Barack Obama: I Am Not A Socialist

In a Univision interview, President Barack Obama claimed that his policies are closer to those of a 1980s-vintage moderate Republican rather than a socialist.

It should be noted that Spanish-language network Univision continues to be the only major news outlet willing to ask the Democrat president any hard questions.

In October, the network pressed Obama on the Fast and Furious scandal and also aired an investigate report into the government program that resulted in the murder of hundreds of Mexican citizens and US Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry (and also reportedly ICE Agent Jaime Zapata).

Alina Mayo Azze of Noticias Univision 23 in Miami, expressing the concerns of Cuban-Americans and Venezuelans, asked the president on Thursday whether he favors a socialist rather than a capitalist model for the US.

According to Politico, this is how the president responded:

“I don’t know that there are a lot of Cubans or Venezuelans, Americans who believe that. The truth of the matter is that my policies are so mainstream that if I had set the same policies that I had back in the 1980s, I would be considered a moderate Republican. I mean, what I believe in is a tax system that is fair. I don’t think government can solve every problem. I think that we should make sure that we’re helping young people go to school. We should make sure that our government is building good roads and bridges and hospitals and airports so that we have a good infrastructure. I do believe that it makes sense that everyone in America, as rich as this country is, shouldn’t go bankrupt because someone gets sick, so the things I believe in are essentially the same things your viewers believe in.”

It seems a stretch that after spending much of his presidency bashing Republicans, the president — who has no private sector business experience — claims to find common ground with moderates in that party from the Reagan era. Also, when you consider the federal government bureaucracy taking over or substantially intervening in the health insurance system, car companies, banking, student loans, along with giveaways to politically favored corporations or big labor unions, executive orders that do an end-run around Congress, plus the runaway spending and thousands upon thousand of pages of new regulations, it’s a challenge to find a connection between Obama’s current policies and even so-called moderate or mainstream Republicanism. This is the same president who admitted that he wanted to spread the wealth around and insisted that entrepreneurs shouldn’t get the credit for building their businesses. Such policies may be reflective of contemporary liberalism rather than socialism, however.

It’s certainly true that Republicans under President G.W. Bush failed in many ways to abide by their small-government principles.

That being said, do you think Barack Obama’s policies are mainstream?