Mitt Romney has promised not to call President Obama a socialist on the campaign trail. But in a speech in Washington Wednesday, Romney got about as close to suggesting the current president wants to bring pure socialism to America as one can without actually saying the word.
“He seeks to replace our merit-based society with an entitlement society,” Romney told an audience at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s candidate forum.
He explained that Obama’s vision for the country is some kind of meritless-free, government-controlled superstate straight out of the pages of Orwell.
In an entitlement society, everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to take risk. That which is earned by some is redistributed to the others. And the only people to enjoy truly disproportionate rewards are the people who do the redistributing–the government.
“[T]he invigorating pursuit of happiness is replaced by the deadening reality that there is no prospect of a better tomorrow,” Romney explained.
This isn’t the first time Romney has flirted with the socialism charge. At one of the GOP debates, he declined to call Obama the word socialist, but noted “he takes his political inspiration from Europe, and from the socialist-democrats in Europe.”
The speech today went a step further than that, suggesting that Obama literally wants to tear out the possibility of individual advancement from America’s fabric and replace it with top-down state control.
“Opportunity is replaced by the certainty that everyone in an entitlement society will enjoy nearly the same rewards,” Romney said. “But there is another certainty: they will be poor.”
It’s a strange attack on the president who said in Kansas Tuesday that “that the free market is the greatest force for economic progress in human history.” Far from suggesting the free market should be replaced with some 1984-like vision of equally-rationed wealth, President Obama called for a marketplace he said will allow more individuals to grab some of the American Dream.
“[T]he free market has never been a free license to take whatever you want from whoever you can,” Obama said. “It only works when there are rules of the road to ensure that competition is fair, open, and honest.”
Romney has tried to take the high road when it comes to the “socialist” attack so often leveled at the president by his Republican opponents.
“I don’t use the word socialist — or I haven’t so far,” Romney told CNN in September. But in his speech Wednesday he got about as close to calling Obama socialist as he possibly could.
