Barack Obama: Forming “coalitions of power” to bring about redistributive change

Voters not yet convinced that John McCain is best for America’s politics and economy will find informative this 2001 radio talk show recording of Barack Obama.  In it, Obama discusses how U.S. courts have failed to accomplish the kind of economic and political “redistributive change” that the United States owes “dispossessed peoples”.  A transcript follows the recording, courtesy of Bill Whittle at NRO:

Transcript of the above radio interview:

Barack Obama: You know, if you look at the victories and failures of the civil-rights movement, and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples. So that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at a lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it, I’d be okay, but 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.

And uh, to that extent, as radical as I think people tried 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 it’s been interpreted, and Warren Court interpreted it in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties: [It] 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, 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. And in some ways we still suffer from that.

In other words, Barack Obama wanted then (and presumably still wants now) to go beyond the basic racist evils of affirmative action to legislatively or administratively create a greater imbalance between blacks and other races.  Obama is a racist, pure and simple.  He couches his rhetoric so as to make it appear that he intends to help poor whites and other racial minorities, but his real goal is informed by the Black nationalism and “liberation theology” of Jeremiah Wright.

Caller: “The gentleman made the point that the Warren Court wasn’t terribly radical. My question is (with economic changes)… my question is, is it too late for that kind of reparative work, economically, and is that the appropriate place for reparative economic work to change place?”

Obama: You know, I’m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. The institution just isn’t structured that way. [snip] You start getting into all sorts of separation of powers issues, you know, in terms of the court monitoring or engaging in a process that essentially is administrative and takes a lot of time. You know, the court is just not very good at it, and politically, it’s just very hard to legitimize opinions from the court in that regard.

So I think that, although you can craft theoretical justifications for it, legally, you know, I think any three of us sitting here could come up with a rationale for bringing about economic change through the courts.”

Barack Obama is further left than any presidential candidate in recent memory.  He is bad for race relations, economy and politics.  John McCain offers a significantly more moderate approach.  Choose McCain while you still have a choice.

More commentary by Bill Whittle at NRO.