The workers’ flag is bluest blue
According to a recent poll [PDF] with a three-point margin of error:
- 55% of likely voters think think that the phrase “a socialist” describes President Obama “very well” or “well”.
- 51% of likely voters disapprove of how President Obama is doing his job. When asked why they disapproved, only 8% of those who disapproved described him as “socialist” or “communist”.
I wonder what proportion of voters both consider Obama a socialist and approve of his job performance.
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I have this hunch that a lot of people who think he is “a socialist” do not actually know what that word means. People under 35 or so who don’t have a large vocabulary and slept through high school Civics class probably don’t associate “socialism” with “communism” — they don’t personally remember much, if any, of the Cold War. If you’d never heard the word before you’d probably guess that it meant something to the effect of “oriented towards society or dealing with social problems”, which I think is very much the impression he wants to give the public.
These are the same people who have popularized slang use of the word “Nazi” to mean “someone who is overzealous about enforcing an ideology to the point of violence”, not realizing that it wasn’t originally a nonsense word or a proper name, but an abbreviation for the German phrase “Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei”, or “National Socialist German Workers’ Party”. Language evolves quickly, especially when the political changes of a generational gap strip it of its original context.
…either that, or they think that Obama’s plan for universal health care is the first step (or perhaps the second or third) on a greased slide toward the gulag. Never mind that the health-care plan that eventually passed Congress resembles the Swiss system more than any other.