"The rational mind looks at that video and says, here's that counterfactual historical argument about what might have been if you had a different response," said Melber. "And the President's response was the best under the circumstances." Melber went on to say that there is also an emotional calculation to this slogan and to the election. "The emotional response is: be very afraid," said Melber. "It's economic fear. We've had other elections on security fear and the fear there is suggesting the idea that the Republican party of Mitt Romney are not looking out for you."

The Obama campaign apparently didn't look backwards into history when selecting its new campaign slogan, "Forward" -- a word with a long and rich association with European Marxism. Many Communist and radical publications and entities throughout the 19th and 20th centuries had the name "Forward!" or its foreign cognates. Wikipedia has an entire section called "Forward (generic name of socialist publications)."

"The name Forward carries a special meaning in socialist political terminology. It has been frequently used as a name for socialist, communist and other left-wing newspapers and publications," the online encyclopedia explains.

The slogan "Forward!" reflected the conviction of European Marxists and radicals that their movements reflected the march of history, which would move forward past capitalism and into socialism and communism.

There have been at least two radical-left publications named "Vorwaerts" (the German word for "Forward"). One was the daily newspaper of the Social Democratic Party of Germany whose writers included Friedrich Engels and Leon Trotsky. It still publishes as the organ of Germany's SDP, though that party has changed considerably since World War II. Another was the 1844 biweekly reader of the Communist League. Karl Marx, Engels and Mikhail Bakunin are among the names associated with that publication.

East Germany named its Army soccer club ASK Vorwaerts Berlin (later FC Vorwaerts Frankfort).

Vladimir Lenin founded the publication "Vpered" (the Russian word for "forward") in 1905. Soviet propaganda film-maker Dziga Vertov made a documentary whose title is sometimes translated as "Forward, Soviet" (though also and more literally as "Stride, Soviet").

[...] You have to hand it to President Obama and his cabal of re-election strategists; they are masters of illusion. Their newly released Web video and its accompanying campaign slogan, "Forward," are science fiction-level fantastical. We're all familiar with Obama's penchant for deflecting responsibility and blaming his policy failures on George W. Bush, but after more than three years in office for Obama, it has gone from childish mischief to juvenile delinquency. This is a question for Guinness: Has any other president run for re-election against the record of his retired predecessor?

[T]he White House would have us believe the economy is doing pretty well. "The president's stimulus plan saved up to 4.2 million jobs" and has given us steady economic growth, and the manufacturing sector is going gangbusters.

What this little clip doesn't tell you -- apart from the meaningless and immeasurable metric of "saved jobs," which has now been further diluted to the ludicrous rendering "saved up to" -- is how much these possibly or possibly not saved jobs cost the American taxpayer. It doesn't reveal Obama's miserable record in creating new private-sector jobs or that overall, he has delivered us a net loss of millions of jobs and unemployment at levels consistently 60 percent higher than what economists consider normal.

It doesn't report that taxpayers lost billions on his vaunted auto bailouts or that through his abuses of power, secured creditors were literally cheated out of their money.

The video conveniently fails to mention that Obama has rightfully earned his nickname "The Food Stamp President" with the objectively measurable skyrocketing increases in government dependency payouts during his term, a great portion of which cannot be blamed on the recession, which his policies grossly worsened anyway. It doesn't disclose that Obamacare will cost nearly twice what Obama promised or that Dodd-Frank is likely to exacerbate the very problems it is ostensibly designed to prevent.

The video casually glosses over Obama's real record on green jobs, the wasted billions and the shameless corporatist corruption. It doesn't showcase his gutting of the military or his plans for radical nuclear disarmament.

But the most gaping hole in this propaganda piece is its glaring omission of the debt crisis Obama has engineered, his abdication of leadership in failing to pressure his party's Senate majority to produce a budget -- even a phony, superficial one -- in more than 1,000 days, and his egregious refusal to work on entitlement reform and balancing the budget.

Team Obama is gifted in community organizing, but not even these wizards can re-create reality to make Obama's record appear anywhere north of calamitous failure. This "progressive" president is headed anywhere but forward.