by Berry Craig

MAYFIELD, Ky. – Sen. John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin haven’t flat-out called Sen. Barack Obama a socialist. They just claim he supports socialist policies.

But a lot of McCainites are dropping the “s-bomb” on the Democratic presidential hopeful. They shout “socialist!” or wave signs saying Obama is a socialist at rallies when the Republican ticket toppers trash him. McCain and Palin love it, you betcha.

Anyway, not many reporters have bothered to ask genuine socialists – there are a few even in this most conservative and capitalist of Western industrial democracies – if they think Obama is one of them.

Rex W. Huppke of the Chicago Tribune did. The verdict: Senator Obama, you’re no socialist.

“He's not really talking about transforming society beyond capitalism,” Huppke quoted Robert Roman of the Democratic Socialists of America. (A pair of communists Huppke interviewed didn’t claim Obama for their side either.)

Of course, McCain and Palin hope by pinning the “socialistic” label on Obama, many Americans will equate the Democrat with cold war communist enemies like Gulag Joe Stalin, Uncle Ho and Chairman Mao.

About all that’s left of the Red Menace are Fidel Castro, who evidently has one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel, and Kim Jong-il, who, as we say in Kentucky, is nutty as a fruitcake.

In the first place, communists and socialists aren’t the same thing. Obama is neither, not by a long shot.

“Obama is about as far from being a socialist as Joe The Plumber is from being a rocket scientist," Darrell West, director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, told Huppke. “I think it's hard for McCain to call Obama a socialist when George Bush is nationalizing banks.”

“Obama is like a center-liberal Democrat, and he is certainly not looking to overthrow capitalism,” added Bruce Carruthers, a sociology professor at Northwestern University. “My goodness, he wouldn't have the support of someone like The Wizard of Omaha, Warren Buffet, if he truly was going to overthrow capitalism."

Obama’s other economic gurus include Paul Volcker and Robert Rubin. Volcker, an economist, was Federal Reserve chairman under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. A corporate executive, Rubin was President Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary. Socialists Volcker and Rubin aren’t.

But socialists there are in other democracies. The U.S. is the only democracy that doesn’t have a significant socialist party.

Most socialists are in Europe where they regularly win parliamentary majorities. They compete with conservative and centrist parties.

Obama is to the left of center in America, which makes him a liberal, not a socialist. But Obama and other liberals would be centrists in other democratic nations. Almost all Kentucky Democrats and every Southern “Blue Dog” Democrat would be in conservative parties.

At least McCain hasn’t said Obama is a “communist” or an advocate of “communistic policies.” But of late, some of the shouters and sign wavers at McCain and Palin rallies have escalated to “c-bombs.”

One sign said “Hussein Communist.” That one would have made Sen. Joe McCarthy especially proud. He kicked Republican Red-baiting into high gear in the 1950s.

McCain’s hero, Sen. Barry Goldwater – an Arizonan like McCain – helped keep the smear job going. He claimed John F. Kennedy was running on a “socialist platform” in 1960, according to Newsweek.

A real socialist said JFK was an “enlightened conservative.” That was Willy Brandt, Social Democratic chancellor of West Germany, one of our NATO allies.

Throughout the cold war, many NATO member nations had social democratic, or democratic socialist, governments at one time or another. Soviet communists hated the West European social democratic parties as much as they hated America’s two big capitalist parties.

What is Democratic Socialism? a book printed in the USSR in 1978, says social democrats are willing dupes of the capitalist powers-that-be and “try to lead the working-class movement away from the true path,” meaning Soviet-style communism. Democratic socialism is nothing more than “petty reformism,” according to the book.

Some Americans – even Democrats -- get socialism and communism mixed up because communists claim they are the true socialists. Remember the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics?

But claiming to be something doesn’t necessarily make it so. The Soviet Union was a communist dictatorship, and not a republic.

“Republic” means representative democracy, like the United States. (Right-wing thugs also have operated under the “republic” guise. For example, the Republic of the Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos and the Republic of Nicaragua under the Somozas were dictatorships.)

Anyway, in his story, Huppke gave a pretty good definition of socialism: “Generally, it involves espousing government control over a country's basic industries, like transportation, communication and energy, while also allowing some government regulation of private industries.” (Private enterprise flourishes in even the most “socialistic” of European democracies such as Sweden and the Netherlands.)

But here’s the fundamental difference between socialism and communism: Socialists believe political power must come only from ballots, not from bullets. History instructs that no group has been more committed to democracy at crunch time than socialists.

Before and during World War II, socialists opposed Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany and Tojo and the other far-right-wing militarists in Japan. (Most conservatives in Italy, Germany and Japan warmly supported their dictators, or passively accepted them.)

Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese militarists mercilessly persecuted socialists, many of whom belonged to labor unions. (Socialists strongly support the right of workers to join unions. Some socialist parties call themselves labor parties.)

When the communists took over Eastern Europe after World War II, they brutally suppressed socialist parties and free trade unions.

McCain and Palin really got going on the socialist stuff when Obama suggested in his now-famous exchange with “Joe the Plumber” (who turned out to be a fraud and another far-right-wing nut job) that “…when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

I can see where millionaires McCain and Palin – her family’s assets are at least a cool $1.2 mill, according to the Associated Press – aren’t big on sharing the wealth. But Huppke concluded that “with the economy in the tank, the idea of a little wealth sharing doesn't sound so bad to people whose 401k plans are worth less than the contents of their coin jars.”

This just in: Fifty-one percent of Americans in a Gallup poll said they favor “heavy” taxes on rich people to redistribute wealth, the AP is reporting. “That is significantly higher than when the same question was asked in 1939, at the tail end of the Great Depression, when 35 percent agreed,” according to the wire service.