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A quote commonly attributed to American socialist Norman Mattoon Thomas, that America would eventually and unknowingly adopt socialism under the name of 'liberalism,' is often cited in U.S. political debates. It gained renewed currency beginning in late 2008, in conjunction with the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama (whom political opponents labeled a socialist) and his subsequent efforts in mid-2009 to enact health care reform in the U.S. (characterized by critics as socialized medicine): A connection between the putative Norman Thomas quote and universal health care was established much earlier, however: in 1961, Ronald Reagan — then still an actor who had not yet embarked upon a political career — cited the words attributed to Thomas during a talk he gave on the perils of socialized medicine: But did Thomas ever make this statement? Although these words have been attributed to him for several decades, no one has ever been able to turn up a source documenting that he actually said or wrote them, whether it was in 1944 (as claimed in the above-quoted example) or in 1927 (as Ronald Reagan asserted) or at any other time. In 2003, for example, Reagan biographer Lou Cannon noted that: Cannon elaborated in a footnote to this passage that: As far as we know, the closest connection yet found between Norman Thomas and the substance of the words attributed to him is something that was written to (not by) him, a 1951 letter from Upton Sinclair, the noted American author best known for his 1906 muckraking novel The Jungle, who twice (unsuccessfully) ran for Congress on the Socialist ticket and (also unsuccessfully) ran for the governorship of California as a Democrat in 1934:
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