The Tea Party has screamed "socialist" at Obama, a corporate Democrat, for so long without any understanding of what the term has meant historically that less informed mainstream Repubs and Democrats, raised or born during Cold War, who used to recoil at the term tend to tune it out.

I mean, when you repeatedly scream that someone with obvious pro-Wall Street policies, who steadfastly protected the free market in health care, a "socialist," many people who don't really understand the term are actually _softened_ to it. I mean, if THAT's socialism, then they don't care.

Some in the Republican party have gone more to the right because of this red-baiting against Obama and now associate anything left of rapacious unregulated capitalism with "socialism" and "communism"--but they're nuts anyway. We were never going to reach them.

Everyone else is beginning to think, "meh." It's kind of like the evolution of people around women's rights over the past 50 years. When woman-haters kept screaming "bitch" or "lesbian" or "slut" at strong women as if that's an insult (my constant experience in the 1980s--if you spoke up you had to be discredited with one of the three standard epithets), finally enough people said, so what if a woman's strong or if a woman loves other women or a woman has sexual agency? Why is that an insult? The screaming of the extremists finally backfired. The culture changed around them and what they think is an insult is either meaningless or has turned into a compliment.

And so it goes with "socialist." It's not the conversation-stopping epithet it was even 10 years ago. We can paradoxically thank the right wing crazies for some of that.

Less informed independents and more open-minded Republicans may think, well, they tell me Obama's a socialist, but I like and trust Bernie a whole lot more than Obama or Hillary, and he's actually talking about returning our lives to the prosperity of my parents and grandparents' generation, so let's try his kind of socialism.