If people thought Joe the Plumber was some kind of stumble for
Barack Obama, a rediscovered interview from 2001 should dispel any
doubts about Barack Obama’s redistributionism. Seven years ago, Obama
told Chicago Public Radio that the Warren Court was too conservative
and missed its opportunity to redistribute wealth on a much grander
scale. In fact, Obama wanted them to break the Constitution and
reorder American society far outside of what the founders intended.
Stop the ACLU has the transcript (via Michelle):
If you look at the victories and failures of the civil
rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court. I think where
it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed
people, so that now I would have the right to vote. I would now be able
to sit at the lunch counter and order as long as I could pay for it I’d
be o.k. But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues
of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political
and economic justice in society.
To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution,
at least as its been interpreted and Warren Court interpreted in the
same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative
liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the Federal
government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the Federal government
or State government must do on your behalf, and that hasn’t shifted and
one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, um,
because the civil rights movement became so court focused I think there
was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing
and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual
coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive
change. In some ways we still suffer from that. …
I’m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive
change through the courts. You know, the institution just isn’t
structured that way.
People have assumed that Obama merely offered a rhetorical stumble,
and Obama and Joe Biden have strenuously attacked anyone that claimed
he intended to bring about radical socialist change. This sounds very
much like socialism and radical change, and there is no mistaking the
context of this statement. While Obama recognizes in this passage that
the judiciary doesn’t have the “structure” to make radical changes to
the Constitution, he doesn’t sound at all happy about it.
Instead, Obama sees community organizing as the essential path to
move from a Constitution of personal liberties to a Constitution of
federal mandates. He wants a new governing document that essentially
forces both the federal and state governments to redistribute wealth,
and he sees that as the natural outcome of the civil rights movement.
That certainly smells of socialism on a far grander scale than ever
attempted in the US, with the New Deal and Great Societies looking like
pale imitations of Obama’s vision.
In fact, as Jeff Goldstein notes, that’s almost classic Marxism, and it would leave America somewhere to the left of 1970s France:
In Obama’s America, we’ll finally be able to break free
of the “constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the
Constitution” — and in so doing, achieve “social justice” through
“redistributive change.”
Well, then. Fine .
But this is not the America I knew…
The government does not exist to determine the acceptable level of
wealth of its individual citizens. For government to assume that role,
it would have to end private property rights and assume all property
belonged to the State. That is classic Marxism, and as Barbara West of
WFTV noted, it runs in Marx’s classic philosophy of “from each
according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”. That
economic direction has been an abject failure everywhere it has been
tried, and in many cases resulted in famines that killed millions of
people.
The RNC and the McCain campaign has to get these quotes out to the American public in the final week of this election.
Update: One more clarifying thought is in order.
Barack Obama complains that the Constitution is a “charter of negative
liberties”. That’s because the Constitution was intended as a limiting
document, to curtail the power of the federal government vis-a-vis the
states and the individual. The founders intended at the time to limit
the reach of the federal government, and built the Constitution
accordingly.
Barack Obama wants to reverse that entirely. And that’s radical change you’d better believe in, or else.