Of all the criticism lobbed at Barack Obama over the last week, the one that gets the biggest hoots and hollers from John McCain’s supporters is that Obama wants to, in McCain air quotes, “spread the wealth.” Crazy, right? Crazy that a candidate would invoke, as the New Yorker notes, the godfather of free-market capitalism, Adam Smith, who wrote in “The Wealth of Nations” that “It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.”

Yet somehow the idea of sharing wealth — the idea of the United States as a republic run by people instead of corporations — has become something borne of Marxism or socialism, two ideologies that have also been distorted in the last week as a downtrodden McCain campaign clings to fear as its only weapon.

In what has become an election in which economic woes have superseded “moral values,” tax cuts are of pre-eminent concern, regardless of their real impact and, even worse, in total disregard of the real fact that a president doesn’t have the authority to overhaul an entire tax plan anyway.

Still, while “socialism” is thrown around as a destructive European ideology that steals from the hands of the workers, the real irony is in its current reality: Economists note that the largest “spreading of the wealth,” the most socialist-like move of late, has come in the form of the Wall Street bailout. Darrell West, the director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, recently told the International Herald Tribune, “The biggest socialist right now is George W. Bush.”

Yet, in playing volleyball with that word and failing to defend its ideal — that the distribution of wealth is for the good of everybody — progressive pundits make the concept of “spreading the wealth” a dirty deed instead of a requisite for a healthy nation, one that Adam Smith considered a founding principle of modern economies.

Today political analyst David Gergen criticized Democrats for allowing the McCain campaign to turn “wealth distribution” into something akin to armed robbery. He noted that progressive taxation was also hailed by Teddy Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan was responsible for creating the Earned Income Tax Credit. In other words, “spreading the wealth” was never as synonymous with government theft as it has been with the McCain camp. And, he adds, Democrats are at fault for letting the McCain campaign continue to run wild with a twisted and antiquated class-warfare concept that only stokes a growing divide.

For more on the wealth-distribution issue and its perversion by the McCain campaign, check out yesterday’s New Yorker article by Steve Coll and this recent article on the red-scare fear campaign from Washington Monthly.