Marc Landy, professor of political science at Boston College. Are they ever. That has long been the case across vast realms of conservative talk radio, of course. I recently heard one of our local luminaries who regularly accuses Obama of Marxism offering a similar sort of indispensable insight on another critical issue: Michelle Obama's appearance during her husband's speech to Congress. The first lady's face resembled that of a camel, while her body looked like the Liberty Bell wrapped in purple, said WTKK's Jay Severin, who, hilariously, fancies himself a political polymath leading a rarefied radio discussion. (Severin imagines any number of things about himself that are at considerable variance with the truth.) So let's examine the matter. One defining aspect of socialism is state ownership, control, or direction of the economy. By contrast, despite the excuse of a crisis, Obama has resisted calls from both left and right to temporarily nationalize teetering banks. Similarly, if Obama were a socialist, crypto or otherwise, he would surely be proposing government-run healthcare, rather than an expansion that builds upon our current hybrid model. Nor does his agenda compare to the democratic socialism of countries like Denmark or Sweden, which have high taxation across a wide swath of the population to fund a generous system of social benefits. "What Obama even in his wildest moments is proposing is way short of that," notes Landy. What's really causing conservative conniptions is that Obama wants to tax top earners more and spend some of that revenue on benefits - healthcare, education, tax cuts, etc. - for others. His mortgage plan has drawn similar ire. But if he prevails, the two top income tax rates - 36 and 39.6 percent - would still be well below those the country had for much of the last six decades. The top rates were 90 percent or more from the mid-1940s until the mid-1960s. They remained above 65 percent from the mid-1960s until Ronald Reagan's presidency, when they were first cut to the 48 to 50 percent range and later to 28 percent with a "bubble" bracket that taxed some income at 33 percent. Taxes rose under both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. During Clinton's presidency, the top rates were set at 36 and 39.6 percent. George W. Bush's tax cuts reduced those rates to 33 and 35 percent. When those tax cuts expire, Obama favors letting the top rates revert to 36 and 39.6 percent. That historical perspective gives the lie to the notion that the president wants to impose an unprecedented level of taxation. Add in his other revenue-raisers, and he would clearly be more progressive than Clinton, but well within the tradition of FDR and LBJ. It's ambitious liberalism, without a doubt. But socialism, with all that conjures up? Hardly. "For upper-income taxpayers, marginal tax rates on ordinary income would return to Clinton-era levels," says Rosanne Altshuler, co- director of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. "Taxes on capital gains would be lower or the same as the top capital gains rate under Ronald Reagan, while taxes on dividends would be significantly lower than under Reagan." So why do Obama's ideologicial opponents persist in the socialist canard? Simple: It's far easier to gull people with politically freighted terms than it is to argue actual facts. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups. For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum * Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/ * It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls. * Read the latest breaking news, and more. -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
