Earth to GOP: Obama's No Socialist

Horrified by President Obama's stimulus plan, conservatives are calling him a European-style socialist—when in fact he's all-American, Jacob Weisberg writes in Newsweek. Obama envisions “cradle-to-grave opportunity, as opposed to the European model of cradle-to-grave security,” writes Weisberg, who explains that Obama’s plans to tackle hot issues like health care and climate change are all market-based.

Obama may be throwing borrowed money at the economy, but he's planning to trim Medicare and Social Security; he may be planning to fight global warming, but with a cap-and-trade system—not regulations. Obama knows that “the European model of social democracy would be unlikely to find root here, even if the president favored it,” Weisberg argues. “Obama gets that we want government to fix the free market, not take its place.”
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