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“Too many folks still don’t have a sense that tomorrow will be better than today. And so, the question in this election is which way do we go?  Do we go forward towards a new vision of an America in which prosperity is shared? Or do we go backward to the same policies that got us in the mess in the first place?”

That was Barack Obama last Saturday at a Chicago fundraiser, expanding on these comments made last year at a speech in Brazil.

“With each passing day, Brazil is a country with more solutions.  In the global community, you’ve gone from relying on the help of other nations, to now helping fight poverty and disease wherever they exist.  You play an important role in the global institutions that protect our common security and promote our common prosperity…Together we can advance our common prosperity.”

Obama is pinning his re-election on his repeated calls for “common prosperity.”  If these calls for “common prosperity” sound familiar, you probably speak Mandarin.

“A long-forgotten socialist slogan, ‘common prosperity,’ coined by the late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, has returned to the limelight, becoming the latest catchphrase for mainland cadres ahead of next year’s leadership reshuffle,” the South China Morning Post reported in a story titled ‘Common prosperity is back in fashion.’

“In a message to a gathering of Asian political parties in Nanning on Sunday, Vice-President Xi Jinping, President Hu Jintao’s heir apparent, reiterated the central government’s commitment to ‘allowing people to share the fruits of development’.

“He said the Communist Party would stick to economic reforms, boost social services, speed up reforms to income distribution and ‘unswervingly pursue the path of common prosperity’, Xinhua said.”