Has over a year of Faux News right-wing fear mongering and Calling President Obama a socialist finally paid off? According to one new poll from the Democracy Corps, a majority at 55 percent of likely voters believe that the word "socialist" describes the president either "well" or "very well," Perhaps this is why The White House is starting a coordinated campaign to push back against the perception that President Barack Obama has an anti-business agenda. White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel told Politico, “rather than recoiling against Obama, business leaders should be grateful for his support on at least a half-dozen counts.” This puts Obama in a curious position. In order to get elected in America, both candidates and a political party have to cozy up to the money sources. Since Reagan's successful war on organized labor, taking the percentage of American workers represented by a union from 25% when Reagan came into office in 1981 down to around 7% of the private workforce today, there isn't the traditional labor money for Democrats to rely on. And because Obama has chosen to go the DLC conserva-Dem route with many of his legislative initiatives, not pushing for single-payer health care, not breaking up too-bit-to-fail banks, and so on, his ability to raise money from an activated and excited base has waned significantly. That leaves the big corporate monopolies, from Wall Street to Wal-Mart to drug companies to defense contractors to the big tech companies that manufacture in China and sell here. It's too late for the 2010 elections for Obama to move to the left, and thus bring in his progressive base for fundraising, but there are many good progressive candidates this year for the House and a few for the Senate, so maybe it won't be so important what the President has done. It will be huge, though, in 2012, particularly now that the Supreme Court has made transnational and foreign corporate monopolies "persons" with Bill of Rights protections such as the ability to carpet bomb TV viewers with political campaign ads. We live, as the old Chinese curse goes, in interesting times. A curse that's particularly appropriate as China is poised to become the second largest and most powerful nation in the world economically because, in part, of Clinton/Obama so-called "free trade" policies. Keep an eye on this election - it's going to tell us a lot about both the future of the Democratic Party and the future of democracy itself.