Newsweek cover story in February of 2009: “We Are All Socialists Now.”
Newsweek editor Jon Meacham: We’re all socialists now, except for President Obama, who’s “been governing from the middle for a year.”
Still though, they have to admit that the guy is just a little to the left of President Gore’s centrist administration.
Elsewhere in news from the far left, another Obama as Hoover sighting:
Rachel Maddow provides some early reaction from the left on the news of Obama’s proposed spending freeze. Maddow begins by suggesting that “on day 2” in an “Econ 101 class,” one learns that a spending freeze is not the way to bring an economy out of a recession. Maddow is a D.Phil, Oxon., which makes it all the more vexing that she could so glibly decide an 80-year-old battle in favor of Keynes and broadcast it to her (admittedly modest) audience as a truism barely worth debating.
If one must do that, isn’t it better to do it in the medium best suited for it — namely, hip-hop?
In any event, it only gets uglier from there, as Maddow testily debriefs Biden’s chief economist Jared Bernstein (who holds degrees in music and social welfare) on the nature of the “freeze.” The quotations are required here because we soon learn that the freeze won’t touch entitlements, won’t touch “emergency spending,” and will feature aggregate rather than across-the-board cuts, meaning some discretionary programs could see budget increases. Maddow calls the freeze “completely insane” and “stupid Hooverism,” and then she tells us how she really feels.
Stupid Hooverisms? Gosh, who knew?
And of course, another closet neoconservative, centrist, moderate, Hooverite Democrat was once not crazy about spending freezes himself:
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