It looks like the Grand Old Party is running low on ammunition to aim at President Barack Obama.

Now, they’re down to throwing shoes.

The latest ones that they and their ultra-conservative compatriots been tossing at him have socialist emblazoned on the label. Before that, they fired bullets at him; bullets first aimed at bringing him down in the eyes of voters as a rock star with more sizzle than substance, then as a closet Muslim and finally, as an Indonesian citizen trying to pull a fast one on besotted voters.

Those bullets all missed their mark. As will the socialism shoe.

Republicans hurled that shoe recently during the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C. Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) called the president the world’s best salesman of socialism.

And Mike Huckabee, former Arkansas governor and GOP presidential candidate, made ridiculous references to Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, two former communist leaders of the former Soviet Union, in talking about Obama’s agenda.

Obviously, the desperation is getting thick. And no wonder.

Obama managed to pass a $787 billion economic stimulus package with the help of only three senators from their party. He’s currently riding waves of public approval that top 60 percent. People who are pessimistic about the economy still have faith in Obama to lead the country out of it.

All of which means that the ammunition from the GOP’s fear arsenal is running low, so low that they hope that calling Obama a socialist will scare people back over to their side.

It won’t.

It won't because first of all, those who keep screaming socialism are apparently banking on inciting fear among people who think it is the same thing as communism – the political and economic system that forbids private ownership and eschews market economies - and had the United States and the Soviet Union in a nuclear arms race for decades.

But the Soviet Union is no more. Many people – particularly the young ones who supported Obama – don’t get much of a fright out of the thought of communists coming to take over. That bogeyman is about as dead as Freddy Kruger.

And socialism, an economic system that is broadly defined as public or state ownership of the means of production or the distribution of goods, isn’t what Obama’s government spending is aimed at.

Obama is using government to stimulate the U.S. capitalistic system that is in free fall right now – so that this recession doesn’t last for another decade.

Yet it doesn’t surprise me that some Republicans would renew their vilifications of Obama as a socialist. I mean, these are folks who, for the past eight years, have only found a path to victory by exploiting people’s fears – not by exciting them with new ideas.

It’s all they know.

It also doesn’t surprise me that they would continue the “otherizing” of Obama that they began when he was running for president. I mean, just think about it. Obama is a guy who began his political career as a community organizer, not as the scion of a politically-connected family or as a darling of the corporate world. That means he may be more inclined to empathize with average people – and even more so inclined to use the power of government to help them instead of using most of it to benefit corporations and wealthy people.

That’s an alien philosophy to Republicans who solely believe in harnessing government to help those who already have – and hope that those who already have will, in turn, help everyone else.

No matter that things haven’t worked that way for some time.

But banking on American fears is the Republican way. It was a .....

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