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asaris · 10-27-2008, 09:09 AM

There was a post on one of my legal blogs talking about that interview. I'll quote it here, but I want to also point out that the interview is from almost 10 years ago. It's entirely plausible to think that Obama has moved to the center since then.

I've snipped the post a bit. It's written by David Bernstein, who is emphatically not an Obama supporter. In fact, he's one of the further right people on a generally right-leaning libertarian blog. The full post can be found here.

Quote:

Before getting to the controversy, the whole interview is worth listening to for another reason: Obama gives a very impressive performance as a constitutional scholar. Even though he was holding down other jobs while teaching at Chicago, he clearly had thought a lot about constitutional history, and how social change is or is not brought about through the courts. Among other things, I was impressed that rather than accept the rather cartoonish view that often prevails about the practical significance of Brown v. Board of Education, he knew that very few black students in the South were attending integrated schools as late as the early 1960s (almost a decade after Brown), and that it was only the threat of a cutoff of federal funds that really got desegregation moving. Being realistic about the practical effect of Brown is heresy in some circles, but Obama is correct. Relatedly, Obama was clearly influenced by Rosenberg/Klarman thesis that the Supreme Court rarely diverges much from social consensus, and can't be expected to.

[...]

What I don't understand is why this is surprising, or interesting enough to be headlining Drudge [UPDATE: Beyond the fact that Drudge's headline suggests, wrongly, that Obama states that the Supreme Court should have ordered the redistribution of income; as Orin says, his views on the subject, beyond that it was an error to promote this agenda in historical context, are unclear.]. At least since the passage of the first peacetime federal income tax law about 120 years ago, redistribution of wealth has been a (maybe the) primary item on the left populist/progressive/liberal agenda, and has been implicitly accepted to some extent by all but the most libertarian Republicans as well. Barack Obama is undoubtedly liberal, and his background is in political community organizing in poor communities. Is it supposed to be a great revelation that Obama would like to see wealth more "fairly" distributed than it is currently?

It's true that most Americans, when asked by pollsters, think that it's emphatically not the government's job to redistribute wealth. But are people so stupid as to not recognize that when politicians talk about a "right to health care," or "equalizing educational opportunities," or "making the rich pay a fair share of taxes," or "ensuring that all Americans have the means to go to college," and so forth and so on, that they are advocating the redistribution of wealth? Is it okay for a politician to talk about the redistribution of wealth only so long as you don't actually use phrases such as "redistribution" or "spreading the wealth," in which case he suddenly becomes "socialist"? If so, then American political discourse, which I never thought to be especially elevated, is in even a worse state than I thought.

In general, I feel that the only reason people complain about Obama's socialism is that they have no idea what real socialism looks like. On the socialism/laissez-faire scale, Obama's probably in the middle. And it might be correct to think that the ideal economic policy is somewhat further to the right of Obama, though I would disagree. It's certainly not correct to say that Obama's anything resembling socialist, unless you thinks he's some sort of secret socialist. In which case, why not believe he's a secret muslim or baby-eater? There's about the same amount of evidence for those claims.