Who's a Socialist?

This week's New Yorker has a piece by Hendrik Hertzberg about McCain/Palin's failed attempt to convince people that Obama is a socialist. Here's how it begins:

Sometimes, when a political campaign has run out of ideas and senses that the prize is slipping through its fingers, it rolls up a sleeve and plunges an arm, shoulder deep, right down to the bottom of the barrel. The problem for John McCain, Sarah Palin, and the Republican Party is that the bottom was scraped clean long before it dropped out.

And here's the last, best part:

For her part, Sarah Palin, who has lately taken to calling Obama “Barack the Wealth Spreader,” seems to be something of a suspect character herself. She is, at the very least, a fellow-traveller of what might be called socialism with an Alaskan face. The state that she governs has no income or sales tax. Instead, it imposes huge levies on the oil companies that lease its oil fields. The proceeds finance the government’s activities and enable it to issue a four-figure annual check to every man, woman, and child in the state. One of the reasons Palin has been a popular governor is that she added an extra twelve hundred dollars to this year’s check, bringing the per-person total to $3,269. A few weeks before she was nominated for Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist—Philip Gourevitch, of this magazine—that “we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.” Perhaps there is some meaningful distinction between spreading the wealth and sharing it (“collectively,” no less), but finding it would require the analytic skills of Karl the Marxist. [my boldface for emphasis]

Ricky chimes in:

Yes, the Sarah Palin, who just two months ago was proudly bragging to a journalist about how the people in the state she governs collectively own the resources and share the wealth, has been running around the country calling Barack Obama a socialist.

I don't recall the Obama speech or policy wherein he proposed that under his presidency all Americans, including children, would collectively own the resources of this great land and share in the wealth.

I heard Barack say he'd like policies that spread the wealth around, which, really, isn't much more radical than when corporations pay dividends, or give their employees bonuses. It's certainly not a departure from the income taxation policy we, Americans, have had since we, Americans, have had an income tax.

Today Obama said:

Lately, [McCain]’s called me a socialist for wanting to roll back the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans so we can finally give tax relief to the middle class. By the end of the week, he’ll be accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in Kindergarten.

Comments

[Wendy]

I actually have no big problem with all Americans collectively owning at least some of the wealth of this great nation. So go ahead, Barack, share those Tinker Toys.

[Elena]

Why hasn't this been disseminated more in the mainstream media? I feel that most of the coverage lately has been of McCain-Palin's lunatic accusations with nothing balance them.

[Margaret]

They are pitiful to keep attacking Obama because it doesn't appear(fingers crossed, knock on wood) to be working. And it makes them look stupid and sleazy.