Remember during the 2008 election, the big-brain Republicans told us we shouldn’t say Obama is a socialist, because that might discredit us? Because since everyone knew he wasn’t REALLY a socialist, calling him one was just giving ammo to the left to call us crazy? I distinctly recall many of us saying that if it walks like a duck, looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck….. but the brilliant Republican elite just couldn’t quite get there, somehow. Apparently, things have changed:
during the election campaign, I was certainly a critic of President Obama. I looked into the radical connections in his past. I wasn’t shy about saying that, but the socialism charge seemed to me to be a bridge too far. I mean, how do you define socialism? That’s a big problem right there. So my inclination when I started this research was to just bracket the whole thing, set it aside, and focus on the fact that Obama is ultra-liberal, much further to the left than he claims to be. But for example, I started to change my mind when I ran across the programs of the Socialist Scholars Conferences that Obama clearly attended when he lived in New York City between 1983 and 1985. And those programs really shocked me, because they included a number of people from Obama’s current political world. And they even included James Cone, who is the theological mentor of Jeremiah Wright. And when I saw that, I really had to rethink my attitude toward the socialism issue. And the more I followed it out, the more I saw that Obama at minimum lived deeply in the midst of a world of socialist community organizers. You know, people can read my book and they can agree or disagree with the idea that Obama himself was a socialist community organizer. But one thing is certain. There are a lot of socialist community organizers. They intentionally keep their socialism secret. And they were Obama’s mentors and colleagues.
That like “walk/look/quack like a duck” logic to me. At the end of the day, arguing about whether Obama IS a socialist is stupid. It is indisputable, and was in 2008, that he had always supported socialist perspectives and policies, and surrounded himself with self-described socialists. Who cares if he had the word stenciled on his t-shirt under his suit? What was obvious then, and has been proved since, is that he would govern like a socialist.
It’s nice to hear the Republican intelligentsia coming around…. finally.
