Comrade Obama Revealed!!!

It started on (where else?) the loony-tunes far right-wing blogs.  A 2001 radio interview with Barack Obama about the Civil Rights Movement and the Warren Court’s approach to redistributive legal decisions.  You’d think that would be a whole bunch of too-big, shiny words for the knuckle-dragging crowd on the right, but somehow this was picked up as further evidence that Obama is a card-carrying member of the Communist Party of Secret Muslims.  I wouldn’t even bother if I hadn’t awoken this morning to find it mentioned in the New York Times, indicating that this lunacy is getting at least some traction in the mainstream media (even if they are largely dismissing it).  

I need to briefly stop here and point out that I have a severe headache and am nauseous from what seems like constant emersion in idiocy.  When will this election end??  When can we dispense with this dribble??  OK, needed to get that out of my system.  Continuing:

Anyway, here’s the passage that has Drudge et al. so up in arms:

“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.”

Obviously the whole interview is a lot longer than this, but that short section is what the nuts have focused on.  You see, they may not know a whole lot about all this Obama-Ayers-Ahmadinejad-style big-city elitist lawyerin’ and all, but they know a commie when they see one.  And in their book, Civil Rights + community organizing + redistributive = Lenin.  Here’s Bill Whittle at the National Review explaining it for us:

“We have never, ever in our 232-year history, elected a president who so completely and openly opposed the idea of limited government, the absolute cornerstone of makes the United States of America unique and exceptional. 
If this does not frighten you — regardless of your political affiliation — then you deserve what this man will deliver with both houses of Congress, a filibuster-proof Senate, and, to quote Senator Obama again, ‘a righteous wind at our backs.’
That a man so clear in his understanding of the Constitution, and so opposed to the basic tenets it provides against tyranny and the abuse of power, can run for president of the United States is shameful enough.”

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air takes it few steps further (with a shout out to journalist of the year Barbara West – see post below):

“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.”

Comrade President Obama is going to cause a famine that kills millions of people!!!! Vote McCain if you want to eat!!!

Just to make it clear, all that Senator Obama is saying (and it’s a rather conservative thought, in fact…but of course facts tend to have a well-known liberal bias, don’t they?) is that one of the mistakes of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s was to pursue redistributive change through the courts rather than through the legislative process. In other words, economic justice (say, for example, equal funding for black and white schools) is best achieved through the legislature rather than the courts, because these require administrative action the courts have been unwilling to pursue and have found themselves often unable to promote. This is conservative in the sense that it rejects what the right often refers to as “judicial activism,” i.e., social change promoted by legal rather than legislative action. It is based on the assumption that legal change is most effective when it follows from changes in social attitudes, as opposed to legal change aimed at transforming society.

But what really bothers the wingnuts here, I think, is simply the word “redistributive.” Here’s David Bernstein (a leading CONSERVATIVE legal scholar at George Mason University) summing it up:

“What I don’t understand is why this is surprising, or interesting enough to be headlining Drudge [UPDATE: Beyond the fact that Drudge's headline suggests, wrongly, that Obama states that the Supreme Court should have ordered the redistribution of income; as Orin says, his views on the subject, beyond that it was an error to promote this agenda in historical context, are unclear.]. At least since the passage of the first peacetime federal income tax law about 120 years ago, redistribution of wealth has been a (maybe the) primary item on the left populist/progressive/liberal agenda, and has been implicitly accepted to some extent by all but the most libertarian Republicans as well. Barack Obama is undoubtedly liberal, and his background is in political community organizing in poor communities. Is it supposed to be a great revelation that Obama would like to see wealth more ‘fairly’ distributed than it is currently?
It’s true that most Americans, when asked by pollsters, think that it’s emphatically not the government’s job to redistribute wealth. But are people so stupid as to not recognize that when politicians talk about a ‘right to health care,’ or ‘equalizing educational opportunities,’ or ‘making the rich pay a fair share of taxes,’ or ‘ensuring that all Americans have the means to go to college,’ and so forth and so on, that they are advocating the redistribution of wealth? Is it okay for a politician to talk about the redistribution of wealth only so long as you don’t actually use phrases such as ‘redistribution’ or ’spreading the wealth,’ in which case he suddenly becomes ’socialist’? If so, then American political discourse, which I never thought to be especially elevated, is in even a worse state than I thought.”

Again, Bernstein is a proud conservative (as is everyone who writes on Eugene Volokh’s legal blog). I’m guessing that he does not support many of the redistributive programs we take for granted, such as Medicare, Social Security, unemployment insurance, the graduated income tax, etc. But there’s a big difference between opposing Medicare and calling anyone who supports Medicare a communist who is far outside the mainstream of American political thought. The former is a stance on policy that I strongly disagree with but is at least honest. The latter is pure, unadulterated bullshit, unless you want to call everyone from FDR to JFK to LBJ to Clinton a raging communist (and throw McCain in there as well, because I haven’t heard him yet give a speech opposing Medicare or proposing a flat tax). Look, if you so much as pave the roads in poor neighborhoods, that’s redistributive – the government is providing services to poor people in excess of the taxes they are paying, while the rich people are largely paying for those services. That’s redistribution by definition. So if you are against redistribution across the board, you favor poor people living without any services beyond what they can pay for themselves out of pocket or they get from charity. In other words, you want to reverse the entire New Deal and then some.

Here’s CONSERVATIVE political scientist Dan Drezner, Tufts professor:

“I’m generally not keen on using the state to redistribute wealth simply in order to reduce income inequality. This is not an aspect of Obama’s platform that fills me with warm fuzzies. To go from there to ‘SOCIALIST!! SOCIALIST!!’ however, is just nuts.
By this criteria, Milton ‘negative income tax’ Friedman was also a socialist.”

Again, I don’t agree with these guys (or Obama’s original quote!) on policy. We in Moxie’s World are dyed-in-the-wool liberals who are all in favor of New-Deal and Great-Society redistribution policies and would love to see more, like a single-payer universal health system. And unlike Obama, we’re all in favor of the courts taking strong stands ahead of public sentiment if there’s a constitutionally justifiable reason to do so (e.g., we strongly support the Massachusetts and California decisions in favor of gay marriage). But I fully agree with these thoughtful conservative commentators on the issue of calling Obama a socialist. It is disingenuous, and and it is utterly absurd. It reeks of desperation and unmitigated stupidity. And yet, apparently (and unsurprisingly), McCain is going to pick this up and run with it:

“John McCain yesterday sought to use a seven-year-old radio interview to buttress his argument that Democrat Barack Obama wants to redistribute wealth.

The interview – first reported by the Drudge Report and highlighted by conservative bloggers and websites – was with a Chicago radio station on Sept. 6, 2001, while Obama was an Illinois state senator and a law school lecturer.
…
At a rally in Dayton, Ohio, McCain mentioned the interview, saying that ‘it is amazing that even at this late hour, we are still learning more about Senator Obama and his agenda.’
‘That is what change means for Barack the redistributor,’ the Republican said. ‘It means taking your money and giving it to someone else. He believes in redistributing wealth, not in policies that grow our economy and create jobs.’”

I mean, Jesus H. Christ on a crutch, this is predictable, maddening, and sad. And with many of the mouth-breathers out there, as we’ve seen repeatedly, it works. You would think we have no serious issues in this country, nothing better to do than spread bullshit. You would never in a million years guess, just based on this, that we’re looking at the worst economic downturn in many decades, three (count ‘em) unsuccessful wars simultaneously, a trillion-dollar bailout of the economy that’s half working at best (at best!), tens of millions uninsured, tens of millions more underinsured, lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality rates than almost all of our peer countries, stagnant wages, rising unemployment, global environmental crisis…

7 more days.