[Peace-discuss] Palin more socialist than Obama

[C. G. Estabrook]

	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. ♦