http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/10/mccain_campaign_falsely_claims.php"McCain Campaign Falsely Claims Obama Described Court's Failure to Redistribute Wealth As "Tragedy"
By Greg Sargent - October 27, 2008, 12:16PM
The McCain campaign's efforts to portray Barack Obama as a closet socialist took a turn into the burlesque today, with the McCain camp falsely claiming that in a seven year old interview, Obama said that it was a "tragedy" that the Supreme Court hadn't redistributed wealth away from hard-working Americans.
The Obama interview in question is being pushed relentlessly today by the wingnuts, who are circulating this audio of it.
The McCain campaign just blasted out a quote from senior economics adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin hammering Obama. In the interview, Holtz-Eakin claimed, "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.'"
Holtz-Eakin asserted that this proves that Obama wants to take money "away from people who work for it" and give it to people "Obama believes deserves it." Apparently McCain himself is going to pick up this cudgel on the trail today, too.
But as usual, this latest attack rests on a complete falsehood.If you look at Obama's full quote -- which you can read right here -- it's very clear that Obama was not directly "regretting" the failure of the court to be "radical." Rather, he was saying that the court's failure to take up redistributive issues proved that it wasn't as "radical" as some have claimed. The "radical" line was clearly a dispassionate claim about the reality of history.
What's more, take a look at the operative part of Obama's quote that includes the "tragedy" line:
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.
As you can see, Obama simply didn't say that the court's faiulre to take up redistribution was a tragedy. Rather, he was arguing that it was a "tragedy" that the Civil Rights movement expected the courts to do too much in this regard, which led the movement away from other ways of accomplishing redistributive goals, such as organizing and legislative politicking.
Now, it's true that Obama was describing redistribution as a worthy goal. The wingers are grabbing on to this as proof, along with his recent claims to America's Favorite Plumber, that he harbors a shadowy socialist and redistributionist agenda. But Obama clearly wasn't talking about the mass seizure of wealth -- after all, redistribution is the whole idea behind taxation, which is a fairly mainstream concept that McCain still presumably supports in principle.
What's more, Obama legal adviser Cass Sunstein argues to Ben Smith that Obama was discussing "redistribution" in the context of a narrow legal discussion about civil rights, meaning he was discussing whether the courts should make the things that guarantee a social safety net -- education, welfare, and the like -- court-mandated rights.
Ironically, Sunstein points out, Obama was arguing that legislative action was a preferable vehicle for accomplishing such goals.
If McCain disagrees with Obama's argument that the courts aren't the primary place to accomplish such things, he should say so. It would certainly make news."
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