"The president says he’s not a socialist, and the country’s most outspoken socialists heartily agree. Indeed, the only people who seem to think Obama displays even the slightest social democratic tendency are those who imagine that the very mention of the word socialism' should inspire a reaction like that of a vampire confronted with the Host."
This article is adapted from The “S” Word: A Short History of an American Tradition… Socialism, published in March by Verso.
"Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy were not socialists. But the nation benefited from their borrowing of socialist and social democratic ideas. Barack Obama is certainly not a socialist. But he, and the nation he leads, would be well served by a similar borrowing from the people who once imagined Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the War on Poverty."
http://www.thenation.com/article/159929/how-socialists-built-america