A Wingnut's Lament

Mark Levin at The Corner is irrate that mainstream media types aren't taking Drudge's latest nothingburger of a scoop more seriously. He writes:

This is how Ben Smith at Politico handles a major story about Obama's socialist, constitutional, and world views. That is Obama's own voice. Those are his own thoughts. That's 2001, we after Obama's eighth birthday. But to Smith, it's just more oppo stuff we can expect in the last days of the campaign. So, Obama's explicit embrace of "redistributing" wealth, his lament that the Warren Court wasn't radical enough to redistribute wealth, and his criticism that the Constitution doesn't explicitly allow for redistributing wealth is of no consequence. The revelation is to be viewed as nothing more than a political tactic by those who uncovered it and are talking about it. Pathetic.

Actually, what's pathetic is the clear inability and/or unwillingness of people like Levin to hear people's words and understand their straightforward meaning. Here's the full text of the comments at issue.

It is abundantly clear to anyone with a half-way functioning brain and a minimal understanding of the English language that Obama was not "lament[ing] that the Warren Court wasn't radical enough." Quite the contrary. He was suggesting that civil rights activists made a mistake by focusing too heavily on the court system as an avenue of change. As Cass Sunstein points out in the Smith post, the argument Obama was making here was fundamentally conservative in nature. He wasn't criticizing the Warren Court, but defending it against arguments that it didn't go far enough.

Furthermore, the kind of "redistributive change" Obama is referring to is not socialism, but rather conceptions of positive rights such as the "right to education" that, for a time, activists sought to have the courts recognize. His point is a very simple one, that reforms to our educational system and economic institutions should be pursued outside of the courts, through grass-roots organization and legislation. This is something that virtually all conservatives agree with.

In less hysterical contexts (i.e., not a week away from a presidential election), just about everyone would agree that we should work toward the goal of closing the income gap between minorities in this country and the white majority. No one (apart from unapologetic racists) thinks that in an ideal world, the median income of a white American should be significantly higher than the median income of a black or Hispanic American. In other words, there is a widespread consensus that we should pursue "redistributive change" in the long term, not by crudely redistributing current wealth, but by pursuing policies--such as improved education, improved access to health care, improved access to small business loans, etc.--that will help level the playing field and allow for organic redistributive change in the long term.

This is the kind of stuff Obama was talking about and it is completely non-controversial.

And finally, it's worth noting, as I have before, that this "socialism" argument is being trotted out against Obama in a way that it hasn't been against recent Democratic candidates, despite the fact that Obama's policy proposals are no more "redistributivist" than those offered by Kerry, Gore, Clinton, Dukakis, etc. (and McCain's policies are much more "redistributivist" than his Republican predecessors).

The reality is that when white politicians talk about "spreading the wealth," Republicans barely take notice. McCain has said very similar things throughout his career. He often rails against the "fat cats" on Wall Street and wants to take taxpayer money and give it those struggling with their mortgages. It's utterly routine for politicians of both parties to go on populist rants about big corporations and greedy CEOs. Proposals for such things as windfall profits taxes (of the kind Sarah Palin imposed in Alaska) are wildly popular. This is because, for most Americans, the idea of "spreading the wealth" or making the rich pay their fair share sounds pretty good. In the typical context, when voters hear about spreading the wealth, they imagine that wealth being spread from the rich or from big corporations to people like themselves (who aren't rich). And that sounds just fine to them.

What the McCain campaign is hoping, however, is that the very same rhetoric will sound more ominous when tied to a black politician. They're hoping that when people hear "spread the wealth" and "welfare" they'll picture a black president taking money from middle class Americans and funnelling it all to "his friends" in the inner city. That's the sentiment they're trying to exploit. That's why these arguments have been a central feature of this campaign and not of other recent presidential campaigns. Those who are sympathetic to the McCain campaign can deny this all they want, but they're only fooling themselves.