Obama Doesn’t Fit the Traditional Mold for a Socialist: Pegging the President on the Political Board

There has been an ongoing debate on whether President Obama is a socialist, and my view is that he is not.  He’s a liberal, but not a traditional one at that, either.

A socialist would have been pushing for the complete nationalization of the financial system, from top to bottom, as Chavez of Venezuela and Castro of Cuba have done to their own countries.  Obama hasn’t done that.   He’s helped to create a system with a kill switch built into it; when the banks stabilize and pay back the government, they’re off the hook. 

To date, the American taxpayer has been paid back $587 billion of the original $787 billion that the government loaned out to the banks.

Socialists do not want Obama’s health care plan either.   Under a Socialist plan, there would be no crushing after-care bills that will still bankrupt entire families; the Socialist model calls for Cadillac-style plans for everybody. 

According to Bill Wharton over at the Washington Post, Obama’s plan underinsures everybody in the name of universal health care.  And there’s still the possibility of catastrophic bills that could push a family or individual into bankruptcy if an individual or family uses up their “allotment” of health care. 

I am opposed to both ideas, as both are prohibitively expensive to the American taxpayer.  We can no more afford the Socialist plan than we can President Obama’s.

According to the Socialist web site, the official Socialist party line is to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan and Iraq immediately, to close all of our overseas bases and to “unconditionally disarm.”  Obama has set a deadline in Iraq, but not one in Afghanistan.  And he wants to expand our involvement in Pakistan and elsewhere in the world, and upgrade our nuclear weapons platforms.   So he doesn’t match up there either, though he has called for a nuclear weapons-free world, while taking steps to upgrade America’s nuclear arsenal.

At first, I thought he was a socialist, but the more I researched it, the more I realized that the dots just didn’t connect.  The Socialist platform is as radical an agenda as I’ve ever seen, and even a leftist like Obama has openly rejected major parts of it.

Make no mistake, I think his agenda is very bad news.   And we don’t  know what is coming next, though we have a general idea.

President Obama’s brand of liberalism is darn peculiar and difficult to pin down.  But this man isn’t a socialist: he belongs to a branch of liberal thought that IS far to the left of center, and is quite radical.  Beyond that, the picture is still out of focus.

There is a label out there for Obama’s brand of liberalism, but “socialism” isn’t the best fit for it.