The GOP playbook since the New Deal has been to label pretty much every Democratic presidential candidate a "socialist," no matter how ridiculous the charge. /1
I'll remind everybody that President Ronald Reagan in 1988 called the centrist Dukakis/Bentsen ticket as "far-out left" and "liberal, liberal, liberal." /2
upi.com/Archives/1988/…
In 1994, Jeffrey Hart called Bill Clinton both a "liberal thug" and a "socialist." /3
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In 1996, a letter writer to the Caspar Star-Tribune said, in reference to Bill Clinton, that "a liberal is nothing more than a socialist."/4
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Another letter writer in 1992 said that Bill and Hillary Clinton were "lifelong and tireless socialist ideologues" who "must be stopped before they push us into total socialism."/5
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In spite of this history, there tends to be surprise when the charge is (very predictably) revived. For example, this 2012 article expressed surprise about the GOP's "new boogeyman" of calling Obama a "socialist."/6 newspapers.com/clip/28639872/…
In my book FREE ENTERPRISE, I show how central the freedom/socialism binary was to the critics of the New Deal and and how often they conflating the latter with New Deal liberalism./7
yalebooks.yale.edu/book/978030023…
Nixon was already reproducing a tried-and-true formula in 1949 when he framed his forthcoming Senate campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas as a "choice between freedom and state socialism" and denounced the Fair Deal as "the same old socialist boloney."/8
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