Politics
Election 2012: Obama a socialist? Many scoff, but claim persists
“I don’t use the word ‘socialist,’ or I haven’t so far,” Romney told CNN in an interview last year. “But I do agree that the president’s approach is government-heavy, government-intensive, and it’s not working.”
In one of the GOP debates, Romney asserted that Obama “takes his political inspiration from Europe, from the socialist-democrats in Europe.”
Radio host Rush Limbaugh was among several conservatives who chided Romney for his reluctance to call Obama a socialist outright.
“You know, I keep forgetting, the fact that Obama is black, is why we can’t call him a socialist,” Limbaugh said on one of his shows. “That had slipped my mind because when I look at Obama, I don’t see black. I see a socialist. I see a Marxist.”
A slew of books have been written by conservative authors trying to out Obama as socialist. Among the more ambitious, in terms of research, was “Radical in Chief” by Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative Washington think tank. Delving into Obama’s years as a student and a community organizer, Kurtz contended that Obama is part of a coterie of “stealth socialists.”
“Over the long term, Obama’s plans are designed to ensnare the country in a new socialism, a stealth socialism that masquerades as a traditional sense of fair play, a soft but pernicious socialism similar to that currently strangling the economies of Europe,” Kurtz wrote.
In much of today’s world, socialism lacks the contentious overtones that it has in America.
