Rebutting Drudge’s “redistributive” YouTube

Drudge put out a youtube video of snippets from an Obama conversation with a local Chicago radio station, which seems to imply that he is promoting “redistributive change” and adds to the Right’s argument that he is a socialist. However, there is also that problem of context that both sides love to leave out. For example, pounding McCain for saying “100 years in Iraq” among other things. Obama at the time was a professor of Law, Poverty and Race at the Chicago School of Law. In the interview he is talking about the Warren Court, which ended segregation and stopped the injustice of Jim Crow. He then says that the Court although successful at bringing about civil rights for the oppressed did nothing to infuse wealth into these depressed areas. Wealth that was needed for things like public schools and infrastructure. Without this wealth, the argument goes, disparity would remain. This was also Martin Luther King Jr.’s argument.

Now Obama had 4 interviews with this radio station and they can all be heard, in all their contextual glory, here: http://apps.wbez.org/blog/?p=639

Secondly, Obama is a law professor. As we all should know, these professors love to argue both sides. They love to play devil’s advocate and Obama is known for taking advisers, listening to both sides, making his own arguments, counter arguments and then making up his mind on the issue. A good account of this can be found here — http://www.politico.com/arena/perm/Cass_R__Sunstein_BDDDA786-0C3A-44E4-B22C-6FA964EB6199.html — where one of Obama’s Harvard Law professors, Prof. Sunstein, talks about how the two mulled over the FISA bill earlier this year. Being able to argue both sides is a good thing. Being able to take in all points of view in order to make a decision is something we would want everyone to do, not to mention our President. However, taking snippets of what people say out of context, while they are arguing one side or the other, can always paint someone in a bad light. We can be arguing the pros and cons of Socialism, and although I believe in Capitalism, one can only take my pro argument for Socialism and argue I am a socialist.

High-minded legal speak on issues can always be confusing (even to law students, lawyers and judges), but dumbing it down to an out of context sound bite is quite dishonorable.

Prof. Sunstein, from the previous politico article, explains what Obama was talking about:
http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/1008/Obama_advisor_pushes_back_on_redistribution.html#comments
A top legal adviser to Barack Obama, Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein, said today that Obama’s 2001 remarks on “redistributive change” — pushed hard on the right today — are being misinterpreted, and that he was actually articulating “conservative” legal principles, and that the then-law professor’s “law-speak” was being misinterpreted.

Obama’s remarks came in a long interview on civil rights and Constitutional law with two other law professors on the Chicago public radio station WBEZ in 2001. (The full transcript is here, and audio is here.) Sunstein argued that Obama is discussing redistribution in a relatively narrow legal context: The discussion in the 1970s of whether the Supreme Court would create the right to a social safety net — to things like education and welfare. He also noted that in the interview, Obama appears to express support for the court’s rejection of that line of argument, saying instead that the civil rights movement should aim for the same goals through legislative action.

“What the critics are missing is that the term ‘redistribution’ didn’t man in the Constitutional context equalized wealth or anything like that. It meant some positive rights, most prominently the right to education, and also the right to a lawyer,” Sunstein said. “What he’s saying – this is the irony of it – he’s basically taking the side of the conservatives then and now against the liberals.”

The first mention of redistribution, which does not appear on the YouTube clip, comes when Obama discusses a 1973 Supreme Court ruling finding that there is no right to education.

“One other area where the civil rights area has changed… is at the state level you now have state supreme courts and state laws that in some ways have adopted the ethos of the Warren Court. A classic example would be something like public education, where after Brown v. Board, a major issue ends up being redistribution — how do we get more money into the schools, and how do we actually create equal schools and equal educational opportunity? Well, the court in a case called San Antonio v. Rodriguez in the early ’70s basically slaps those kinds of claims down, and says, ‘You know what, we as a court have no power to examine issues of redistribution and wealth inequalities. With respect to schools, that’s not a race issue, thats a wealth issue and something and we can’t get into.”

Later in the interview, Obama seemed to concur with conservative and mainstream liberal scholars on the court’s more modest view of its powers:

“Maybe i am showing my bias here as a legislator as well as a law professor, but you know, I am not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts,” he said. “You know the institution just isn’t structured that way. Just look at very rare examples where during he desegregation era the court was willing to, for example, order … changes that cost money to local school district[s], and the court was very uncomfortable with it. It was hard to manage, it was hard to figure out, you start getting into all sorts of separation of powers issues in terms of the court monitoring or engaging in a process that is essentially is administrative and takes a lot of time. The court is not very good at it, and politically it is hard to legitimize opinions from the court in that regard. So i think that although you can craft theoretical justifications for it legally, I think any three of us sitting here could come up with a rationale for bringing about economic change through the courts, I think that as a practical matter that our institutions are just poorly equipped to do it.”

Obama did suggest in the interview that he favors “redistributive change,” and that it should come though “political and organizing activities,” and that’s the discussion Republicans are jumping on, arguing that it shows the same philosophical impulse as Obama’s now-famous comment to an Ohio plumber that he favors “spread[ing] the wealth around.”

“Now we know that the slogans ‘change you can believe in’ and ‘change we need’ are code words for Barack Obama’s ultimate goal: ‘redistributive change,’” said McCain adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin. “No wonder he wants to appoint judges that legislate from the bench – as insurance in case a unified Democratic government under his control fails to meet his basic goal: taking money away from people who work for it and giving it to people who Barack Obama believes deserve it. Europeans call it socialism, Americans call it welfare, and Barack Obama calls it change.”

But Sunstein argued that in the context of a long, legalistic interview, the words referred to the narrower forms of redistribution — education, legal filing fees, legal representation, and other issues — that had been discussed in the case Obama cited and in discussions around it.

A University of Chicago law professor who appeared on the 2001 WBEZ program with Obama, and who also supports him, Dennis Hutchinson, described the interview as “not a bombshell.”

“He’s saying you don’t achieve stable social change through judicial activism,” Hutchinson said. As for “redistribution of wealth,” “that’s what a progressive tax system does,” he said.

“It’s two minutes and 17 seconds of what I could say in front of a class,” he said, suggesting reporters go back to speculating about Obama’s cabinet picks.

UPDATE: The legal scholars over at Volokh have a similarly underwhelmed take.

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