The campaign: Is Obama a ‘socialist’?

So this is what desperation looks like, said John Nichols in The Nation. Having failed to convince a majority of Americans that Barack Obama is either a terrorist, a closet Muslim, or a vapid celebrity orator, John McCain has found one final epithet to hurl at Obama in the waning days of the campaign: “Socialist!” As evidence for this charge—currently featured at McCain-Palin rallies nationwide and around-the-clock on right-wing talk radio—McCain cites an exchange Obama had with an Ohio man now nationally known as Joe the Plumber, who had complained that Obama wants to raise taxes on people making $250,000 a year. “When you spread the wealth around,” Obama fatefully replied, “it’s good for everybody.” That notion is certainly debatable, said Rex Huppke in the Chicago Tribune, but it isn’t socialism. Real socialists believe that all important industries should be nationalized, and that everyone should have roughly the same amount of money. These are not Obama’s positions, and if he were a socialist, why would he have the support of such iconic capitalists as Warren Buffet?

Obama may not fit the academic definition of “socialist,” said Byron York in National Review Online, but ordinary people know one when they see one. Like all leftists, Obama wants to punish success and redistribute income from those who earn it to those who live on government handouts. That idea has always been a tough sell in America, where even plumbers believe they can become rich someday. As a result, Joe the Plumber has become more than just “a zinger in McCain’s stump speech.” Supporters are flocking to his rallies with placards identifying themselves as “Phil the Bricklayer” and “Rose the Teacher,” an army of Americans who work too hard for their money to let Obama and his ilk—whatever you want to call them—“spread” it “around.”

McCain’s argument on this point might be stronger, said The Washington Post in an editorial, if he didn’t himself believe in “spreading the wealth.” The radical notion of the wealthy paying tax at a higher rate than the poor happens to be a feature of our current tax system—and has been for a century. It’s called “progressive taxation.” In all his years in Washington, McCain has never opposed progressive tax rates. In fact, back in 2001, McCain even opposed one of President Bush’s tax cuts, saying that “so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us, at the expense of middle-class Americans.” And that was before the financial crisis, said Michael Cooper in The New York Times. The truly surreal aspect of McCain’s attacks on Obama’s “socialism” is that they’re coming from a man who just voted for Bush’s nationalization of the banks and financial system. To put it mildly, McCain’s message “sounds a bit mixed.”

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You’re missing the point, said Michael Barone in USNews.com. This isn’t an abstract argument about the tax code. When Barack Obama told Joe the Plumber he wanted to “spread the wealth around,” he revealed an attitude—a liberal elitist’s “contempt for the working man,” whose pockets he feels entitled to pick. That admission might just “turn the election around.” You might be right, said Dan Rodricks in the Baltimore Sun, except that Americans have just lived through a prolonged period of Republican, trickle-down economics in which the wealth “trickled up,” not down. Now, with working people struggling to pay their bills and worrying about losing their jobs in a recession caused by Wall Street fat cats, “socialism” is the least of their fears.