Is Obama a socialist? No, he’s worse
Is Obama a socialist? No, he’s worse than that
By Mary Ellen Synon
16th September 2010
For those of you who are trained in the fastidious ways of the British ‘liberalism’ and are therefore shocked and can’t think why the American Right is gaining such strength, here’s the reason: Barack Obama.
Americans are waking up to the fact that they have elected a man as president who is every inch an exotic creature. Which was rather fun at first.
The problem is, America is discovering that Mr Obama has brought more than just a foreign name and an interesting racial mix to the White House. He has brought a whole foreign way of thinking. And Americans don’t like it.Millions of them now want national leadership with a more star-spangled way of looking at the world, which is why this week there is something else going on in America, a national debate on a story about Mr Obama in the business magazine, Forbes.
The story is called ‘How Obama thinks.’ Its conclusion is that he thinks like a 1950s East African anti-colonialist.
The article was written by Dinesh D’Souza, an academic and author who is as exotic as the US president. Mr D’Souza was born in Mumbai and immigrated to America as a student. He is now president of
The King’s College in New York. He once served in the Reagan White House.
Many of Mr Obama’s critics claim he is a socialist. Certainly, as Mr D’Souza says: ‘Thanks to Obama the era of big government is back. He has expanded the federal government’s control over home mortgages, investment banking, health care, autos and energy.’
His critics explain this in two ways. ‘The first is that Obama is clueless about business. The second is that Obama is a socialist – not an out-and-out Marxist, but something of a European-style socialist, with a penchant for levelling and government redistribution.’
But ‘these theories aren’t wrong so much as they are inadequate. Even if they could account for Obama’s domestic policy, they cannot explain his foreign policy.’ (And what’s Mr Obama’s foreign policy? As the Weekly Standard put it, omnipotence at home, impotence abroad.)…