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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Obama the Marxist

A week ago I reported that famed right-wing agitator Richard Viguerie was extremely upset with House Minority Leader John Boehner for conceding on Meet the Press that he didn’t believe President Obama was a “socialist.” So Viguerie polled his own readership on the question of the president’s ideology, and got this response:

An online poll conducted by the Web site ConservativeHQ.com found that a near-unanimous 95 percent of respondents disagreed with House Republican Leader John Boehner’s recent statement that he did not consider President Obama to be a socialist….
Only 4 percent agreed with Boehner, with 1 percent undecided.
The poll then asked to evaluate Obama’s political philosophy. Of the 975 respondents, the results were:
Centrist–1%
Traditional Liberal–1%
Socialist–37%
Marxist–59%
Other–2%
Undecided–0%

Now granted, the kind of people who look to Viguerie for leadership tend to come from the hard-core conservative fringe. And I can only guess how they would define the word “Marxist.” But the fact that well over five hundred people, offered the alternative of “socialist,” insisted on the “Marxist” label is pretty bizarre, since it implies they think the President of the United States is determined to seize the means of production on behalf of the industrial proletariat (not, BTW, the most pro-Democratic of demographic groups these days).
No wonder a Newsmax columnist has just published a piece suggesting that the U.S. military might need to launch a coup d’etat to overthrow the U.S. government. With secessionist and nullification views making a big comeback, and plenty of people still believing the president is some sort of foreign Muslim “plant,” it’s no surprise the completely hallucinatory idea of Barack Obama as a Marxist has some purchase in the same precincts of the Right.

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