Contraceptives mandate already mandated

New contraceptives mandate doesn’t change much for DePaul

By Rima Thompson and Rachel Metea

Published: Monday, February 13, 2012 LINK

The Catholic Church is scrutinizing the Obama administration's new mandate requiring religious-based institutions to provide contraception for their employees, despite a new compromise announced Friday.

The Obama administration's mandate ignited a religious debate, with many Catholic institutions crying out that the new mandate was a breach of their religious freedom. With the mandate's new changes, religious organizations will not have to pay for or directly provide contraceptive services, President Obama announced Friday.

Along with several other Catholic universities, DePaul University, which is the nation's largest Catholic university, already offers contraceptives in both its fully insured HMO plan and its self-insured PPO plan.

"The heart of it is pretty simple," DePaul University President Father Dennis Holtschneider said in an email to The DePaulia. "DePaul fully supports the bishops' stance, but has offered [contraceptive] benefits ever since both Illinois and the Federal government required us to do so several years ago."

Catholic and other religious-based institutions across Illinois have historically been able to avoid a state mandate requirement to include contraception in employees' health benefits.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops released a statement late Friday expressing their opposition to the new compromise. The Bishops oppose the new mandate saying that the rule forces private health plans to cover sterilization and contraception at "the stroke of a bureaucrat's pen". The Bishops argue that mandated preventative services should not include birth control and contraceptives because pregnancy is not a disease.

The mandate would have forced religiously affiliated institutions—such as DePaul University—to provide access to birth control for women employees unless they can show reason for qualifying for the exemption, they must comply with the new law by August 2013. Doctors who do not agree with contraceptives will not be forced to prescribe birth control. Both the new and old mandates exclude churches and only include religiously affiliated institutions.

"Under the rule, women will still have access to free preventive care that includes contraceptives … no matter where they work, so that core principle remains," Obama said in his announcement. "But, if a women's place of work is a charity or a hospital that has a religious objection to provide contraceptive services as part of their health plan, the insurance company, not the hospital, not the charity, will be required to reach out and offer the woman contraceptive care free of charge, without co-pays and without hassles."

Twelve years ago, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) ruled that the exclusion of contraceptives from health insurance coverage is discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Several years later, DePaul University added birth control to its health insurance coverage after complaints from the EEOC.

DePaul University's official statement expressed disappointment in the Obama administration's decision not to include religious educational institutions under the exemption umbrella.

"The University's position on this issue is fully aligned with that of the Catholic Health Association, which recently expressed its disappointment ‘that the definition of a religious employer was not broadened' to encompass Catholic educational and other institutions in the new federal regulations for health insurance plans," said RobinFlorzak, DePaul's interim assistant vice president of public relations and communications.

DePaul University released a new statement after the Friday amendment saying, "DePaul is encouraged by the administration's willingness to forge a compromise, but it would be premature to discuss it further until the university has had time to fully review the administration's new approach."

Nearly half of Americans said religiously affiliated colleges and hospitals should be required to provide their employees with contraceptives or birth control through health care plans at no cost, according to a survey released last week by the Public Religion Research Institute. According to the survey, 52 percent of Catholics say religiously affiliated colleges and hospitals should have to provide coverage that includes contraception.

According to a study released last April by the Guttmacher Institute, 99 percent of women have used a contraceptive method other than family planning. Similarly, 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women have used contraceptive methods.

The announcement made Jan. 20 by Department of Health and Human Services Secretary, Kathleen Sibelius, has sent media personnel from Catholic and other religious-based institutions behind closed doors scrambling to generate a politically correct statement for the press.

Contraception was already partially covered through health plans of religiously affiliated institutions in 28 states. Obama's health care law changes that coverage from partial to full.

Annie Hughes, Loyola University of Chicago's marketing and communications associate wrote a statement about the original ruling and said: "Loyola University Chicago joins the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities … in expressing our profound disappointment in the recently announced Department of Health and Human Services ruling. The ruling narrowly defines the "religious employer" exemption and therefore requires all faith-based hospitals, universities, and social service agencies to cover contraceptive, sterilization, and abortifacient products and services in their employee and student-health plans that are contrary to the religious commitments of our institutions."

Many of these religious officials, who oppose the new health care law, believe that their organizations should have the freedom to follow their beliefs, and that it is wrong for the Obama administration to mandate a law that goes against those beliefs.

"The key ruling that we take issue with is that the mandate, without a broader religious employer exception, constitutes an unprecedented attack on the religious liberty of Catholic and other religious institutions who have served the common good of our country since its founding, a founding based upon the very notion of religious freedom now at stake," said Hughes.

Many Catholic universities such as Georgetown, Loyola University Chicago and Fordham University will provide contraceptives for medical reasons and not for birth control.

But, the facts presented by the Obama administration based on the Institute of Medicine's recommendation leaves little hope that such an exemption will be granted to these institutions. According to the Institute of Medicine, one in two pregnancies are unplanned and four in 10 of those pregnancies may lead to abortions.

Still, Catholic and other religious institutions continue to argue that birth control goes against the core of their principles.

"The mandate rests upon an excessively narrow definition of "religious employer" that excludes religious hospitals, social service agencies, and universities from its definition. It undermines our ability to do our shared work with the requisite religious freedom protected by law," Hughes said.

Obama officials have maintained that the objective of the law is not to offend or infringe upon anyone's religious beliefs. It is intended to protect the rights of female employees who work for religious affiliated institutions.

As the debate continues, some religious leaders are encouraging their parishioners to voice their opinions to their lawmakers, while others are putting their trust in the decisions of their institutions.

"I respect very much faith-based institutions' right to make decisions based upon their identities," said the DePaul University CDM and law school chaplain, Tom Judge. "I also respect DePaul's right to discern what is most consistent with our mission, as well."

"This misguided decision on the part of the Department of Health and Human Services would force our institution to violate well-known, well-established, and, until now, well-protected moral commitments," Hughes said. "In good conscience, we cannot abide by such a law as it stands. We are currently in conversation with our colleagues to plan further action toward correcting this erroneous decision."

"The employee health insurance plans include a prescription contraceptive benefit, in compliance with state and federal law," Florzak said. "An optional insurance plan that covers such benefits is available to students, also due to previously established state and federal requirements."

According to Holtschneider, there are no conversations inside the university about changing DePaul's health coverage with regards to contraceptives. "Illinois law remains Illinois law," he said.

Romeny's not concerned

February 2, 2012

Romney Isn’t Concerned

By PAUL KRUGMAN LINK

If you’re an American down on your luck, Mitt Romney has a message for you: He doesn’t feel your pain. Earlier this week, Mr. Romney told a startled CNN interviewer, “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there.”

Faced with criticism, the candidate has claimed that he didn’t mean what he seemed to mean, and that his words were taken out of context. But he quite clearly did mean what he said. And the more context you give to his statement, the worse it gets.

First of all, just a few days ago, Mr. Romney was denying that the very programs he now says take care of the poor actually provide any significant help. On Jan. 22, he asserted that safety-net programs — yes, he specifically used that term — have “massive overhead,” and that because of the cost of a huge bureaucracy “very little of the money that’s actually needed by those that really need help, those that can’t care for themselves, actually reaches them.”

This claim, like much of what Mr. Romney says, was completely false: U.S. poverty programs have nothing like as much bureaucracy and overhead as, say, private health insurance companies. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has documented, between 90 percent and 99 percent of the dollars allocated to safety-net programs do, in fact, reach the beneficiaries. But the dishonesty of his initial claim aside, how could a candidate declare that safety-net programs do no good and declare only 10 days later that those programs take such good care of the poor that he feels no concern for their welfare?

Also, given this whopper about how safety-net programs actually work, how credible was Mr. Romney’s assertion, after expressing his lack of concern about the poor, that if the safety net needs a repair, “I’ll fix it”?

Now, the truth is that the safety net does need repair. It provides a lot of help to the poor, but not enough. Medicaid, for example, provides essential health care to millions of unlucky citizens, children especially, but many people still fall through the cracks: among Americans with annual incomes under $25,000, more than a quarter — 28.7 percent — don’t have any kind of health insurance. And, no, they can’t make up for that lack of coverage by going to emergency rooms.

Similarly, food aid programs help a lot, but one in six Americans living below the poverty line suffers from “low food security.” This is officially defined as involving situations in which “food intake was reduced at times during the year because [households] had insufficient money or other resources for food” — in other words, hunger.

So we do need to strengthen our safety net. Mr. Romney, however, wants to make the safety net weaker instead.

Specifically, the candidate has endorsed Representative Paul Ryan’s plan for drastic cuts in federal spending — with almost two-thirds of the proposed spending cuts coming at the expense of low-income Americans. To the extent that Mr. Romney has differentiated his position from the Ryan plan, it is in the direction of even harsher cuts for the poor; his Medicaid proposal appears to involve a 40 percent reduction in financing compared with current law.

So Mr. Romney’s position seems to be that we need not worry about the poor thanks to programs that he insists, falsely, don’t actually help the needy, and which he intends, in any case, to destroy.

Still, I believe Mr. Romney when he says he isn’t concerned about the poor. What I don’t believe is his assertion that he’s equally unconcerned about the rich, who are “doing fine.” After all, if that’s what he really feels, why does he propose showering them with money?

And we’re talking about a lot of money. According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, Mr. Romney’s tax plan would actually raise taxes on many lower-income Americans, while sharply cutting taxes at the top end. More than 80 percent of the tax cuts would go to people making more than $200,000 a year, almost half to those making more than $1 million a year, with the average member of the million-plus club getting a $145,000 tax break.

And these big tax breaks would create a big budget hole, increasing the deficit by $180 billion a year — and making those draconian cuts in safety-net programs necessary.

Which brings us back to Mr. Romney’s lack of concern. You can say this for the former Massachusetts governor and Bain Capital executive: He is opening up new frontiers in American politics. Even conservative politicians used to find it necessary to pretend that they cared about the poor. Remember “compassionate conservatism”? Mr. Romney has, however, done away with that pretense.

At this rate, we may soon have politicians who admit what has been obvious all along: that they don’t care about the middle class either, that they aren’t concerned about the lives of ordinary Americans, and never were.

Birth Control Rule was law under Bush

Most of Obama's "Controversial" Birth Control Rule Was Law During Bush Years

The right has freaked out over an Obama administration rule requiring employers to offer birth control to their employees. Most companies already had to do that.

By Nick Baumann on Wed. February 8, 2012 LINK

Pete Souza/The White House

President Barack Obama's decision to require most employers to cover birth control and insurers to offer it at no cost has created a firestorm of controversy. But the central mandate—that most employers have to cover preventative care for women—has been law for over a decade. This point has been completely lost in the current controversy, as Republican presidential candidates and social conservatives claim that Obama has launched a war on religious liberty and the Catholic Church.

Despite the longstanding precedent, "no one screamed" until now, said Sara Rosenbaum, a health law expert at George Washington University.

In December 2000, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled that companies that provided prescription drugs to their employees but didn't provide birth control were in violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prevents discrimination on the basis of sex. That opinion, which the George W. Bush administration did nothing to alter or withdraw when it took office the next month, is still in effect today—and because it relies on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, it applies to all employers with 15 or more employees. Employers that don't offer prescription coverage or don't offer insurance at all are exempt, because they treat men and women equally—but under the EEOC's interpretation of the law, you can't offer other preventative care coverage without offering birth control coverage, too.

"It was, we thought at the time, a fairly straightforward application of Title VII principles," a top former EEOC official who was involved in the decision told Mother Jones. "All of these plans covered Viagra immediately, without thinking, and they were still declining to cover prescription contraceptives. It's a little bit jaw-dropping to see what is going on now…There was some press at the time but we issued guidances that were far, far more controversial."

After the EEOC opinion was approved in 2000, reproductive rights groups and employees who wanted birth control access sued employers that refused to comply. The next year, in Erickson v. Bartell Drug Co., a federal court agreed with the EEOC's reasoning. Reproductive rights groups and others used that decision as leverage to force other companies to settle lawsuits and agree to change their insurance plans to include birth control. Some subsequent court decisions echoed Erickson, and some went the other way, but the rule (absent a Supreme Court decision) remained, and over the following decade, the percentage of employer-based plans offering contraceptive coverage tripled to 90 percent.

"We have used [the EEOC ruling] many times in negotiating with various employers," says Judy Waxman, the vice president for health and reproductive rights at the National Women's Law Center. "It has been in active use all this time. [President Obama's] policy is only new in the sense that it covers employers with less than 15 employees and with no copay for the individual. The basic rule has been in place since 2000."

Not even religious employers were exempt from the impact of the EEOC decision. Although Title VII allows religious institutions to discriminate on religious grounds, it doesn't allow them to discriminate on the basis of sex—the kind of discrimination at issue in the EEOC ruling. DePaul University, the largest Roman Catholic university in America, added birth control coverage to its plans after receiving an EEOC complaint several years ago. (DePaul officials did not respond to a request for comment.)

As recently as last year, the EEOC was moderating a dispute between the administrators of Belmont Abbey, a Catholic institution in North Carolina, and several of its employees who had their birth control coverage withdrawn after administrators realized it was being offered. The Weekly Standard opined on the issue in 2009—more proof that religious employers were being asked to cover contraception far before the Obama administration issued its new rule on January 20 of this year.

"The current freakout," Judy Waxman says, is largely occurring because the EEOC policy "isn't as widely known…and it hasn't been uniformly enforced." But it's still unclear whether Obama's Health and Human Services department will enforce the new rule any more harshly than the old one. The administration has already given organizations a year-long grace period to comply. Asked to explain how the agency would make employers do what it wanted, an HHS official told Mother Jones that it would "enforce this the same way we enforce everything else in the law."

A rabbi on the liberal religious

What It Means to be A Liberal Person of Faith

Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie |

Dec 13, 2011

Huffington Post LINK

Again and again, and especially during the election season, we read in the media about "people of faith," "religious Americans" and "value voters" -- and what is meant, in almost all cases, are Americans who are conservative in both their religion and their politics. There is nothing wrong with being a conservative, of course, but we liberal people of faith like to point out that there are other kinds of believers in America. In fact, there are a lot of us.

What exactly does it mean to be a liberal person of faith?

It means to believe in God, to have deep religious convictions and to be offended whenever media voices pour scorn on religious people.

It means to draw on religious teachings and beliefs when making judgments about matters of public policy. But at the same time, it means to know that when we, as people of faith, make a public argument, we must ground our statements in reason and a language of morality that is accessible to everyone -- to people of different religions, for example, or of no religion. After all, we recognize that other believers have religious convictions different from our own, and in our diverse democracy, Americans need a common political discourse not dominated by exclusivist theology.

It means to understand that "person of faith" does not only mean the Religious Right; it is, in fact, an inclusive term, referring to both liberals and conservatives and to Christians and Jews of all persuasions, as well as to Muslims, Hindus and believers from other religious traditions.

It means to always bring a measure of humility to religious belief. In making our religious judgments, we liberal persons of faith draw on the sacred texts of our tradition, but we don't claim to have a direct line to heaven, and we aren't always sure that we know God's will.

It means being concerned about the poor and the needy, and giving a fair shake to all. When people talk about God and yet ignore justice, it feels downright wrong to us. When they cloak themselves in religion and ignore mercy, it strikes us as blasphemous.

It means to believe that sanctity exists in the commitment that gay couples make to each other. We recognize that more conservative religious people are likely to see this matter very differently, but we oppose, absolutely and unequivocally, unprincipled gay bashing and hateful rhetoric that fuels the hell-fires of anti-gay bigotry.

And it means that we share many of the concerns of conservative people of faith. Like them, we are concerned about the coarsening of culture that makes it difficult to raise honorable, decent children. Like them, we worry about trashy TV and the erosion of the family. And like them, we believe that the public interest does depend, at least in part, on private virtue -- even as we know that justice requires not only good individuals but also the actions of government.

And finally, it means that we welcome dialogue with our fellow citizens who have a more conservative religious viewpoint. It seems healthy to us for people of faith to talk about how our differing religious perspectives help us understand the issues of the day. After all, we have all put our trust in America, the most religiously diverse country in the world. And we all believe that tolerance is an American value. So let the dialogue begin.

Socialists wish Obama was a socialist

Why Obama's the Least Socialistic President in Modern History (And That's a Shame) By Richard (RJ) Eskow, AlterNet Posted on February 18, 2012, Printed on February 19, 2012 LINK The Republican presidential candidates keep calling Barack Obama a socialist. If they're trying to invoke the Red Menace like Republicans of past campaigns, they're a generation too late. Americans between the ages of 19 and 29 have no memory of the Cold War. Today they have a more positive impression of socialism than they do of capitalism. The word “socialism” can be applied to a range of economic models, from Cuban collectivism to the Western European social democracies that are the home of some of the world's most successful corporations. But until this election came along it had never been used to describe someone who expanded the private health insurance system, let a negligent company keep control of the cleanup for an environmental disaster it caused, offered to cut retirement and elder health benefits, and repeatedly insisted that the government should cut costs. This president is less socialistic than most of his predecessors, including many Republicans. The irony is that socialist-inspired policies are popular with Americans, including many Republicans, even if the label is not. Polls suggest that a more “socialist” Obama would also be a more popular candidate, and the same is true of his opponents. Socialisms The word “socialism” is used to describe a spectrum of possible economies ranging from the Scandinavian model, where government involvement co-exists with multinational corporations, to the more communistic Cuban model and the idealistic anarcho-syndicalism of the anti-Franco insurgents in the Spanish Civil War. The social democracy model emphasizes expanded public rights to social services and a more distributive tax base, but leaves ownership of production in capitalist hands. This form of socialism has had a major influence on the governments and economies of Italy, Great Britain, Germany, Sweden, and Finland. It hasn't interfered with the success of multinational corporations like Mercedes-Benz, Nokia, Deutschebank, Barclays Bank, or Ferrari. Socialist ideas have a long history in the United States. Socialist and left-leaning parties were the first to propose a number of ideas that are now considered core American ideals, including civil rights, antipoverty programs, Social Security and Medicare. The Pink Menace But socialism was once linked with the Soviet Union, America's nuclear foe, which gave it an aura of treachery and danger it no longer posseses. The Republicans who call Obama a socialist are using a GOP tactic that reached its zenith in Richard Nixon's 1950 Senate victory against Helen Gahagan Douglas. Nixon supporters handed out thousands of “Pink Sheet” flyers that year comparing his opponent's voting record to that of socialist-leaning New York City Representative Vito Marcantonio. Marcantonio ran on the American Labor Party ticket and belonged to several groups that were regarded as “red.” Douglas considered Nixon's actions thuggery, as did a number of other Americans in both parties. She called him as “a young man in a dark shirt,” which was an indirect allusion to the fascists the US had been fighting five years before. (Upon hearing her remark, Nixon displayed an odd unfamiliarity with human anatomy. “Why, I'll castrate her!” the future president said. He also described Douglas as “pink right down to her underwear.”) Douglas found it hard to believe these attacks could be effective, and some people think her delay in responding to them cost her the election. But they did, and this set the tone for the next six decades of GOP campaigns. Newtradamus Newt Gingrich was the first of the current crop of contenders to attack Obama with the socialist label, as political writer John Nichols reminded me in a recent interview. Gingrich published a book last year titled To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine. Gingrich's publisher called it a “dire warning for America,” which is “at risk for its very survival” after electing “the most liberal president ever.” Gingrich reacted to the GOP's 2010 electoral victories in his book by saying, “The American people rejected the secular-Socialist machine that had seized control of the Federal government.” In fact, one of the reasons Republicans really won in 2010 was because they ran a series of very effective ads around a so-called “Seniors' Bill of Rights” whose key proviso was a direct attack on “socialist” Obama's repeated attempts to negotiate entitlement cuts: “No cuts to Medicare to pay for another program,” the Republicans declared. “Zero.” Yes, these Republicans were defending one of our country's most socialistic, and most popular programs, while accusing their “socialist” opponent of trying to cut it. Gingrich's 2011 book waxes triumphant about recent conservative victories int Europe's three largest economies -- Germany, France and Great Britain. Within 18 months those governments' policies had plunged Europe into a deep recessionary spiral. He singles out the British election as a vote to “reverse years of socialist decay through through a dramatic, Thatcher-like policy of radically shrinking the public sector, slashing government spending, reducing welfare, and restoring public enterprise.” What he didn't say is that Great Britain is now struggling with setbacks in unemployment, wages and growth, and recently weathered a series of nationwide riots sparked by economic conditions. Gingrich was firm in his predictions for Obama in 2011. The president, said Gingrich, would embrace “card check” politics for unions and promote cap-and-trade to slow the ongoing destruction of our fragile ecosystem. Gingrich's predictions proved false as Obama quickly abandoned both initiatives. Nostradamus he isn't. But Gingrich, undeterred by reality, still insists that Obama is imposing a “radical,” “secular/socialist state” on the American people. Red Tide The socialist theme was quickly picked up by the other GOP candidates. “Obama's socialist policies are bankrupting America,” said a Rick Perry TV ad. Michele Bachmann concluded her Iowa campaign by declaring she wouldn't let Obama “implement socialism” in the United States. Rick Santorum accused Obama of not doing enough to fight “militant socialism” around the world (the first draft of his presentation used the phrase “godless socialism”), adding that Obama is a “radical.” Front-runner Mitt Romney was the lone holdout, the only candidate not to label the president with the S-word. But he couldn't hold out forever, especially since both his rivals and the press pressed him about it repeatedly. He tried to avoid the question when he was asked directly whether Obama was a socialist, but finally allowed that the president “takes his political inspiration from Europe and from the socialist democrats in Europe.” (Romney pointedly described Europe's “social democrats” as “socialist democrats” for maximum effect.) And despite this year's lofty declarations against personal attacks, John McCain wasn't above a little red-baiting himself in the final weeks of the 2008 campaign. "At least in Europe the socialist leaders who so admire my opponent are upfront about their objectives," he said then. "They use real numbers and honest language.” The Enemy Within In time-honored fashion, the red-baiters soon began to turn on one another. Gingrich described Romney as a “Massachusetts moderate” whose campaign was studying “European socialist ideas.” And a caller to Rush Limbaugh's program even accused Limbaugh, who is above all else a Republican Party operative, of supporting the “socialist” Romney. “If you're going to start throwing the 'socialism' term around there,” Limbaugh answered indignantly, “I'll tell you, these are times of tumult.” Now he tells us. Ron Paul's extreme libertarianism makes him, authentically, the least socialistic candidate in the race. Yet Paul was the only candidate who refused to call Obama a socialist. He's a “corporatist,” said Paul, an assessment with considerably more evidence to support it. Obama's Socialist Scorecard Is Barack Obama a radical socialist, a "corporatist," or something else? A friendly journalist describes him as a “pro-business populist,” and that's certainly been the posture he's tried to take. If “thin-skinned business leaders” ignore his rhetoric and “look at his proposals and record,” writes Jonathan Alter, “they might be pleasantly surprised.” Indeed. John Nichols is the author of a book titled The “S” Word: A Short History of an American Tradition … Socialism. When asked if Obama is a socialist he laughed and said, “Afraid not.” “In fact,” Nichols added, “Obama is one of the most un-socialistic presidents this country's had in the last 150 years.” “When Barack Obama was asked to reform the healthcare system,” Nichols said, “he rejected all of the models based on social democratic proposals, as well as their American 'single-payer' equivalent, and instead went for insurance reforms reforms that were initially proposed by the (conservative) Heritage Foundation.” (The United States is the only developed nation without a “socialized” healthcare system, and its costs are twice those of many comparable countries.) “There you see him rejecting social democratic ideas and going for a conservative model.” “Look at the Gulf oil spill,” Nichols added, “a real disaster for America and the world. President Obama could have taken the response that Franklin Roosevelt and, I would argue, Dwight D. Eisenhower would have taken. He could have said 'Here's a big corporation that's caused us a huge , disastrous problem, and we cannot trust them to address that problem because of their past and current activities. So we're going to nationalize this problem … control will be handed over to the Army Corps of Engineers and other agencies. Then we're going to assess this corporation for the cost of the cleanup.'” “That's a solution with a social democratic overlay,” said Nichols, “but also one that's very much rooted in the way this country's always done things. Obama didn't do that.” Red Dawn Ironically, a more “socialistic” agenda could improve Obama's popularity – even among Republicans! Polls taken during the health reform debate showed that 51 percent of Republican voters wanted a "public option" in the health bill that would allow them to purchase coverage from the "socialist" Medicare system. Even stronger majorities of voters overall supported the public option. But Obama never fought for it, and some reports indicated he had traded it away early on in return for a promise from the for-profit hospital industry that it would not resist the bill aggressively. Other polls have shown that overwhelming majorities of Republican voters, including Tea Party members, oppose cutting Social Security or Medicare in order to reduce the federal deficit. Yet Obama created a “Deficit Commission” and appointed as its co-chairs two politicians who were publicly in favor of doing just that, and he has continued to offer cuts of that nature as part of a "Grand Bargain" with Republican leaders in Congress. A "millionaire's tax" is also popular among Republican voters, who also joined with other Americans in wanting the government to act more decisively to create jobs. If the nation were governed by a referendum of Republican voters -- just Republicans -- it would be more "socialistic" than it has been under President Obama. Since these policies are supported even more strongly by Democrats and independents, a more “socialistic” Obama – one who rejected cuts to Medicare and Social Security, fought more aggressively for a “millionaires' tax,” pushed a public option, and backed a more aggressive jobs agenda – would be more popular with American voters across the political spectrum. Red Republicans It's proven popular with previous presidents from both parties. In fact, based on their policies, most Republican presidents of the last century were more “socialistic” than Barack Obama. Eisenhower built the federal highway system and presided over the IRS when the top marginal tax rate for high earners was 91 percent. Nixon proposed a minimum guaranteed income for all Americans, which he called a “negative income tax," without any Clinton-era preconditions like "workfare." It would have applied to all families with children, and passed Congress but failed in the Senate. Nixon also imposed wage and price controls in 1971to control inflation. These controls, while not considered traditionally “socialistic,” were a radical imposition of state control over the private-sector economy. Even Herbert Hoover, who presided over the Crash of 1929 and is often contrasted with FDR, described himself as a “progressive.” He expanded the civil service, proposed a Department of Education and a guaranteed pension for all Americans, enlarged the national park system, ended private oil leases on government land, and formed an antitrust division within the Justice Department. And, much as it irritates Republicans to be reminded of it, Ronald Reagan raised taxes 11 times. Obama has proposed a reasonable $476 billion program of infrastucture repair, but he's avoided the kinds of bold initiatives put forward by his Republican predecessors: No Hoover-like litany of progressive reforms, no major public projects like Eisenhower's highways, no Nixon-style negative income tax. And he certainly hasn't responded to our ongoing economic crisis with any state interventions on the scale of Nixon's wage and price controls. Socialism's Super Salesmen All this name-calling may not be helping the GOP, but there may be another surprise beneficiary: Socialism. The once-stigmatized ideology has become more acceptable since the fall of the Iron Curtain. The Pew Research Center reports that 31 percent of Americans have a favorable response to the term, while 61 percent respond negatively. The public's feelings about capitalism soured slightly in 2011, with approval/disapproval shifting from 52/37 to 50/40. What's much more striking is the fact that, for the first time, more young people think favorably of socialism than they do of capitalism. Forty-nine percent of young people aged 18-29 have a positive view of socialism, while 43 percent see it negatively. Twenty months ago those numbers were reversed, making this a dramatic shift in youth opinion. Which raises the question: Are today's Republican presidential candidates socialism's best salesmen? Of course, many factors could be driving young people's improving opinion of socialism. Youth unemployment is at record highs, and they can see that little is being done to change that. The Occupy movement has highlighted the ills of unfettered capitalism. But could they also be watching the comic-opera figures on the GOP debate stage and being drawn to anything that group dislikes? Nichols thinks so. “When they hear Republican politicians ranting and raving about socialism,” he said, “young people may be thinking, 'If these yahoos are against it, it can't be that bad.' At the very least, I think it's opened up a great deal of interest in socialism as a alternative.” Socialism's Return? Nichols notes that socialist parties were once part of a vigorous American debate and government's role in society. He believes that socialism should re-enter the mainstream and serve the same purpose on the left that libertarianism serves on the right. There are even places where the two ideologies can collaborate, like civil liberties and foreign policy. As Nichols notes, many of today's mainstream ideas were first articulated by either libertarian or socialist thinkers. And as Obama has embraced more seemingly “socialist” mainstream ideas – tax structure, or greater infrastructure spending – his popularity has risen. Whatever happens, one thing's already clear: Love him or not, Barack Obama is no socialist. But socialist-inspired ideas remain as popular – and as American – as ever. That's something politicians in both parties would do well to remember. Richard Eskow is a writer, a senior fellow with the Campaign for America's Future, and the host of a weekly radio show, "The Breakdown." © 2012 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved. View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/154175/