'Red Diaper Obama' by Steve

Donald Trump does have one genuine superpower: he makes people reveal who they truly are. John Kasich, for instance, spent years masquerading as a conservative lion from Ohio, only to unmask himself as a guy with the emotional fortitude of a parking meter and the electoral success of a participation trophy. He’s soft. He’s annoying. Did you know his dad was a postman? Just ask him. He campaigned for Biden with the zeal of a man who had just discovered avocado toast. He is not, however, a communist—and neither was the guy who actually won those elections by embarrassing margins while Kasich sulked in the Green Room.

Because somewhere between petty tweets and midterm meltdowns, a certain slice of the right convinced themselves that Barack Obama, a moderate Democrat who bailed out Wall Street and let billionaires accrue wealth at a record clip, was secretly the second coming of Mao. Obama: the thin-skinned “communist” who was so committed to the revolution that he oversaw a booming stock market, expanded domestic oil drilling, and never once tried to nationalize your podiatrist’s office or collectivize your lawn mower. If that’s a red revolution, then I’m a breakfast taco with a side of dialectical materialism. The smoking AK-47 of this cuckoo conspiracy is the 2012 Roanoke speech. “You didn’t build that!” The horror! The treason! The confiscation of small-business dreams! Except Obama was stating the uncontroversial fact that success relies on individual initiative and the public systems that allow commerce to function—roads, schools, the internet born from government research. He wasn’t dispatching a Politburo commissar to seize your bakery; he was noting that your delivery van drives on taxpayer-funded asphalt and your employees learned to read in public schools. If acknowledging that civilization requires teamwork makes you a communist, then Dwight D. Eisenhower is practically Stalin in a cardigan. The interstate system? Private contractors, public funds—a marriage older than your grandpa’s mortgage. The Hoover Dam? Built under Herbert Hoover, whose name is literally on the dam, and who was about as Red as a Wall Street ledger on bonus day.

NASA put a man on the moon using private aerospace firms, government funding, and capitalist lowest-bidders, a reality John Glenn famously joked about while hurtling through space. That isn’t Marxist collectivization; it’s subcontracting with better helmets. Even under Obama’s supposedly socialist reign, American education allowed people to opt out for private, parochial, or homeschool options. In a genuine communist state, the only choice is between State Elementary Number Four and a re-education camp with muddy potatoes and an inspiring poster of a tractor. Now, some aspiring candidate in Denver recently declared that “socialism is when the roads are paved and the fire trucks show up.” Bless her heart. But stretching “government exists” into “Marxist takeover” is like calling a mall cop the Gestapo because he asked you to stop skateboarding by the Auntie Anne’s.

The absurd punchline? Obama governed so far to the “left” that Jeff Bezos became the richest man on earth and corporate profits hit astronomical highs. If he was running a red revolution, he forgot to tell the capitalists, who treated his eight years like an extended Black Friday sale where the doorbuster was deregulation. So relax. The only thing genuinely red about Obama was the electoral map after he beat Mitt Romney—twice—and the Republican tears he collected in his retirement martini glass.

Editorial comments expressed in this column are the sole opinion of the writer