‘Socialist’ claim persists

Associated Press

NEW YORK

When President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign unveiled its new slogan, some conservative critics were quick to pounce.

“Forward,” they asserted, is a word long associated with Europe’s radical left. Its choice reaffirmed their contention that Obama is, to some degree or other, a socialist — a claim that surfaced early in the 2008 campaign and has persisted ever since, fueling a lively industry of bumper stickers and books.

“New Obama slogan has long ties to Marxism, socialism,” read a headline in The Washington Times. A column by Russian immigrant Svetlana Kunin, for Investor’s Business Daily, said Obama seeks to move America forward to “total government involvement in people’s lives.”

This is far from a new phenomenon — the use of “socialist” as a political epithet in the U.S. dates back to pre-Civil War days when abolitionist newspaper editor Horace Greeley was branded a socialist by some pro-slavery adversaries. In the 20th century, many elements of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal — including Social Security — were denounced as socialist. So was Medicare when it was created in the 1960s.

But to many historians and political scientists — and to actual socialists as well — the persistent claim that Obama is a socialist lacks credence.

He’s widely seen as a pragmatist within the Democratic Party mainstream who’s had ample success raising campaign funds from wealthy Wall Street capitalists. Even some of his strongest critics acknowledge that his administration hasn’t sought one of the classic forms of socialism — government control of the nation’s means of production.

Terence Ball, a political scientist at Arizona State University, said “socialist’ has gained currency as an anti-Obama slur because “the ‘L’ word [liberal] has lost it shock value.”