Posted by
Chris on Monday, October 27, 2008 3:55:48 PM
If you're reading this, you probably already know about Obama's recently surfaced 2001 interview in which he seems to be saying that it's a "tragedy" that the civil rights movement took up the wrong strategy (i.e., the courts) for redistributing wealth. University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein tries to defend him this way:
"What the critics are missing is that the term 'redistribution' didn’t mean in the Constitutional context equalized wealth or anything like that. It meant some positive rights, most prominently the right to education, and also the right to a lawyer...What he’s saying – this is the irony of it – he’s basically taking the side of the conservatives then and now against the liberals."
I'm open to correction on this, but I've taken Constitutional law classes, have a degree inpolitical science, and have followed Constitutional issues in the news for decades. I do not recall ever hearing the term "redistribution" used in the sense that Sunstein is describing. That doesn't mean he's wrong, but I have to wonder, given the context of his remarks - which clearly had to do with economics - and the fact that the interview was on public radio, intended for the general public, not for professors familiar with legalese, I find it hard to swallow that Obama's remarks meant anything other than the most obvious reading on their face. Obama does seem to say that redistribution of wealth is difficult to justify from the bench due to the nature of the Supreme Court, but even so, he thinks it's a tragedy that the civil rights movement picked the wrong strategy for the redistribution of wealth. Even the most charitable reading/hearing of his comments would have to explain why he would describe economic change in terms of redistribution - a term that obviously is laden with distinct connotations.
Caveat emptor, my friends. It looks we have a genuine socialist running for president.
Update: I did an Google "Advanced Search" using the terms "constitution" and "redistribut*" (the latter of which looks for all forms of the word "redistribute") and instructed the search engine to throw out all web pages that had the term "Obama". I was only able to look for a few minutes, because I'm trying to earn some wealth myself to pay the bills, but I found nothing to lend support to Sunstein's interpretation of Obama's comments. Some legal scholar with time on his hands should address this.