The Real Obama

The Real Obama




By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, October 27, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Election '08: Barack Obama's "spread the wealth" remark to Ohio's Joe the Plumber was a rare peek at the radical behind the guarded rhetoric. A newly-unearthed 2001 radio interview provides full view.

The real, unguarded Barack Obama has been exposed, and Americans should hear it for themselves before they make the most consequential electoral decision of their lifetime.

Speaking to Chicago public radio station WBEZ seven years ago, then-Illinois state Sen. Obama reflected on the history of the civil rights movement.

"Where the movement succeeded," he said, "was in court-imposed remedies regarding segregation and voting rights."

But where it failed was that "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."

The man now a week away from possibly being elected president then lamented that "the civil rights movement became so court-focused" that it veered away from action to "put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change, and in some ways we still suffer from that."

"Redistributive change" — so that's the kind of "change we need" and "change we can believe in" that a President Obama would give America. Exactly as he told Joe the Plumber.

It's pretty hard to spin a term as obvious as "redistributive change," but the Obama campaign is doing its desperate best. He was actually defending conservative legal principles, an Obama legal adviser absurdly told the Politico Web site.

The 2001 interview also finds an unwary Obama saying the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren — which in Warren's 1953-to-1969 tenure was the most activist and power-grabbing in U.S. history — "wasn't that radical" because "it didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it has been interpreted."

Asked by a caller about further "reparative economic work" from the federal courts, Sen. Obama replied that he was "not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts," but that "any three of us sitting here could come up with a rationale for bringing about economic change through the courts."

As president, however, "economic change through the courts" would be only a Supreme Court appointment or two away, supported by dozens of Obama's lower-court appointments.

Congress too is eagerly getting ready to enact "redistributive change." Last week, top House Democrats discussed taxing Americans' pretax contributions to 401(k) plans, with the promise of tens of billions of dollars in new government revenues every year — plus forcing workers to invest in government debt, shifting trillions of dollars from private savings to government control.

Could that be part of what Obama meant in Colorado this weekend when he warned, "make no mistake . . . we will all need to sacrifice"? Was it part of what running mate Joe Biden meant last week when he said of corporate executives, "their pensions go first"? Do workers' pensions then "go" next?

Too many Americans think this radical urban organizer is just another Clinton or Gore. But a vote for Obama is a vote for socialist "spreading of wealth," as Obama admitted to Joe the Plumber, and a vote for "major redistributive change," as he put it in 2001.