Iit is neither radical nor socialist to be a liberal.

Final 4-13-10 Obama the Radical Socialist

In a recent poll commissioned by Politico, 63 percent of Republicans said Barack Obama was a socialist; 24 percent believe that he wants “the terrorists to win” and 31 percent think he is “a racist who hates white people.” What kind of weird world do we live in?

Obama may not be getting Republican votes for his agenda but he should, since he is proposing policies basically designed by and for Republicans. So why is this center-right president accused of being a socialist!

The Obama agenda is solidly center-right. The so-called “socialist government takeover of health care” is, in its essentials, a plan first suggested by Richard Nixon and later implemented by Republican Governor Romney in Massachusetts.

In military affairs, Obama kept the Bush team in place with Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense and Generals Petraeus and McChrystal as field commanders. He continues the George Bush withdrawal from Iraq and replicated the Iraq surge in Afghanistan.

In energy, Obama has just joined the drill-baby-drill team. The “cap and trade” pollution control policy is a market-oriented, business friendly Republican alternative to the administrative command and control preferred by the Democrats.

The START nuclear weapons reduction agreement with the Russians that Obama just signed in Prague is the one-third reduction originally proposed by Ronald Reagan.

In finance, it is the Wall Street-Republican team of Summers and Geithner that is giving away hundreds of billions of dollars to shore up the banks, is refusing to close the zombie banks and is rejecting the otherwise universal call to downsize the too-big-to-fail banks.

At the Federal Reserve, Obama reappointed Ben Bernanke, a Bush appointment, as chairman and has now proposed putting the new “consumer finance protection agency” in the banker owned and controlled Federal Reserve. That is right where a Republican president would have put it over the strong objections of the Democrats.

There is no government takeover. There is no liberalism, much less socialism. There is no invasion of civil and political rights, unless it is a continuation of Bush policies – like the Patriot Act, special reditions and military tribunals, all of which Obama inherited and kept.

So why does Newt Gingrich call this “the most radical administration in America's history?”

For almost 30 years, since 1980, conservatives have been in charge and they pushed hard to the right. They inaugurated a supply-side agenda of cutting taxes for the wealthy. They reduced government regulation of the environment, workplace and finance to “free up” business. They poured money into a privatized military-industrial complex and built a foreign empire.

With some justification, conservatives got the idea that they really were the majority and that they were entitled to run the country. Unfortunately, all that brought wrack and ruin. Those policies offshored our industry, inflated our financial sector, impoverished our middle class and undermined our standing in the world. Nonetheless, these policies became embedded as the normal and even moral way that the world “should be.” Of course, they also brought a Great Recession and Democratic control.

President Obama and the Democrats may have won big but that did not undo 30 years of conservative thought, policy and action. Most importantly, in this case, it did not affect or undo the mindset of those who lost the election. When the tea partiers say they want their country back, they are objecting to the outcome of the last election.

To the conservative mindset, the idea of a Democratic congress, presidency and the right to appoint even moderate Supreme Court justices cannot be right. It would undo the Reagan revolution. It would not be what their America is about. They cannot conceive of a Barack Obama as President, the mother of six as the Speaker of the House nor an avuncular gay man writing legislation to control our financial system. It just is not right! It violates everything the conservative majority, America, stands for.

In that mindset, the Obama policies are not the real conservative policies of a Ronald Reagan or Newt Gingrich, which would be a flat tax, privatized Social Security or the revocation of Roe v. Wade. Anything less is un-American, radical and socialist. Everything about Obama becomes de facto radical or fraudulent, hence someone, probably ACORN, stole the election. A liberal president cannot be legitimate, hence the birthers.

Conservatives have to get over their sense of uniqueness and entitlement. They have to admit that, even if they did shift the political center to the right, the last election moved it back leftward. To achieve a healthy political discourse, conservatives will have to accept that their's is not the only America and it is neither radical nor socialist to be a liberal.