In 2008, he told a private citizen on the campaign trail that “when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” A point he later said he did not regret making.

It’s probably no coincidence that his campaign offices in Houston were decorated with Che Guevara flags.

In 2001, he decried the “tragedy” of the government not redistributing more wealth.

And way back in 1995, here’s what he wrote in his memoir, “Dreams From My Father“:

Desperate times called for desperate measures, and for many blacks, times were chronically desperate. If nationalism could create a strong and effective insularity, deliver on its promise of self-respect, then the hurt it might cause well-meaning whites, or the inner turmoil it caused people like me, would be of little consequence.

If nationalism could deliver. As it turned out, questions of effectiveness, and not sentiment, caused most of my quarrels with Rafiq. [Rafiq al-Shabazz, a “self-professed [Black] nationalist” (page 198)]

and…

That was the problem with people like Joyce [a college classmate of Italian, African-American, Native American, and French ethnicity]. They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounced real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people. …The truth was that I understood [Joyce], her and all the other black kids who felt the way she did. In their mannerisms, their speech, their mixed-up hearts, I kept recognizing pieces of myself. And that’s exactly what scared me. Their confusion made me question my own racial credentials all over again. …To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. [pages 99-100]

If it walks like a Socialist and quacks like a Socialist…

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