Is it racist to call someone a socialist?

Michael C. Moynihan responds to an editorial in the Kansas City Star, which tried to pillory John McCain for calling Barack Obama a socialist:

Now let me, as a card-carrying member of the libertarian establishment, say from the outset that while the prospect of an Obama presidency and large Democratic majorities in the House and Senate stimulates my acid reflux, I am optimistic that our presumptive leader will govern more in the style of L.B.J. than Eugene Debs. Thank heaven for small mercies. So yes, I expect the next four years to be pretty grim, but those who foretell massive grain collectivization, the requisition of SUVs, a liquidation campaign against the kulaks, would be advised to take a deep breath.

But buried in these charges of socialism, Diuguid, the Star's in-house racial cryptographer, finds clear racist intent. He explains that "J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI from 1924 to 1972, used the term liberally to describe African Americans who spent their lives fighting for equality." Indeed, "freedom fighters" like "W.E.B. Du Bois, who in 1909 helped found the NAACP which is still the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization [and] Paul Robeson, a famous singer, actor and political activist who in the 1930s became involved in national and international movements for better labor relations, peace and racial justice . . ."

This is a sort of reverse McCarthyism; the presumption that because an activist was denounced as a 'socialist' he was obviously no such thing. But here Diuguid is, whether out of luck or ignorance, partially correct. Du Bois and Robeson were most certainly not socialists — they were Stalinists.