You’d sort of think that Citigroup, perhaps the biggest public assistance recipient in history ($50 billion or so and counting), would be a little careful about meddling in politics right now. Logical, but apparently wrong.
First came the news that Citi was downgrading its rating of Wal-Mart’s stock on grounds that the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA)–which was just reintroduced in Congress this week–might pass and damage the retail giant’s profits. Then it transpired that the same analyst who pulled that bizarre scare-tactic stunt, one Deborah Weinswig, actively participated in a conference call among EFCA opponents to strategerize about defeating the infamous socialist legislation that would let a majority of employees in a workplace form union bargaining units without formal NLRB elections.
As explained by Sam Stein at HuffPo, the conference call was organized by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, represented by Gordon Spencer, who explained its highly nuanced position on EFCA as follows:

“From the Chamber’s perspective, and I would say probably from the whole business community’s perspective, there are really no amendments you could make to this bill that would make it acceptable.”

So much for the spirit of compromise and bipartisanship.
In any event, the hysteria level among business lobbyists about EFCA is very high, strange as that may seem at a time when you would think they have a lot of bigger fish to fry.
As for Ms. Weinswig and Citi’s involvement in the anti-EFCA cabal, they aren’t the only corporate welfare loafers who think it’s okay to beg the Obama administration and a Democratic Congress for money while lobbying against legislation they support. According to Stein in an earlier article, Bank of America hosted its own anti-EFCA conference call three days after receiving a $25 billion subsidy from the feds.
It’s unclear at this point if EFCA has the votes to get through the Senate. But even if it does, and without the sort of amendments that the Chamber is already ruling out, the only way it would affect the business community is if it made it a bit easier for workers to organize unions. If the position of the anti-EFCA crowd is that unions are so intolerable that they ought to be outlawed, then they should come right out and say so without all the crocodile tears about preserving the sacred right of workers to vote against unionization via secret ballots after long, employer-dominated campaigns. But those who are accepting vast public subsidies to stay in business ought to have the decency to stay out of lobbying efforts based on the idea that corporate America should be allowed to do whatever it damn pleases, or they’ll plunge us all into penury.

The Center for American Progress has released two very meaty new studies on progressive trends in the American electorate.
The first, by TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira, is entitled “New Progressive America,” and documents “twenty years of demographic, geographic, and attitudinal changes across the country” that “herald a new progressive majority.” Texeira’s basic conclusion is:

At this point in our history, progressive arguments combined with the continuing demographic and geographic changes are tilting our country in a progressive direction–trends that should take America down a very different path than has been traveled in the last eight years.

The fundamental question Teixeira asks in this study is how the country moved from a 53-46 Republican victory in the 1988 presidential election to a 53-46 Democratic victory in 2008.
In terms of demographics, the study focuses on pro-Democratic shifts in the population, especially an 11 point increase in the minority percentage share of voters in presidential electionsa 4 point increase in the percentage of voters who are white college graduates, and a 15 point drop in the percentage of voters who are non-college-educated whites. The first two groups have become solidly pro-Democratic, and while Democrats made small gains in the “white working class vote” between 2004 and 2008, this remains the most conservative major voting demographic.
Other pro-Democratic demographic trends include the impressively progressive outlook of Milennials (those born after 1978), which are adding 4.5 million adults to the voting pool every year, and the growing tilt of professionals, who are “now the most progressive occupational group.” Religious diversity, or more specifically “rapid increases among the unaffiliated”–is another pro-Democratic factor.
In terms of geography, Democrats have become dominant in most major metropolitan areas, primarily because they have made vast improvements since 1988 in fast-growing suburbs.
Texeira also offers detailed analysis of trends in nine states usually thought of as “swing states”: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Colorado, Nevada, Ohio, Florida, Virginia, North Carolina and Indiana. All these states were carried by George H.W. Bush in 1988 and by Barack Obama in 2008.
The second big CAP study, by John Halpin and Karl Agne, is entitled “State of American Political Ideology, 2009.” Using new definitional categories and a detailed examination of voters’ actual views, this study challenges the static impression of ideological positioning in the electorate that has been produced by the many surveys that simply ask voters whether they consider themselves “liberals, moderates or conservatives” (the basis of all that “center-right nation” talk after the last elections).
Its basic conclusion is:

After nearly three decades of public acceptance of the Reagan-Bush model of conservatism–limited government, tax cuts, traditional values, and military strength–a broad and deep cross-section of the American public now holds markedly progressive attitudes about government and society.

In terms of ideological self-identification, the study deployed a five-part scale that adds “libertarian” and “progressive” to the usual three-part menu. This approach showed 34% of voters self-identifying as conservatives, 29% as moderates, 15 percent as liberals, 16 percent as progressives, and 2% as libertarians. Follow-up questions designed to identify the leanings of moderates divided the electorate into 47% who were or who leaned liberal or progressive, and 48% who were or who leaned conservative or libertarian.
But when Halpin and Agne used 40 specific ideological statements to probe beneath self-identification, a different picture emerged:

On the domestic front, after years of supply-side tax cuts, support for corporations (especially extractive oil and mining companies), and deregulation of the economy, large percentages of Americans increasingly favor progressive ideas centered on: sustainable lifestyles and green energy; public investment in education, infrastructure, and science; financial support for the poor, elderly, and sick; regulation of business to protect workers and consumers; and guaranteed affordable health coverage for every American. On the international front, the legacy of the Bush years has yielded to an American public far more interested in restoring the country’s image abroad, fighting climate change, and pursuing security through diplomacy, alliances, and international institutions than in the continued pursuit of national objectives through the sole projection of military might.
Approximately two-thirds of Americans—reaching to 70 percent to 80 percent on some measures—agree with progressive ideas in each of these domestic and global areas.

Both these studies supply extensive details supporting the top-line findings. But the big news is that the trends–both demographic and ideological, and ultimately partisan–so evident in November of 2008 are truly trends, not emphemeral events. And while the success of President Obama’s and the Democratic Congress’ agenda will obviously have a major impact on what happens in 2010 or 2012, we Democrats do, finally, appear to have the wind at our backs.

The current (3/18) issue of The New Republic sports a nifty ’30s-style prole art cover and the articles are organized around the theme “Obama’s New Deal.” Inside, TNR features an interesting discussion of one of the more important grand strategy choices Obama must make half way through the first hundred days — focusing his agenda, with TDS co-editor William Galston offering a critique of “Barack’s Too Long Wish List,” and a response by TNR’s Jonathan Cohn, “The Case for Presidential Multi-Tasking.” A couple of nut graphs from Galston:

Roosevelt organized his first term around two principles that the Obama administration would do well to ponder. First, he kept his (and the country’s) attention firmly fixed on a single task: ending the crisis of confidence and restarting economic activity. While he was more sensitive than previous presidents to the links among seemingly disparate issues, these interconnections in his view did not warrant trying to move on all fronts at once. The people and the Congress had to be brought along with an agenda and a narrative that they could understand.
Second, although FDR moved quickly starting on inauguration day, he never believed that his capacity to legislate would wane after his first year in office. On the contrary, he used early momentum to build popular support, yielding further congressional gains in 1934 and a massive landslide in 1936. The creative period of the New Deal continued until Roosevelt overreached in 1937 with his ill-considered proposal to reorganize (or as his detractors put it, “pack”) the Supreme Court.

And a teaser from Cohn:

…Obama’s multi-faceted strategy has certain clear advantages. For one thing, it keeps the right wing unsettled. With so many initiatives going forward, there’s no chance for conservatives to coalesce in opposition to any one issue. Instead of the entire conservative movement hammering away in unison, you have some of them going after health care, some of them going after earmarks, some of them going after cap-and-trade, and so on. In that sort of environment, few attacks resonate because they don’tt get the sustained attention they need.
The converse is true, of course; Obama isn’t giving the affirmative case sustained attention, either. But if neither side can rally its forces, then the most likely result would seem to be status quo politics. And status quo politics right now, I would argue, favors the party that just won a landslide presidential election while building up huge congressional majorities.

An interesting dialogue, and the choices about focus to be made in the weeks ahead may well determine the success of the President — and his party.

As you probably know if you spend any time paying attention to conservative agitprop, Depression Revisionism is all the rage on the Right, where it’s now settled wisdom that the New Deal failed and that Herbert Hoover, like Franklin Roosevelt, was a big-spending market interventionist who helped create the Great Depression in the first place by excessive meddling with the economy. This revisionist point-of-view is obviously aimed at reinforcing GOP arguments that Obama’s economic activism is doomed to fail–you know, just like FDR’s.
More importantly, this rather counter-intuitive if loudly and confidently announced historical axiom seems to have infected MSM coverage of the current economic debate. An anecdote: I was recently awaiting a flight in an airport that featured monitors blaring out CNN, and could not help but be aware of an “Anderson Cooper 360” segment on the economic stimulus package. Nestled in the midst of turgid analysis of the jobs impact of this bridge and that road was an interview with some midwestern economics professor, who was given the opportunity to say, without contradiction, that it was the “consensus” of economists that the New Deal had failed to make a dent in the Great Depression. This is the sort of assertion that has a strong subliminal effect on those of us–a pretty big majority of Americans–who don’t spend a lot of time keeping up with the Dismal Science.
The would-be Copernicus of this Calvin-Coolidge-Was-Right revolution in understanding of the 1930s is undoubtedly Amity Shlaes, a conservative columnist whose best-selling book on the New Deal and the Great Depression, The Forgotten Man, is one of those tomes that is constantly cited as definitive by people who haven’t read it at all.
While the temptation to say we should all actually read Shlaes is offset by my lack of interest in further enriching her, I’m glad to report that Jonathan Chait has laid out the basic issues for us in an important review in The New Republic.
I know that like many bloggers I often link to an article or post and beg you to “read the whole thing,” but with respect to Chait’s review of Shlaes, I really do mean it. That’s because Shlaes’ take on the Great Depression has become very central not only to the GOP case against President Obama’s agenda, but to the “positive” antediluvian economc policies most Republicans are urging upon us as an alternative.
To boil it all down, Chait shows that Shlaes’ account of the Depression is highly anecdotal and doesn’t always support the “lessons” we are supposed to learn from her; that she uses economic statistics in a dubious and very selective way to make her points; and that her interpretation of both FDR’s and Hoover’s reponses to the Depression is one that virtually no reputable historian would support. He also establishes that most economists, regardless of ideology–and contra the assertion of that economist speaking on “Anderson Cooper 360”–would disagree with Shlaes’ basic understanding of the Depression and its causes and remedies.
We should all understand by now that interpretations of large historical events often have a profound influence on contemporary public discourse. “Revisionist” takes on developments ranging from the destruction of Solomon’s Temple and the execution of Jesus Christ, to the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Battle of Tours, the French Revolution, and the Treaty of Versailles, all fed powerful political and intellectual movements many decades and even centuries later. While the Great Depression of the 1930s probably doesn’t match most of those events in its significance, it was undoubtedly an experience that molded political opinions in America for a very long time, mostly in a way that benefitted the Democratic Party. It’s thus not surprising that Republicans want to overturn the popular understanding of those difficult years. And thus it’s important for progressives to challenge them when they are so dangerously wrong. Thanks to Jonathan Chait for firing back with facts, logic, and a compelling narrative of what really happened in America so long ago.

You’d have to say that the atmosphere on and immediately after November 4, 2008, was about as different as you can get from that of November 7, 2000, particularly for Democrats. The latter produced an enduring testament to the perfidious effects of malevolent and incompetent electoral administraton, while the former represented a reasonably decisive choice by an energized citizenry.
But according to a major new study by a consortium of university researchers, nearly as many people had trouble exercising their right to vote last year as in 2000:

Four million to five million voters did not cast a ballot in the 2008 presidential election because they encountered registration problems or failed to receive absentee ballots, which is roughly the same number of voters who encountered such problems in the 2000 election, according to an academic study to be presented to the Senate Rules Committee on Wednesday.
An additional two million to four million registered voters — or 1 percent to 2 percent of the eligible electorate — were “discouraged” from voting due to administrative hassles, like long lines and voter identification requirements, the study found.

The study did indicate that voting technology problems had significantly improved since 2000, mainly due to the abandonment of punch-card ballots and lever machines. But obstacles to the registration of eligible voters and the maintenance of accurate voter registration records may have actually gotten worse:

“Registration issues were for 2008 what machine problems were for the 2000 election,” said Stephen Ansolabehere, a political science professor at Harvard and the study’s lead author.
State and local election officials have had a difficult time keeping voter registration lists current as voters move, change names or become inactive. Updating voter profiles in these lists is estimated to cost about a third of local election offices’ budgets, the report said. Verifying the authenticity of voter registrations by checking the information with other databases is also a burden and has led to people being removed incorrectly.

Registration problems, of course, were a more hidden factor in past elections. Even in 2000, it’s reasonably clear that a screwed-up “purge” of supposed ex-felons by Florida election officials cost Al Gore as many votes as the vastly more famous ballot irregularities and aborted recounts.
Will the latest evidence of a broken electoral system finally motivate Congress to take effective steps to set true national standards for voter registration and other election procedures? Probably not, since memories of 2000 have faded. But the strong Democratic majorities in Congress mean that longstanding Republican efforts to restrict the franchise should no longer stand in the way of election reform, and the costs involved don’t look very daunting at a time of near-trillion-dollar legislative packages.
Let’s hope the new study lights a few fires of outrage in Washington, and that anyone who cares about fair elections works to fan the flames.

John F. Wasik’s commentary, “No Reason to Demonize U.S. Single-Payer Health” in today’s edition of Bloomberg.com offers a convincing argument that the most promising form of health care reform has been wrongly taken off the table by both the Obama administration and the mainstream media. On Obama’s strategy:

If President Barack Obama wants real change in American health care, he will have to get over the fear of even mentioning single-payer concepts. At his health-care summit last week, only the threat of a demonstration garnered late invitations for Oliver Fein and Congressman John Conyers, two leading proponents of the single-payer plan.
…Obama has said he would keep an open mind on health-care solutions. Yet when asked on March 5 about why he was against single-payer medicine, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs replied: “The president doesn’t believe that’s the best way to achieve the goal of cutting costs and increasing access.”

Wasik supports Rep. John Conyers’ National Health Insurance Act, which has 93 co-sponsors in the House of Reps, and he makes a strong case for the economics behind the plan.
Obama may see single-payer health care reform as a longer-range goal to be achieved in stages. Polls indicate that despite widespread discontent about the current health care system and strong support for single-payer reform, millions of Americans want to keep their current insurance coverage. In a Gallup Poll conducted 11/13-16, for example, 26 percent of respondents said their current coverage was “excellent” and another 41 percent said it was “good.” Obama’s reform team may have concluded that angering them at this stage may imperil reforms that could improve coverage for millions more.
Wasik is dead right however, about the mainstream media’s “sheepish” failure to give single-payer reform a fair hearing. From the Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting study he cites:

Single-payer–a model in which healthcare delivery would remain largely private, but would be paid for by a single federal health insurance fund (much like Medicare provides for seniors, and comparable to Canada’s current system)–polls well with the public, who preferred it two-to-one over a privatized system in a recent survey (New York Times/CBS, 1/11-15/09). But a media consumer in the week leading up to the summit was more likely to read about single-payer from the hostile perspective of conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer than see an op-ed by a single-payer advocate in a major U.S. newspaper.
Over the past week, hundreds of stories in major newspapers and on NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, NPR and PBS’s NewsHour With Jim Lehrer mentioned healthcare reform, according to a search of the Nexis database (2/25/09-3/4/09). Yet all but 18 of these stories made no mention of “single-payer” (or synonyms commonly used by its proponents, such as “Medicare for all,” or the proposed single-payer bill, H.R. 676), and only five included the views of advocates of single-payer–none of which appeared on television.
Of a total of 10 newspaper columns FAIR found that mentioned single-payer, Krauthammer’s syndicated column critical of the concept, published in the Washington Post (2/27/09) and reprinted in four other daily newspapers, accounted for five instances. Only three columns in the study period advocated for a single-payer system (San Diego Union-Tribune, 2/26/09; Boston Globe, 3/1/09; St. Petersburg Times, 3/3/09).
The FAIR study turned up only three mentions of single-payer on the TV outlets surveyed, and two of those references were by TV guests who expressed strong disapproval of it: conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks (NewsHour, 2/27/09) and Republican congressman Darrell Issa (MSNBC’s Hardball, 2/26/09).

And that may be the biggest problem for single-payer advocates — opening up the discussion. The campaign to stigmatize single payer reform as “creeping socialism” is well-underway, and the fear-mongers are ascendant. For now, it’s up to the progressive blogosphere to push the idea on to the front pages and nightly news programs.
Single-payer advocates argue that presidential leadership ought to be about forging consensus, not searching for it and Obama’s best shot at comprehensive health care reform has to be taken sooner, rather than later, while his approval ratings are still high. Yet, Obama’s strategy choices and timing have been pretty good so far. Still, opening up the discussion to include single-payer reform might help make his current proposals more acceptable to moderates. It’s hard to see much of an upside to taking single-payer totally off the table.

Greg Sargent’s Plum Line blog has some great news — the launching of “Progressive Media,” a new activist “war room” focused on pushing the Obama Administration’s agenda and message du jour. Progressive Media will be based at the Center for American Progress and will be staffed by a “nearly a dozen” activists. Sargent explains:

The Democratic operatives running the project are already holding a daily early morning call with dozens of operatives from liberal groups — labor, health care, the environment — to coordinate messaging and to deliver usable talking points for the day, according to liberal operative Jennifer Palmieri, who’s the project’s communications director.
The new war room — which is called Progressive Media — represents a serious ratcheting up of efforts to present a united liberal front in the coming policy wars. The goal of the war room will be to do hard-hitting research that boils down complex policy questions into usable talking points and narratives that play well in the media and build public support for the White House’s policy goals.
“We’re trying to break policy down into digestible bits that mean something to people,” Palmieri says, citing as an example an analysis the group did finding that 14,000 people a day are losing health care.

Progressive Media is a joint project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund and Media Matters for America Action Network and will be headed up by Tara McGuinness, an anti-war activist and former aide to Sen. John Kerry.

When Obama came before Congress to deliver a prime-time, nationally-televised address, he made a point to note that the White House had launched a new website to track the impact of the economic recovery package. He created recovery.gov, he said, “so that every American can find out how and where their money is being spent.”
Last week, the Obama administration unveiled a three-color logo that will be used to identify all the projects across the country funded by the economic recovery bill. The only thing written on image are the words, “recovery.gov,” and the logo is now featured prominently on the recovery website.
“These emblems are symbols of our commitment to you, the American people — a commitment to investing your tax dollars wisely, to put Americans to work doing the work that needs to be done,” Obama said. “So when you see them on projects that your tax dollars made possible, let it be a reminder that our government — your government — is doing its part to put the economy back on the road of recovery.”
Of course, the website and the logo are more than a symbol of commitment — both are instantly recognizable as an extension of the greater Obama brand.
During the campaign, the Obama organization made a concerted effort to cultivate that brand. By election day, the rising sun logo was ubiquitous, the whole world knew that Barack Obama stood for hope and change, and anything printed in the Gotham font was associated with the campaign.
Even the Shepard Fairey poster — an iconic image that the Obama organization did not create — was rolled into the broader cultural phenomenon.
The Obama brand is defined by three things:
It manages to be both forward-looking and seeped in history.The recovery logo is a perfect example — but for the web address, there is nothing about it that would seem out of place in a New Deal program. The Fairey image is deeply nostalgic, but it uses the Gotham font, which was created in 2000.
It’s deeply tied to the web — every offline program has an online component. As the official transition began, for instance, Obama was represented online with Change.gov. The moment Obama was sworn in as president, his staffers launched a new version of WhiteHouse.gov which fit the brand.
It is connected directly to real people. During the campaign, supporters were invited to join MyBarackObama — to set their own fundraising goals, discuss their own priorities for the country, and bring their friends and family into the effort. During the transition, citizens were invited to apply for positions in the government, to weigh in on policy goals, and to offer their vision for the new administration. Now, with the recovery, people are invited to see their tax dollars at work and to hold the government accountable for this spending.
Barack Obama, as an individual, is not the brand. He is its most powerful symbol and its strongest advocate. But the brand is larger than even the president. It is both an argument about what government should be and a movement to make that vision reality.
On Monday afternoon, John Dickerson — a political writer for Slate — posted a link in his Twitter feed. “A first for this WH?,” he wrote, “Emailing articles supportive of policy. How an administration acts like a campaign: http://bit.ly/12U1yt”
The Obama administration isn’t so much campaigning as it is continuing to advance the brand.

It’s reasonably safe to say that there are few vital issues on which the United States Supreme Court has been so consistently inconsistent of late than in the area of so-called “racial gerrymandering”–the consideration, in pursuit of federal voting rights laws, of racial data in considering congressional and state legislative districting schemes.
Yesterday’s 5-4 SCOTUS decision on a North Carolina case (Bartlett v. Strickland) continues that ignoble tradition of Supreme confusion. In a majority opinion written by confusion-meister Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Court held that the federal Voting Rights Act in no circumstances dictates adoption of districts in which minority voters represent less than a majority of the electorate. This directly affects the previous practice (particularly during the last decennial redistricting round) of promoting on VRA grounds so-called “crossover” or “minority-influence” districts where candidates favored by minority voters had a good chance of winning by putting together a biracial coalition composed of most minorities and some whites–typically in places where minority voters represented somewhere between 40% and 50% of the electorate.
This means the only VRA-required districts henceforth will be those where minority voters are in an actual majority. The effect, as Justice Souter observed in his dissent, may well be to encourage “packing” of minority voters into some districts, enabling the “bleaching” of others. And the consequences of that approach, as we learned during the 1991-92 redistricting cycle, is often to significantly reduce Democratic representation, and (in the South at least) virtually eliminate white Democratic legislators and Congressmen who rely on robust minority voting.
In other words, if you don’t want to get into all the legal complexities, yesterday’s decision could be bad news for the Democratic Party, and for the biracial coalitions that the Democratic Party so often depends on for success. Indeed, if, as expected, the election of an African-American president heralds a growing willingness of white voters to cross racial lines (as black voters, of course, have so often had to do), reducing those “crossover” districts could reduce the number of minority candidates in office–a rather perverse outcome given the overriding purpose of the Voting Rights Act.
It’s important not to overstate the immediate impact of this decision, however: it only affects redistricting decisions made in order to comply with the VRA ban on “dilution” of minority voting rights. States are perfectly free to draw up maps identical to those at issue in North Carolina, but not as a matter of VRA compliance (to get technical about it, the district in question ostensibly violated a state law against districts that subdivided counties; the Court simply ruled that the VRA didn’t apply, and thus didn’t override that state law). But states, particularly in the South, where Republicans control the redistricting process are quite likely to go back to the “packing” and “bleaching” practices of the recent past in response to this decision.
(Another complication is that the ruling only directly applied to lawsuits under the VRA, not to the “preclearance” requirement that most southern states and a few areas outside the South get Justice Department approval for redistricting maps. But it’s highly likely that a subsequent decision will extend the same logic to that process).
The Democratic-controlled Congress could, of course, moot the whole issue by amending the VRA to make it clear that “crossover” districts are favored; that’s exactly what Justice Ginsberg suggested it do in her own dissent in Bartlett. But Kennedy’s opinion hinted that such a construction of minority voting rights might raise constitutional problems under the Equal Protection Clause (another irony, given the origins of that Clause as a basis for protecting African-American rights).
In the end, the only sure remedy for Bartlett is for Democrats to win as many governorships and legislative chambers as possible in 2010, particularly in states with large minority populations.

To put this campaign into context, for a moment just imagine the following scenario. Suppose that John McCain had been elected president last November and by this point in time,

1. A minor Democratic presidential candidate had directly accused him of being a member of a secret Nazi organization. A second Democratic presidential candidate said Hitler and Mussolini would approve his policies.
2. A significant liberal journal of opinion had said that McCain was following Hitler’s political strategy and quoted Hitler to prove it.
3. The leading liberal commentators in the New York Times and Washington Post wrote commentaries about McCain’s program using political expressions with absolutely clear and unmistakable connotations of fascism (e.g. “Aryan superiority”, “racial purity”, “national culture” etc.),

“Why would Obama inflict these destructive policies while the economy is collapsing? Simple. Each step strengthens the role of government in people’s lives…That’s exactly what Lenin sought to do. In a cheery volume called State and Revolution, for example, Lenin explains how:

The dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the organization of the vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of suppressing the oppressors, cannot result merely in an expansion of democracy….the dictatorship of the proletariat imposes a series of restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists.

Lenin, too, wished to “spread the wealth around.” And Obama, like Lenin, has been perfectly frank in recommending that we need to go beyond the “merely formal” rights enunciated in the Constitution in order to “bring about redistributive change” in society.

3. The leading conservative commentators in The New York Times and The Washington Post use buzzwords that any political science graduate or well-read person can recognize as directly rooted in classical Marxist and socialist theory.

Charles Krauthammer describes Obama’s “big bang agenda to federalize or socialize” the “commanding heights of the post industrial economy” and calls it the “most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime.”
Michael Gerson calls the budget “ideologically ambitious, politically ruthless and radical to its core…This is not merely the rejection of “trickle-down economics,” it is a weakening of the theoretical basis for capitalism — that free individuals are generally more rational and efficient in making investment decisions than are government planners”
David Brooks (who has since stepped back from this approach) says America [is] “skeptical of top-down planning” and “has never been a society riven by class resentment.”Obama’s administration, on the other hand, is: “swept up in its own revolutionary fervor”, “caught up in the self-flattering belief that history has called upon it”, is “a social-engineering experiment that is entirely new”, “expands state intervention”, is “predicated on a class divide”

Notice the roundabout way that this process works. On the one hand the columnists can argue with technical accuracy that they are not directly calling Obama a socialist or Marxist-Leninist — and from one point of view they are quite right. The quite evident purpose of their attacks are to not to smear Obama’s personal reputation but rather to demonize the basic ideas of progressive taxation and a robust public sector as policies that should be outside the pale of civilized discourse – ideas that can only be justified by un-American ideologies.
But at the same time, their comments unavoidably and unmistakably tend to imply and reinforce the more extreme accusations. With Rush Limbaugh bellowing that Obama is a “socialist” and Huckabee, Kimball and Keyes calling him a “Leninist” and a “communist”, it is simply impossible not to recognize that politically loaded terms of the kind the leading conservative columnists are using do seem to suggest some degree of sympathy for more extremist claims. The result is that the extremists feel a sense of partial “wink and a nudge” vindication while moderates and middle of the road voters perceive a kind of broad conservative consensus that Obama and his advisors actually are following a secret radical program to which they do not publically admit.
David Brooks realized that his column had contributed to this kind of unacceptable innuendo and, to his very real and substantial credit, the day after his initial column wrote a follow-up piece in which he carefully reformulated his position. As he said:

I had conversations with four senior members of the administration and in the interest of fairness, I thought I’d share their arguments with you today.
In the first place, they do not see themselves as a group of liberal crusaders. They see themselves as pragmatists who inherited a government and an economy that have been thrown out of whack. The budget, they continue, isn’t some grand transformation of America. It raises taxes on energy and offsets them with tax cuts for the middle class. It raises taxes on the rich to a level slightly above where they were in the Clinton years and then uses the money as a down payment on health care reform. That’s what the budget does. It’s not the Russian Revolution.
…I didn’t finish these conversations feeling chastened exactly. ..I’m still convinced the administration is trying to do too much too fast and that the hasty planning and execution of these complex policies will lead to untold problems down the road.
Nonetheless, the White House made a case that was sophisticated and fact-based. These people know how to lead a discussion and set a tone of friendly cooperation. I’m more optimistic that if Senate moderates can get their act together and come up with their own proactive plan, they can help shape a budget that allays their anxieties while meeting the president’s goals.

You should read the whole column. It distinguishes quite well between legitimate conservative disagreements over policy on the one hand and what is simply unjustified innuendo on the other.
Other conservative commentators like Krauthammer and Gerson don’t necessarily have to agree with Brooks’ quite dramatic re-evaluation of his position. But they owe it to their readers to display a basic level of personal intellectual honesty.
Here is the acid test: if they honestly think Barack Obama, along with Larry Summers and Obama’s other advisors are actually using Marxist or socialist doctrine to guide their thinking, they should say so, and provide support for their position. If they don’t really believe that this is true they should stop lending “a wink and a nudge” support to conservative extremists who make those accusations by using politically loaded terms that unavoidably suggest that they believe such accusations might have some element of truth.
That crosses the line from policy disagreement to character assassination and it doesn’t discredit Obama. It discredits them.
And, in addition, it’s bad for America.