Proud socialist Billy Wharton took to the pages of the Washington Post yesterday to argue that Barack Obama is not a socialist. Frankly, he’ll thank everyone for dropping the phony comparison.
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.
Wharton points to Obama’s refusal to nationalize the banks, his rejection of single-payer health care, and his unwillingness to withdraw all troops from Iraq and Afghanistan immediately. All are areas that represent deep divides between the president and America’s socialist minority. Wharton continues, “The president has… been assigned the unenviable task of salvaging a capitalist system intent on devouring itself.” Fundamentally reshaping that system is out of the question for Obama. Any political observer who has been watching Obama closely but still doesn’t accept that either (1) doesn’t understand the president, (2) doesn’t understand socialism, or (3) understands both but is willing to disregard reality for the sake of a partisan talking point.
