Barack Obama is a hard-core leftist.

Here's what Barack Obama had to say about small-town Pennsylvania recently (emphasis in original):

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

This actually makes perfect sense from a socialist point of view: "the people" are inherently good, and therefore social pathologies are really caused by the machinations of oligarchs, "social wreckers", "economic royalists", conservative saboteurs of government programs, right-wing talk show hosts, etc.