by Damozel | Here is what the McCain camp says he said:
In a previously uncovered interview from September 6, 2001, Barack Obama expressed his regret that the Supreme Court hadn't been more 'radical' and described as a 'tragedy' the Court's refusal to take up 'the issues of redistribution of wealth.' No wonder he wants to appoint judges that legislate from the bench."
--McCain economics adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin (WaPo)
Here is what he actually said:
You know if you look at the victories and the 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 peoples so that I would now 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 would be okay.
But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And 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 the Warren Court interpreted it 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 it doesn't say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf and that hasn't shifted.
And one of the I think the tragedies of the Civil Rights movement was because the Civil Rights movement became so court focused 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 and in some ways we still suffer from that." (TPM)
Here is what it meant IN CONTEXT:
On closer inspection, the "bombshell audio" turns out to be a rather wonkish, somewhat impenetrable, discussion of the Supreme Court under Earl Warren. Obama, then a University of Chicago law professor and Illinois state senator, argued that the courts have traditionally been reluctant to get involved in income distribution questions. He suggested that the civil rights movement had made a mistake in expecting too much from the courts -- and that such issues were better decided by the legislative branch of government....
In other words, Obama says pretty much the opposite of what the McCain camp says he said. Contrary to the spin put on his remarks by McCain economics adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin, he does not express "regret" that the Supreme Court has not been more "radical." Nor does he describe the Court's refusal to take up economic redistribution questions as a "tragedy." He uses the word "tragedy" to refer not to the Supreme Court, but to the civil rights movement. (WaPo)
How did they get it SO wrong? Ron Chusid explains:
Today they are going wild over a YouTube video dug up by Matt Drudge–which is the first sign it should be questioned.... A heavily edited segment from a 2001 interview is distorted to claim Obama supports redistribution of the wealth in a Marxist sense. The full show, which sounds quite different from the segments taken out of context by many right wing bloggers, can be found here.
Digby explains the rest:
[B]ecause he used the words "redistribute" and "wealth" every conservative in America figures they've cracked the Da Vinci Code and revealed Obama for the Maoist-Leninist-Marxist-Communist-socialist that he is.....
That's not only a pretty conservative (not in the political sense) argument, it's echoed by conservative legal scholars....
On the substance of whether or not we should accept "redistribution of wealth" in society, perhaps it's better to flip the question. Does the McCain-Palin ticket defend the extreme concentrations of wealth - with CEOs earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a minute and sitting on the proceeds rather than creating jobs - that exists in this country today? The owners of the top 1% of wealth have more than the bottom 90%. The top 1% wage earners make more than the bottom 50%. Is that in any way sustainable or preferable? Can anyone look into the eyes of the 47 million who have no health care or the other 50-60 million who would go bankrupt if they tried to use theirs and tell them that extreme concentration of wealth is a positive social good?
I would put up the time-honored concept of progressive taxation against the attempt to protect the massive, depression-inducing income inequality we have today.
A-freakin'-MEN.
Of course, Digby's a progressive.
What say Obama's moderate or centrist supporters?
[T]he "tragedy," in Obama's telling, is that the civil rights movement was too court-focused. He was making a case against using courts to implement broad social goals - which is, last time I checked, the conservative position...
Is this really all McCain has left?
Justin Gardner at Donklephant:
TIME points out another obvious flaw in this argument: any politician who’s for progressive taxation has to be for wealth redistribution of some sort…
This argument remains problematic for McCain, because back between 2000 and 2004 McCain also had concerns about the distribution of wealth in America. More specifically, he opposed the Bush Tax cuts because a “disproportional amount went to the wealthiest Americans.”
NBC’s Tom Brokaw asked McCain about this on Sunday, during a Meet The Press sit down. McCain’s answer is a bit difficult to parse. He seems to suggest that some progressivity is good in the tax code, but that progressivity should be minimized (or at least not increased) during difficult economic times.
Is John McCain a socialist?
See, we can do it too.
Yes. We can.
And in fact, Ambinder discusses the risk of this sort of argument for Republicans.
[I]t might be dangerous for the Republican Party to elevate the stakes for this election to a death match between competing ideologies. If Barack Obama's victory is as decisive as it is shaping up to be, the Democrats can justifiably claim that conservatism itself has been rejected as a political and governing philosophy. In the closing weeks of the campaign, as the Republican ticket continues to run against the very idea of progressive politics, they are sowing the seeds of the post-election realignment narrative....
Obama has been talking about the larger GOP governing philosophy for a while now, but until recently, the race hasn't seemed like as much of a referendum on Republicanism; it's been more of a referendum on the Bush years.
What changed?
The GOP went all in on an ideological war.
Joe Klein brings the debunkery.
To state the obvious, once again: We have had a redistribution of wealth, upward, during the Reagan era. Taxes on work, a.k.a. payroll taxes, have increased. Taxes on wealth, the upper margins of the income tax plus capital gains plus estate taxes, have decreased. To call Obama a socialist because he wants to redress this imbalance is as accurate as calling McCain an oligarch because he doesn't.
Now that McCain's been called out on this, you figure he'll stop using it, right? Yeah, sure. After all, this is mild compared to the trash going out in those robo-calls.
McCain & Co. have learned Bush's lesson well: if you don't mind being called a liar, you can do whatever you want. Or as The Mahablog says:
The problems is, of course, that if the entire noise-making apparatus of the Right jumps on this lie and pounds on it together, they could peel some votes away from Obama. So even though it’s absolute nonsense, it could do some damage. Stay tuned.
David Bernstein at conservative law blog The Volokh Conspiracy weighs in with his interpretation:
Before getting to the controversy, the whole interview is worth listening to for another reason: Obama gives a very impressive performance as a constitutional scholar. Even though he was holding down other jobs while teaching at Chicago, he clearly had thought a lot about constitutional history, and how social change is or is not brought about through the courts. Among other things, I was impressed that rather than accept the rather cartoonish view that often prevails about the practical significance of Brown v. Board of Education, he knew that very few black students in the South were attending integrated schools as late as the early 1960s (almost a decade after Brown), and that it was only the threat of a cutoff of federal funds that really got desegregation moving. Being realistic about the practical effect of Brown is heresy in some circles, but Obama is correct. Relatedly, Obama was clearly influenced by Rosenberg/Klarman thesis that the Supreme Court rarely diverges much from social consensus, and can't be expected to.
Bernstein concludes:
Based on this interview, it seems unlikely that Obama opposes constitutionalizing the redistributive agenda because he's an originalist, or otherwise endorses the Constitution as a "charter of negative liberties," though he explicitly recognizes that this is how the Constitution has been interpreted since the Founding. Rather, he seems to think that focusing on litigation distracts liberal activists from necessary political organizing, and that any radical victories they might manage to win from the courts would be unstable because those decisions wouldn't have public backing. The way to change judicial decisions, according to Obama, is to change the underlying political and social dynamics; changes in the law primarily follow changes in society, not vice versa....
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?...
[A]re 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. (VC)
Other blogger reactions are posted at Memeorandum.
RECENT BUCK NAKED POLITICS POSTINGS
Re-re-distribution of Wealth: Cutting Executive Pay Could Save Jobs
ATF Foils Plot to Kill Obama & Murder 102 Students at a High School
Another Awesome Campaign Ad: "Whassup"
Palin Pal Republican Senator Ted Stevens Convicted on all Seven Felony Counts
Pakistan: U.S. Stops Ground Raids, Starts Airstrikes
Jon Swift: How to Tell if You're Pro- or Anti-America
Bush Getting Involved in Ohio's Voter Purge?
Comments