The Scariest Socialist: Obama or Bush?

Dick Morris is a fantastic writer and an incredibly insightful observer of the American political scene — most of the time. Just not this time. I am referring to a sales pitch that Morris has been making for Nicholas Vardy’s Global Stock Investor newsletter.

Morris writes: “If Barack Obama wins this election, one thing is certain … he will preside over the largest expansion of the government’s role in the economy since the 1930s. This ‘New New Deal,’ as some Democrats are already calling it, may well have the same result as the original one: to turn a sharp, painful recession into a long Depression.”

Fair enough. Traditional Republicans and Democrats have different worldviews when it comes to the tax code, social priorities and the role of government in general. So raising generic, off-the-shelf concerns about how a President Obama might “redistribute” the hard-earned money of the average American worker is all quite acceptable — even expected — during a heated presidential race.

But in this particular case, Morris demonstrates a major blind spot in his analysis. Obama cannot possibly “preside over the largest expansion of the government’s role in the economy” for one simple reason: George Bush beat him to it.

In fact, with the recent hyperventilated Bush administration’s actions, prompted by the failures of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG and the like, an argument can easily be made that George Bush will go down as the greatest “socializer/centralizer” of the American economy in the history of the American presidency.

To his credit, Morris fully discloses the fact that he receives a percentage of each newsletter subscription sold, but his statement/sales pitch, and the similarly ineffectual “Obama=Scary Socialist” theme used by John McCain and Sarah Palin toward the end of the campaign, rings pretty hollow given the Bush administration’s recent “tweaks” to the American free-enterprise system.

Look, let’s face it. It has always been uphill for McCain. Iraq stopped being the topic and Hillary Clinton wasn’t the Democratic nominee. But the last nail in the coffin probably came the minute that President Bush dispatched his Treasury secretary to Capitol Hill to inform congressional leaders that the financial sky was falling and that Bush’s centralized “one-size-fits-all” $700 billion fix was the only game in town.