Why Did Obama Attend Socialist Conferences?

Via Jim Geraghty, the Kansas City Star asks John McCain if Obama is a socialist:

[McCain] also said Obama had the “most extreme” record in the Senate. Asked later if he thought Obama was an extremist, McCain said: “His voting record â€¦ is more to the left than the announced socialist in the United States Senate, Bernie Sanders of Vermont.” Does McCain think Obama is a socialist? “I don’t know. All I know is his voting record, and that’s what people usually judge their elected representatives by.”

Michael Crowley writes that McCain “is not quite living up to the admirable standards of political discourse he professes to champion.” But Bernie Sanders is an avowed socialist. Obama’s voting record was ranked farther to the left than Sanders’s. Obama is free to label his own political views however he wants, but that’s a fact. Hopefully some intrepid reporter has a chance to ask Obama about this matter, and while they’re on the topic would it be too much to ask Obama why he attended socialist conferences in college? In Dreams from My Father, Obama writes of the “socialist conferences I sometimes attended at Cooper Union”, and he later recounts attending a Stokely Carmichael speech: