SOCIALISM?!

Ah, here we are in 2008, a politician advocates more progressive taxation, and the label Socialist is taken out of the closet, dusted off, and applied to him by his political opponents. To further clarify their claim, they take a 2001 interview out of context, ignoring most of what was said, and claim Obama said, more or less, that the real tragedy was that the courts didn't intervene to make "redistributive change."

Emily Bazelon has a superb piece up at Slate.com; and she explains the contorted mess that risque soundbites have created in McCainland.

On the stump, John McCain now segues from Joe the Plumber to "Barack the Redistributor." As in "redistributor of wealth and taker of your money." These are the Republicans' bad words of the week, much as "community organizer" was during this summer's convention. The prompt is a 2001 Chicago Public Radio interview Obama gave, pushed by Fox television and the Drudge Report on Monday.

Oh, my.

Of course, Obama actually said that the real tragedy of the civil rights movement was that it overly relied upon the courts, specifically the Supreme Court, to initiate change. And then he goes on to reject using the courts for the purposes of economic redistribution:

What comes through far more clearly in the interview is a tactical point: Obama thinks it's a mistake to rely too much on courts to further any broad agenda. He says, "I think one of the tragedies of the civil rights movement was that the civil rights movement became so court-focused. I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and organizing activities on the ground that are able to bring about the coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change, and in some ways we still suffer from that." And then he continues, "Maybe I am showing my bias here as a legislator as well as a law professor, but you know … the institution just isn't structured that way."

In other words, if you wish to intiate a change redistributing power--economic, political, whatever--using the courts won't be successful because the courts aren't structured to bring about that sort of change.

Wow, it's amazing what happens when you actually read for the purpose of understanding rather than reading for the purpose of scoring points of the speaker. Amazing.

So, it turns out that Obama really has a "conservative" view on which public institutions should initiative redistributive change:

It's a truism that conservatives favor legislative change and see the courts as an undemocratic end run around it. They especially think that about any push for "redistributive change," Obama's subject here. In this interview, Obama comes down on the traditionally conservative side, albeit for presumably different reasons. He thinks the civil rights movement misjudged the courts' utility—they were good for providing for a right to vote and for black people to sit with white people at a lunch counter, to use Obama's examples, but they're not good for deciding who's entitled to what government benefits or property rights.

In the end, Obama is no more a "redistributionist ideologue" than McCain:

OK, but if Obama doesn't think the courts will wave the magic wand of redistribution, isn't he still pulling for the legislature to wave it? This is where the McCain attack, in Sunstein's words, "is so ludicrous that to deny it makes one feel like one has come to crazy land." On the one hand, of course Obama is for redistribution. So is any politician, including John McCain, who favors a progressive income tax. Governments constantly take more from one group and give more to another. That's what Medicare is about, and the whole idea of funding public schools in the first place.

Bazelon concludes that McCain's rhetoric is just that, campaign rhetoric:

For this—the Obama version of large-scale wealth distribution—there is no evidence. There is only his support for garden-variety social-welfare programs, like unemployment insurance and the Earned Income Tax Credit, a tax refund for low-income working people. "Of course it's not a surprise to say that Obama wants the EITC or to expand the unemployment insurance program, or that he's in favor of education reform that's going to cost some money and will give a decent education to people who don't have it," Sunstein says. "But we already knew that. And it's not socialism." True. But it doesn't make for much of an attack on the stump.

It is very likely that more on the absurdity of the "socialism" charge will follow.

As an aside: Does anyone remember any political campaign of the past twenty years that was as anti-intellectual as McCain/Palin? Progressive taxes as socialism and Young Earth Creationism!