Politics
Election 2012: Obama a socialist? Many scoff, but claim persists
“I grow weary of Obama and the Democrats being called socialist,” said Ball, who has written about ideologies. “If you talk to any real socialist, they disown them very, very quickly.”
Full-fledged U.S. socialists are relatively scarce these days, three socialist-oriented presidential candidates received about 21,000 votes among them in 2008. And current socialist leaders don’t share the right-wing view that Obama is a fellow traveler.
“It makes absolutely no sense,” said Greg Pason, national secretary of the Socialist Party USA. Obama’s health care overhaul “is anything but socialist. It’s bailing out for-profit companies.”
Yet Pason has been pleased by the “socialist” rhetoric.
“We’ve had an opportunity to talk to people, and that’s been a blessing,” he said. “People have actually researched socialist organizations.”
One tidbit they might learn: The Pledge of Allegiance, the epitome of American patriotism, was written in 1892 by a socialist clergyman, Francis Bellamy.
When the 2012 Republican presidential campaign was still competitive, three of the leading candidates, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachmann, depicted Obama as a socialist. Mitt Romney, the eventual winner, declined to go that far.
