So if the United States has elected a socialist president, the socialists must be pretty excited, right? Claiming just a single U.S. Senator (Vermonter Bernie Sanders) and exactly zero members of the House of Representatives as their own, putting a socialist in the White House would represent the greatest achievement of any socialist alive today.

But there’s just one problem. The socialists won’t claim Obama as their own. They won’t even call him a socialist.

One of the big problems in public political “debate” is that too many people toss out the words “socialism” and “socialist” without knowing what those words mean. If they did, they would know Obama is no socialist. He’s a centrist. Left-leaning, perhaps, but a centrist all the same.