By ROBERT ALT
Last updated: 5:43 am
October 28, 2008
Posted: 3:42 am
October 28, 2008
IN a 2001 radio interview that's just come to light, Barack Obama discussed the Supreme Court's role in redistributing wealth. Call it Obama's "Joe the Plumber meets Justice Brennan" moment.
Contrary to some screaming Web discussions, Obama did not - at least as a practical matter - promote using the courts to redistribute wealth. Yet the interview was still revealing.
For starters, in it Obama again spoke favorably of "major" redistribution of wealth, and he gave hints about his liberal views on the judiciary.
As with most of Obama's public comments, his remarks in the interview were measured. In discussion of the high court's liberal heyday under Chief Justice Earl Warren, for example, he said, "The court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and more basic issues of political and economic justice in the society."
As a former student of Obama's at the University of Chicago, I'd note that this was rather typical of his teaching style - stating liberal propositions in a descriptive way, while neither acknowledging the radicalism of the underlying premise nor stating whether he agrees with it.
That is, Obama's statement describes a liberal objective - redistributing wealth through the courts - but he doesn't actually say whether he believes the court was correct in failing to venture into redistribution or even whether he supports redistribution.
But he did make it clear where his sympathies lie: "One of the, I think, tragedies of the civil-rights movement was, because the civil-rights movement became so court-focused, uh, 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 coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change, and in some ways we still suffer from that."
Notwithstanding his support for redistribution in theory, Obama said he was "not optimistic about bringing major redistributive change through the courts."
Let those words sink in for a moment: major redistributive change. If his plans for taxation and spending didn't make it plain, Obama's goal should be clear now. And his objection is simply that the courts aren't very good at carrying out long-term redistribution - not that major "sharing the wealth" shouldn't come from other branches of government.
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