Is Obama as mainstream as the left thinks? His views vs those of Socialist Party

“To listen to the candidates, the 2012 election is an epochal clash between irreconcilable worldviews. It is the Alliance against the Empire, the elves versus the orcs, the forces of capitalism battling the forces of compassion.”

So begins a column at Bloomberg View by liberal blogger Ezra Klein. Klein is right. This recent assessment of the campaign by one of the candidates backs him up:

We have not seen a choice this stark in years. The contrast this year could not be sharper. So the question is not whether people are still hurting; people are still hurting profoundly. A lot of folks out there still out of work looking for work. The question is, what do we do about it?

The speaker of those words was candidate Barack Obama.

The bulk of Klein’s column is a defense of the president’s ideology against attacks by his GOP opponents, who—when they are not busy assailing each other—have said variously that “President Obama wants to put free enterprise on trial” (Romney) and “the centerpiece of this campaign, I believe, is American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky” (Gingrich). Klein rebuts these calumnious charges by listing key elements of Obama’s first-term record and his 2012 platform:

He continued the Bush administration’s rescue of the financial system and auto industry. He passed a health-care law modeled on reforms Romney passed in Massachusetts. He passed a financial-regulation bill that erected a protective scaffolding around the banking system, but shied away from fundamentally reshaping it. He wants to extend most, but not all, of the Bush tax cuts. He has insisted that deficit reduction include some tax increases, though he has signaled he is willing to accept as many as three dollars in spending cuts for every dollar in increased taxes. He wants to raise the effective tax rates of people making more than a million dollars annually. He wants to invest in infrastructure.

You can disagree with this list without pretending it is radical or somehow inimical to free enterprise. Obama has pursued an ambitious, center-left agenda. Capitalism will survive his efforts to use market-based means to accomplish traditional liberal ends.

Klein tries to put a positive spin on some of these measures. Saying, for example, that Obama “wants to extend most, but not all, of the Bush tax cuts” is just a sneaky way of avoiding saying he wants to raise taxes on the wealthy—an admission Klein himself makes more forthrightly a few sentences later. But pointing out commonalities with George W. Bush, one of the most progressive Republican presidents in the history of the nation, hardly supports the case that Obama is not radical.

So I have come up with what I believe to be a fair and reasonable test of Obama’s place on the ideological continuum: a comparison of his record/2012 platform with that of Stewart Alexander, the Socialist Party USA candidate. A summary of the SPUSA platform conveniently arrived in my inbox this morning.

Candidate Alexander would agree with Klein that Obama isn’t as radical as many might think. But that, it turns out, is a matter of degree. Consider Alexander’s plan for job creation (which he correctly faults Obama for giving insufficient attention to during his first term):

The jobs program that the Alexander/Mendoza 2012 campaign is proposing calls for the creation of a Full Employment economy. We have a three-pronged approach. First, we want to create an Emergency Jobs Program that will put millions of workers back to work immediately in fields like environmental cleanup, infrastructure creation and maintenance, and education. Second, we support proposals to publicly fund a worker owned and managed cooperative sector. This will serve to not only put people back to work, but to re-build the manufacturing capacity of our country. Finally, we want to fund job training programs that lead to job sharing or job splitting, where workers will work less yet retain the same amount of pay and benefits.

Except for the specific language—“Emergency Jobs Program” versus “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act”—I defy anyone to cite a fundamental difference between this approach and Obama’s during his first term. Notice the areas in which the socialist candidate envisions creating jobs: “environmental cleanup, infrastructure creation and maintenance, and education.” Obama—check, check, check.

How does the SPUSA candidate envision paying for the Emergency Jobs Program? Why, by bleeding the rich—just like Obama, only more so:

A serious restructuring of the tax code that allows us to take back the wealth created by our work and accumulated by the 1% is key to funding our job creation plan. We want more than Obama’s proposed payroll tax cut. We deserve more than just reversing Bush’s economically suicidal tax breaks for the rich. We need a radical restructuring of the way in which we think about wealth. The great riches of this society need to be put to use to help us all—to make life better for the 99% and create new opportunities for work, relaxation and community.

To paraphrase the last part of that quote, “I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody."

Like Obama (and libertarian candidate Ron Paul), Stewart calls for slashing defense spending. The amount he proposes cutting—a 50% reduction—is far more than Obama has cut, but again it’s a matter of degree, not divergent ideology. In fact, Stewart’s avowed dream—“the creation of a world based on peace and solidarity”—could have been lifted from Obama’s Cairo speech.

Are there differences between the Socialist Party candidate and Obama? Sure. Alexander Stewart is more frank than the current administration in his assessment of the causes behind the recent decline in unemployment and job growth. He also opposes Obama’s approval of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), but that difference may be ascribable to Stewart’s not sharing Obama’s lust for power.

Ultimately, though, the two candidates are cut from the same cloth.

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