What if they gave a socialist party and nobody cared?

The big news in the world of conservative publishing today is Stanley Kurtz’s Radical-in-Chief. It’s not actually out yet — that will happen on October 19 — but you can pre-order at the link I provided.  According to the press release, the book proves completely that Obama, despite his denials, is in fact a socialist, and not just a run of the mill “liberal Democrat” or a “progressive”:

Part biography, part history, part detective story, RADICAL-IN-CHIEF reveals the carefully hidden tale of Barack Obama’s political past. Stanley Kurtz, whose research helped inject the Bill Ayers and ACORN issues into the 2008 presidential campaign, presents the results of more than two years of digging into President Obama’s radical political world. The book is filled with previously unknown information about the president’s past, tied together by a bold argument about what Obama’s deepest political convictions really are.

RADICAL-IN-CHIEF marshals a wide array of never-before-seen evidence to establish that the president of the United States is indeed a socialist. Tracing an unbroken thread of socialist activities and political partnerships, from Obama’s youth through his community organizing days and beyond, the book confirms that the president’s harshest critics have been right about his socialism all along.

RADICAL-IN-CHIEF also exposes the truth about community organizers–the socialist beliefs they hold and hide, and how they trained and groomed a president. Obama’s community organizer colleagues had a strategy for slowly and stealthily turning the United States into a socialist nation. The Obama administration is carrying out that strategy today.

This book will forever change our national debate about who Barack Obama is.

For those of us who followed Stanley Kurtz’s writing in the run-up to the 2008 election, much of this is familiar stuff. Kurtz promises, however, that he has new research and revelations to bolster his already strong arguments about Obama’s political identity.  I have no doubt that the book will make for fascinating and informative reading.

The book’s October 19 release date is obviously timed to help educate voters in the lead-up to the November election.  I have a concern, however, one I’ve voiced before:  I’m pretty sure that the American public, indoctrinated for 40 years in the American public education system and the Ivy League universities, really doesn’t care about the word “socialist.”

While earlier generations of Americans understood the word to describe a political system that coincides with the diminution of personal and economic freedom, too many Americans hear the word and simply think of it as an alternative economic system.  They think Europe, with its pretty buildings and, until recently, high standard of living.

These same Americans do not think of the USSR and the Gulags, or the Nazis and the concentration camps, or the Norks and their concentration camps, or the Cubans and their political prisons, or the Chinese and their political slave labor.  All of those, Americans would say, were communist, which is different, never mind that it’s not.

I can already hear some of you saying right now that Americans are proving, with their hostility to the Obama/Democrat agenda, that they hate socialism.  But I’m talking semantics.  They’ll say they hate “Big Government,” or taxes, or government inefficiency, or too much government spending, but they will be utterly blase about “socialism.”  The word has lost its power.  The underlying concepts may bother Americans, but to say Obama is a socialist probably has as much meaning as to say he eats potatoes.

So while I think it’s fascinating that Kurtz can and will prove the ties that bind Obama to the hard Left, the fact is that, unless we can get Americans understand what that actually means, the book will be a nine day wonder that will not affect the ladies who rot their minds watching The View.