[Vision2020] <gasp> Sarah the Socialist?!

[Saundra Lund]

Yuppers, it's as true about Palin & McCain as they want us to believe it is
true about Obama:

"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."

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2008/11/03/081103taco_talk_hertzberg

Like, Socialism
by Hendrik Hertzberg 
November 3, 2008

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. Back when the polls were nip
and tuck and the leaves had not yet begun to turn, Barack Obama had already
been accused of betraying the troops, wanting to teach kindergartners all
about sex, favoring infanticide, and being a friend of terrorists and
terrorism. What was left? The anticlimactic answer came as the long
Presidential march of 2008 staggered toward its final week: Senator Obama is
a socialist.

"This campaign in the next couple of weeks is about one thing," Todd Akin, a
Republican congressman from Missouri, told a McCain rally outside St. Louis.
"It's a referendum on socialism." "With all due respect," Senator George
Voinovich, Republican of Ohio, said, "the man is a socialist." At an airport
rally in Roswell, New Mexico, a well-known landing spot for space aliens,
Governor Palin warned against Obama's tax proposals. "Friends," she said,
"now is no time to experiment with socialism." And McCain, discussing those
proposals, agreed that they sounded "a lot like socialism." There hasn't
been so much talk of socialism in an American election since 1920, when
Eugene Victor Debs, candidate of the Socialist Party, made his fifth run for
President from a cell in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where he was
serving a ten-year sentence for opposing the First World War. (Debs got a
million votes and was freed the following year by the new Republican
President, Warren G. Harding, who immediately invited him to the White House
for a friendly visit.) 

As a buzzword, "socialism" had mostly good connotations in most of the world
for most of the twentieth century. That's why the Nazis called themselves
national socialists. That's why the Bolsheviks called their regime the Union
of Soviet Socialist Republics, obliging the socialist and social democratic
parties of Europe (and America, for what it was worth) to make rescuing the
"good name" of socialism one of their central missions. Socialists-one
thinks of men like George Orwell, Willy Brandt, and Aneurin Bevan-were among
Communism's most passionate and effective enemies. 

The United States is a special case. There is a whole shelf of books on the
question of why socialism never became a real mass movement here. For
decades, the word served mainly as a cudgel with which conservative
Republicans beat liberal Democrats about the head. When Barry Goldwater and
Ronald Reagan accused John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson of socialism for
advocating guaranteed health care for the aged and the poor, the implication
was that Medicare and Medicaid would presage a Soviet America. Now that
Communism has been defunct for nearly twenty years, though, the cry of
socialism no longer packs its old punch. "At least in Europe, the socialist
leaders who so admire my opponent are upfront about their objectives,"
McCain said the other day-thereby suggesting that the dystopia he abhors is
not some North Korean-style totalitarian ant heap but, rather, the gentle
social democracies across the Atlantic, where, in return for higher taxes
and without any diminution of civil liberty, people buy themselves excellent
public education, anxiety-free health care, and decent public
transportation. 

The Republican argument of the moment seems to be that the difference
between capitalism and socialism corresponds to the difference between a top
marginal income-tax rate of 35 per cent and a top marginal income-tax rate
of 39.6 per cent. The latter is what it would be under Obama's proposal,
what it was under President Clinton, and, for that matter, what it will be
after 2010 if President Bush's tax cuts expire on schedule. Obama would use
some of the added revenue to give a break to pretty much everybody who nets
less than a quarter of a million dollars a year. The total tax burden on the
private economy would be somewhat lighter than it is now-a bit of elementary
Keynesianism that renders doubly untrue the Republican claim that Obama
"will raise your taxes."

On October 12th, in conversation with a voter forever to be known as Joe the
Plumber, Obama gave one of his fullest summaries of his tax plan. After
explaining how Joe could benefit from it, whether or not he achieves his
dream of owning his own plumbing business, Obama added casually, "I think
that when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody." McCain and
Palin have been quoting this remark ever since, offering it as prima-facie
evidence of Obama's unsuitability for office. Of course, all taxes are
redistributive, in that they redistribute private resources for public
purposes. But the federal income tax is (downwardly) redistributive as a
matter of principle: however slightly, it softens the inequalities that are
inevitable in a market economy, and it reflects the belief that the wealthy
have a proportionately greater stake in the material aspects of the social
order and, therefore, should give that order proportionately more material
support. McCain himself probably shares this belief, and there was a time
when he was willing to say so. During the 2000 campaign, on MSNBC's
"Hardball," a young woman asked him why her father, a doctor, should be
"penalized" by being "in a huge tax bracket." McCain replied that "wealthy
people can afford more" and that "the very wealthy, because they can afford
tax lawyers and all kinds of loopholes, really don't pay nearly as much as
you think they do." The exchange continued:

YOUNG WOMAN: Are we getting closer and closer to, like, socialism and
stuff?. . . 

MCCAIN: Here's what I really believe: That when you reach a certain level of
comfort, there's nothing wrong with paying somewhat more. 

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.