I'm not sure about other countries, but Americans through around words like fascist, communist, etc. without really knowing what they mean. Obama is not a Hitler (thank you Godwin), he's a Roosevelt or a Kennedy (Robert, not Jack, IMO), with all the good and bad that implies, depending on your political views.
People have been throwing around the words "fascist" and "communist" without paying much attention to the actual definitions of those words. Now, admittedly, my definition comes from a left-aligned source, but this is also the academic definition I used when studying WWII Japan in college.
Fascism is a "form of far-right populism. Fascism glorifies national, racial, or cultural unity and collective rebirth while seeking to purge imagined enemies, and attacks both revolutionary movements and liberal pluralism in favor of militarized, totalitarian mass politics." It's important to note that fascism was formulated in direct response to communism, as a means of driving out "Bolsheviks." The idea was that the government was going to unite, chase out the corrupting elements that had lead the country away from an unrealistically idealized past (pre-WWI for the Germans, Roman Empire for the Italians), and then return control of capital to the cleansed and re-aligned citizenry.
Communism, on the other hand, tends to villainize rather than idealize the past. Mass naationalization of ALL capital, industry, and resources is intended from the start to be permanent, and redistribution of wealth is the primary stated goal. This is as opposed to fascism which nationalizes resources it perceives as being necessary to its goal and then cuts them loose when the goal is achieved (which it never is, because fascism requires a perceived enemy to maintain unity, but never mind about that now.)
Socialism has undergone some redefinition in the last 50 years. Initially, it was simply a pre-communism. However, no communist regime has ever actually gone through the socialist phase, so socialism has been for all practical purposes divorced from communism, and is considered a steady-state form of government all its own, as seen to various degrees is several European countries. Now, socialism is "a political philosophy advocating substantial public involvement, through government ownership, in the means of production and distribution." Note, it is NOT complete nationalization, and it is not essentially defensive in nature like fascism. It is, however, unwieldy, vulnerable to misdirection, and not particularly suited, in my opinion, to a population with a lot of diversity of cultural background, economic class, and political opinion.
Obama is, if anything, a socialist, and please note, HIS PROPOSED NATIONAL SERVICE IS NOT MILITARY in nature. And Obama is not a socialist, no, really, not even close. Believe me, I know more than a few actual socialists (most of them are anarchists too, by the way, which makes for some interesting ideology) and Obama ain't one of them.
The closest thing we have to fascism in the US is the Bush administration, which has gotten around the hassle of nationalizing resources by aligning itself with national and transnational corporations that have virtual monopolies on the resources a fascist government would normally have to go out and seize for itself. And Bush is a looooooooong way from being a Mussolini and would never approach the stature of the Big H even if he were made president-for-life. Vladimir Putin's Russia seems to be settling quite comfortably into a classical fascist state, which is kind of scary.
None of these terms is particularly useful in discussing the current presidential candidates. All they do is exaggerate and polarize debate so that no productive discussion can continue without being derailed.
To use a phrase that routinely gets thrown at me in other threads, people need to calm the fuck down so we can talk about pros and cons of what is actually being proposed, rather than than blowing it into Godwinian proportions. Obama isn't Hitler. Neither is Bush. Hitler arose out of a combination of one of the most brutal economic depressions the modern world has ever seen, and the battered pride of a nation that had just lost an incredibly destructive war and then been subjected to a harsh and humiliating peace treaty. The US isn't going that direction any time soon, and if you think Archer Daniels Midland or Exxon-Mobile or ClearChannel would ever permit anything resembling anything like fascism, socialism, or communism to take root, you are being alarmist and silly.
Do I like a lot of what either candidate is proposing? No. I love my country but I fear my government, for a lot of the same reasons that werepossum does, from the opposite political perspective, but I'm not running around like a cat with a tin-can tied to it's tail about it. And I say the exact thing to my fellow lefties, by the way. Obama is not a terrorist. Bush is not the devil. Everybody just quit freaking out and talk.
O) but morally speaking it is reprehensible. I mean, it is essentially stealing one year of a persons life, which he wanted to use for his own purposes, and then using that for your own purposes. 
