Fox News, a News Corp subsidiary
Honestly, I am think that Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes and most at that network live in a reality that is different than mine.
I was just pointed to an interview with Howard Kurtz in which he said that President Obama “has a different belief system than most Americans” and that on his recent travels he “told by the French and the Germans that his socialism was too far left for them to deal with.” I don’t know if Ailes believes this or if it is part of the continuing campaign of the right to paint the President as so radically different from us that he is somehow threatening, but the statements are not simply wrong, they are absurd.
President Obama is a capitalist and he believes in our system of representative, Constitutional democracy. He has given no indication otherwise. He would not have risen in the party system were that not the case and he certainly would not have got elected to the highest office in the land, either. The Presidents differences with the the opposition are differences of degree, not belief systems.
As for France and Germany telling him that his socialism is to far left, well that is ridiculous. Germany, France and the United States do have differences on approaches necessary to stimulate their economies because in a global economy what is done in one country impacts the others, but the questions concern the means and scale of intervention and have nothing to do with ideology. France and Germany are also democratic, capitalist states, but both are fundamentally more socialist in character then the US. Both have and have had for some time, state funded systems of education, government owned rail systems, universal health care, strong labor movements, etc.