Fear of an Anti-Capitalist Planet

October 27, 2008

By Tobin Harshaw

Here’s a quote that has the gang at National Review and most of the rest of the right side of the blogosphere in a collective uproar:
One of the, I think, the tragedies of the Civil Rights movement was because the Civil Rights movement became so court-focused, uh, I think that 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.
While the bold-facing is Bill Whittle’s, the words are Barack Obama’s, from a 2001 Chicago Public Radio interview (audio of entire interview here), in which he also laments that “the Supreme Court never entered into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society.”
Whittle gives his interpretation:
We all know what political and economic justice means, because Barack Obama has already made it crystal clear a second earlier: It means redistribution of wealth. Not the creation of wealth and certainly not the creation of opportunity, but simply taking money from the successful and hard-working and distributing it to those whom the government decides ‘deserve’ it. This redistribution of wealth, he states, ‘essentially is administrative and takes a lot of time.’ It is an administrative task. Not suitable for the courts. More suitable for the chief executive.
Jennifer Rubin at Commentary thinks this is the tip of the iceberg:
It is fairly obvious that Obama was saying nothing extraordinary in his own mind. This is the sort of thing left-leaning “intellectuals” bandied about. It’s the outlook that underscored the bent of not just his closest comrades at the time (e.g. Reverend Wright and Father Pfleger), but the activist organizations he and Bill Ayers supported through the Woods Fund. It is absurd, really, to write off all these associations as an aberration or exaggeration, or to ignore them as some imagining of paranoid conservatives. What comes through loud and clear was that Obama shared the classic anti-capitalist, redistributionist philosophy accepted as dogma by many on the Left.
Remember, this isn’t ancient history. Obama was sharing Socialism 101 with radio listeners just seven years ago. At the same time, he was sitting on the board of the Woods Fund, going to Trinity United Church, and a enjoying a robust professional relationship with Bill Ayers. Has he given all that up? We don’t know, because no one in the media has taken seriously Obama’s intellectual and professional development.
Meanwhile, ABC’s Jake Tapper had a chat with Bill Burton of the Obama Campaign, who gave him this reponse:
“In this interview back in 2001, Obama was talking about the civil rights movement -– and the kind of work that has to be done on the ground to make sure that everyone can live out the promise of equality,” Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton says. “Make no mistake, this has nothing to do with Obama’s economic plan or his plan to give the middle class a tax cut. It’s just another distraction from an increasingly desperate McCain campaign.”
Burton continues: “In the interview, Obama went into extensive detail to explain why the courts should not get into that business of ‘redistributing’ wealth. Obama’s point – and what he called a tragedy – was that legal victories in the Civil Rights led too many people to rely on the courts to change society for the better. That view is shared by conservative judges and legal scholars across the country.
Spin or substance? Andrew Sullivan thinks the latter: “So Obama was arguing that the Constitution protects negative liberties and that the civil rights movement was too court-focused to make any difference in addressing income inequality, as opposed to formal constitutional rights. So it seems to me that this statement is actually a conservative one about the limits of judicial activism. Is this really all McCain has left?”
And the judicious Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy also sees more smoke than fire.
Based on the audio posted, however, I find it hard to identify Obama’s normative take. When Obama says that he’s “not optimistic” about using the courts for major economic reform, and when he points out the practical and institutional problems of doing so, it’s not entirely clear whether he is (a) gently telling the caller why the courts won’t and shouldn’t do such things; (b) noting the difficulties of using the courts to engage in economic reform but not intending to express a normative view; or (c) suggesting that he would have wanted the Warren Court to have tried to take on such a project.
My best sense is that Obama was intending (a), as his point seems to be that the 60s reformers were too court-focused. But at the very least, it’s not at all clear that Obama had (c) in mind. It doesn’t help that only parts of the audio are posted: Given the obvious bias of the person who edited the audio, it’s probably a decent bet that the rest of the audio makes the comments seem more innocuous than they do in the excerpts. Of course, there’s the separate point about Obama’s interest in “major redistributive change” more generally: It would be interesting to know if Obama endorsed that goal in the interview, and what specifically he had in mind.
Well, if the polls can be trusted, Orin, we should find out pretty soon …