[Vision2020] The Other, Accurate Side of the Story: Drudge's Politics of Desperation

[Saundra Lund]

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/10/drudges-latest.
html#more

 

The Atlantic

The Daily Dish

Andrew Sullivan

27 Oct 2008 11:19 am

 

Drudge's Latest

 

Go read the original talk that Obama gave on NPR and see if it says anything
even faintly similar to the truncated quotes about to be used by McCain. I
mean: come on. Here's the headline: <http://www.drudgereport.com/>  

"2001 Obama: Tragedy That 'Redistribution Of Wealth" Not Pursued By Supreme
Court"

 

Here's what it's based
<http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2008/10/mccain-to-attac.html>  on:
the "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. The
actual quote in full:

"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," Obama said, "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 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, as least as it's been interpreted, and
Warren Court interpreted 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." 

Obama said "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
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."

 

So Obama was arguing that the Constitution protects negative liberties and
that the civil rights movement was too court-focused to make any difference
in addressing income inequality, as opposed to formal constitutional rights.
So it seems to me that this statement is actually a conservative one about
the limits of judicial activism.

 

Is this really all McCain has left?

 

 

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2008/10/mccain-to-attac.html

ABC News

Political Punch

Jack Tapper

McCain to Attack Obama for Public Radio Comments from 2001

October 27, 2008 10:16 AM

On September 6, 2001, then-state senator Barack Obama appeared on a public
radio chat show to discuss "Slavery and the Constitution."

You can listen to the whole show
<http://www.wbez.org/audio_library/ram/od/od_010906.ram> HERE. 

In that show -- WBEZ-FM's "Odyssey" -- Obama discussed the role of the
courts in civil rights. 

Today, aides say, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., will seize on some of those
remarks, as hyped by Mr. Drudge.

Obama in that interview said, "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," Obama said, "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 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, as least as it's been interpreted, and
Warren Court interpreted 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."

Obama said "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
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 stuffer from that."

A caller, "Karen," asked if it's "too late for that kind of reparative work
economically?"  And she asked if that work should be done through the courts
or through legislation.

"Maybe I'm showing my bias here as a legislator as well as a law professor,"
Obama said. "I'm not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive
change through the courts. The institution just isn't structured that way."

Presumably McCain will go after Obama in ways
<http://hotair.com/archives/2008/10/27/smells-like-socialist-spirit/> some
on the conservative bloggosphere are today, accusing Obama of calling it a
"tragedy" for not venturing into "the issues of redistribution of wealth" --
though Obama's campaign says that's a twisting of his words.

"In this interview back in 2001, Obama was talking about the civil rights
movement - and the kind of work that has to be done on the ground to make
sure that everyone can live out the promise of equality," Obama campaign
spokesman Bill Burton says. "Make no mistake, this has nothing to do with
Obama's economic plan or his plan to give the middle class a tax cut. It's
just another distraction from an increasingly desperate McCain campaign."

Burton continues: "In the interview, Obama went into extensive detail to
explain why the courts should not get into that business of 'redistributing'
wealth. Obama's point - and what he called a tragedy - was that legal
victories in the Civil Rights led too many people to rely on the courts to
change society for the better. That view is shared by conservative judges
and legal scholars across the country.

"As Obama has said before and written about, he believes that change comes
from the bottom up - not from the corridors of Washington," Burton says. "He
worked in struggling communities to improve the economic situation of people
on the South Side of Chicago, who lost their jobs when the steel plants
closed. And he's worked as a legislator to provide tax relief and health
care to middle-class families. And so Obama's point was simply that if we
want to improve economic conditions for people in this country, we should do
so by bringing people together at the community level and getting everyone
involved in our democratic process."

 

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