Rivals use scare tactics in bid to stop the Obama march

• Republicans brand Democratic candidate a ‘socialist’ seeking to cause class warfare

Barack Obama is a socialist? That is what John McCain camp would like Americans to believe.

Trailing badly in the polls, Obama-the-socialist is the relentless message the campaign is hammering since last week.

A Republican Senator from Florida called Mel Martinez has gone a step further to insinuate that Obama wants to turn the USA into a communist Cuba.

A bemused Obama has pointed at the implausibility of all this by wondering how he would have attracted to his economic advisory team a guy like Warren Buffet, the quintessential entrepreneur capitalist.

By some measurements, Buffet is even richer than Bill Gates.

The whole socialist thing arises from a grotesque twisting of Obama’s economic plan. For some strange reason, the word taxation deeply riles Americans.

Republicans traditionally campaign on a platform of low taxation, and McCain is doing the same almost to the point of saying he won’t tax anybody.

Obama is carefully saying he will not raise additional taxes on the working and middle classes except on the super-rich.

The socialist theme has been intertwined with that of Joe the Plumber, who has become a running metaphor for the McCain campaign ever since a plumber from Ohio called Joe Wurzelbacher complained to Obama about his plans to tax those earning beyond $250,000 annually.

Obama’s answer that he intended to “spread the wealth” to the  working class and the middle class is now being caricatured by the Republicans to mean he is talking the language of socialist redistribution.

Tax plan

Of course, Obama’s tax plan, which has been prepared with input from luminaries like former Federal Reserve Board (or Central Bank) chairman Paul Volcker, is more complex and farther from socialism than this caricature makes it to be.

It involves a sophisticated mix of tax credits for small businesses and relief for the middle class, where most Americans claim to be.

It is part of an overall economic plan that lays out universal health care for all Americans, a proposal which has attracted the support of Hillary Clinton more than anything else on the Obama platform.

America is perhaps the only developed country without a comprehensive medical insurance for every citizen.

Like much else in this presidential campaign, everything the Republicans are saying is coded.

What essentially they mean when accusing Obama of wanting to “take money away from hard-working Americans” is that he intends to pour largesse only to those on welfare, who are primarily poor African-Americans. African-Americans, together with the youth of all races, form the most fervent segments of Obama’s support base.

One of the best responses to the Republican scare tactics about Obama’s tax intentions was given by former Secretary of State Colin Powell when endorsing Obama last week.