There was a third reason the “epithet lacked traction.”

Obama’s not a socialist. Really not. Unless you take one snippet — “spread the wealth around” — and treat it as Obama’s defining principle applied to everything. He’s a fiscal center-leftist who believes in slightly higher tax rates at the highest end, tax credits for the middle class, and the need for better regulation to ensure the effective functioning of markets. His health care plan is for universal availability of insurance, not single payer. It’s not socialism. It wasn’t the messenger. It wasn’t that people thought socialism was good. It didn’t stick because it was wrong.

You don’t remember Obama praising Reagan for significant tax cuts and deregulation in the 1980s, do you? Was the primary that long ago?

Obama may screw up. But he will not turn this country into a socialist republic. In fact, he will do much less of that than has occurred under Bush, between the bailout and the strengthening of the government relative to constitutional civil rights.