Leftier than thou
Updated on 31 October 2008
So does John McCain think Barack Obama is a socialist or not? Felicity Spector finds out.
Last night on CNN's Larry King live he was pretty clear: "No, of course not," he insisted. So just where did this whole 'socialist' jibe originate?
It's all Joe the plumber's fault, of course. It was in reply to his innocent little tax question that Obama shot back that crypto-communist stuff about 'spreading the wealth'.
Let's see what John McCain actually said. Back in July he told the Kansas City Star: "All I said was his voting record, its more to the left than the announced Socialist in the United States senate, Bernie Sanders of Vermont." The reporter asks "Do you think he's a socialist, Barack Obama?" McCain is equivocal: "I don't know."
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But ever since Joe burst onto the scene McCain has really warmed to the theme: this from his radio address earlier this month - "Joe, in his plainspoken way, said this sounded a lot like socialism.
"And a lot of Americans are thinking along the same lines. In the best case, 'spreading the wealth around' is a familiar idea from the American left. And that kind of class warfare sure doesn't sound like a 'new kind of politics'."
Of course it was left to Sarah Palin to really stick in the knife. In her speech in Roswell, New Mexico, on 19 October she had this to say: "Barack Obama calls it spreading the wealth. Joe Biden calls higher taxes patriotic.
"But Joe the plumber and Ed the dairy man, I believe that they think it sounds more like socialism. Friends, now is no time to experiment with socialism."
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Leaving aside the credentials of this latest political analyst, Ed the dairy man, it all seems fairly straightforward. Spreading the wealth? Downright Marxist.
Except what was it that Sarah Palin told the New Yorker's Philip Gourevitch, barely four weeks ago?
Talking about her own state, she said "And Alaska, we're set up, unlike other states in the union, where it is collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs."
Perhaps 'sharing the wealth' and spreading it are totally different things. Perhaps we should all just spread a little love around.
