[Vision2020] PRUDEN: A game-changer by Obama

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PRUDEN: A game-changer by Obama
Wesley Pruden
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
ANALYSIS/OPINION:

If your toilet is stopped up by something really big and smells really
bad, you'll probably need a plumber. Joe the Plumber, as it turns out,
diagnosed the trouble, and yesterday we learned what it was. It smells
really bad.

The tape recording of an interview that Barack Obama gave to Radio
Station WBEZ in Chicago in 2001 surfaced, and in that interview Mr.
Obama, then a law professor and a state senator, lays out how he would
redistribute the wealth. He sounds like a man with a plan.

The interview explains a lot, beginning with the attempt, abetted by a
mainstream media that no longer tries to hide its slavish obeisance to
the Democratic campaign, to destroy Joe the Plumber and shut down
discussion of the implications of what the candidate said.

Mr. Obama doesn't think much of the Constitution, or even of the
Supreme Court justices who have rewritten it over the years to
accommodate notions of "social justice." The Warren Court, which wrote
finis to public-school segregation with its unanimous Brown v. Board
of Education decision in 1954, has been decried since as radical, but
it wasn't radical enough. Earl Warren only pretended to be a soldier
of the revolution.

One of the "tragedies of the civil-rights movement," Mr. Obama says,
is that the Supreme Court did not address redistribution of wealth,
probably because of the inherent difficulty of achieving such goals
through the courts. The Supreme Court did not break from the
restraints of the Constitution and "we still suffer from that." Mr.
Obama is not "optimistic" that the Supreme Court can achieve
redistribution of wealth — of taking from the workers to give to the
deadbeats — but he obviously thinks he knows how to do it. A president
with a compliant Congress, which he expects to be in January, can do
it through legislation and "administration."

The Barack Obama of this interview clearly does not think much of what
the Founding Fathers bequeathed to us: "The Constitution reflected the
enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on to this day. The
framers had that same blind spot . . . the fundamental flaw of this
country."

Mr. Obama is a gifted politician, with the smarts to understand that
this could be the "game-changer" that leaves his campaign, almost
picture-perfect until now, in ruins. He understands that he has to fly
under the radar for now. That's why his campaign apparatus moves
swiftly to dismiss questions about the Obama paper trail, such as it
is, and to crush anyone bold and foolish enough to inquire into the
real Barack Obama.

Joe the Plumber learned the hard way what happens to such questioners,
and when a television reporter in Florida asked Joe Biden whether his
running mate is a Marxist economist, good old Joe, usually eager to
talk about everything, acted as if the interviewer had accused him of
serial killing or child molesting. Some things just aren't to be
talked about, not now. Not Barack Obama's radical notions about
redistributing the wealth — which is, after all, the essence of
Marxism. Not about how he intends to replace fundamental American
values with values that most Americans, if they knew about them, would
regard as alien and hostile.

If John McCain wants to change the game over the next seven days,
he'll have to break through the media screen to spell out, clearly,
often and in detail, the implications of what Barack Obama actually
means when he talks about how to redistribute the wealth. To
redistribute wealth, you first have to confiscate it from those who
earned it with hard work, and the way to do that is with confiscatory
taxes. Then you give it to those who didn't earn it. Such
explanations, made with cool detachment, once would have been the work
of the newspapers and even the television networks. But not this year.
Mr. McCain can expect real grief from the media when the polls
tighten.

There's nothing ambiguous about Mr. Obama's radical views, as revealed
in this interview. He clearly thinks the Constitution was a "tragedy,"
that the men who wrote it were not the revolutionary heroes plain
Americans regard them to be, and their work must be corrected by the
surviving radicals of the '60s and their progeny. Anyone who listens
to this interview, available on YouTube.com, understands why Michelle
Obama was never proud of her country until she thought the opportunity
was at hand to destroy the country to save it, and why Barack Obama
could spend 20 years comfortably listening to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright
exhort God to damn America.
Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/oct/28/a-game-changer-by-obama-himself/