No! Deliberately misreading Obama?
Oct. 28th, 2008 10:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsThis morning I was listening to The Mike Gallagher show where he was trying to spread the evil further by claiming, perhaps accurately but, you know, I really don't care, that William Ayers has a Free Mumia poster in his office at the University of Illinois at Chicago. It just sounded like desperation.
But then he went off in the direction of an interview from 2001 in which Obama talked about the civil rights movement and its attempts at seeking the "redistribution of wealth." He played the interview at length, and then went off on how Obama was arguing that the courts could and should have done more. And I didn't get that at all from the quote I heard.
Here's the Obama quote in full, from ABC News:
It is a staple of conservative thought that the courts are not the place to seek change. If you want to change the law, change the law, don't have the courts go haring off looking for an excuse to "interpret" the law in a way favorable to your argument.
It seems to me that, if anything, Obama has chosen a path much more amenable to his vision of actually changing the law: despite graduating with a Harvard Law Degree magna cum laude and working as a professor of law, he's now a politician: he's taken the path that he sees as being the most positive toward changing the law in a meaningful way. He stayed out of the courts. The civil rights movement there, as far as he's concerned, is done.
Drudge had the headline (in his bombastic all-caps way), "TRAGEDY THAT 'REDISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH' NOT PURSUED BY SUPREME COURT." But that's not what Obama said. He said it was a tragedy that the civil rights movement became so focused on the courts as the way to address their grievances that they failed to create a meaningful, principled legislative package with which to push their ideals, or large-scale, people-driven instutions to back them. Having established the reality of de jure equality (a negative right), the civil rights movement became habituated to using the courts to push their agenda, when what they were really seeking were positive rights requiring changes to tax codes and civil services.
You might not agree with Obama's position on the way the law, economy, and society interact. I don't agree with it myself. However, nowhere in the Constitution of the United States does it declare that we are a capitalist society, and the phrase in the preamble to "promote the general welfare" gives everyone who wants to argue their position a lot of wiggle room. But the overall sense of the interview I get is that Obama, for all his seeming "radicalism," is pursuing his goals in the most appropriate manner possible. Conservatives should get over their bile and admire both Obama's moral position: he's making the changes he wants the way they want him to.
And Drudge is just a bald-faced liar.
But then he went off in the direction of an interview from 2001 in which Obama talked about the civil rights movement and its attempts at seeking the "redistribution of wealth." He played the interview at length, and then went off on how Obama was arguing that the courts could and should have done more. And I didn't get that at all from the quote I heard.
Here's the Obama quote in full, from ABC News:
If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement, and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples, so that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at a lunch counter and order, and as long as I could pay for it, I'd be OK.Now, I don't know what Gallagher was going on about. It seems to me that in the central paragraph there, Obama is describing a conservative viewpoint, that the courts did not, and should not, legislate from the bench. The Warren Court, he seems to be saying, stuck with the traditional interpretation of the Constitution as one restraining the government from certain actions against its citizens, even to acheive goals the current administration and legislation depicts as necessary.
But, 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. And to that extent, as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn't that radical. It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, as least as it's been interpreted, and Warren Court interpreted in the same way that, generally, the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties, says what the states can't do to you, says what the federal government can't do to you, but it doesn't say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasn't shifted.
One of the, I think, the tragedies of the civil rights movement, was because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change, and in some ways, we still stuffer from that.
It is a staple of conservative thought that the courts are not the place to seek change. If you want to change the law, change the law, don't have the courts go haring off looking for an excuse to "interpret" the law in a way favorable to your argument.
It seems to me that, if anything, Obama has chosen a path much more amenable to his vision of actually changing the law: despite graduating with a Harvard Law Degree magna cum laude and working as a professor of law, he's now a politician: he's taken the path that he sees as being the most positive toward changing the law in a meaningful way. He stayed out of the courts. The civil rights movement there, as far as he's concerned, is done.
Drudge had the headline (in his bombastic all-caps way), "TRAGEDY THAT 'REDISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH' NOT PURSUED BY SUPREME COURT." But that's not what Obama said. He said it was a tragedy that the civil rights movement became so focused on the courts as the way to address their grievances that they failed to create a meaningful, principled legislative package with which to push their ideals, or large-scale, people-driven instutions to back them. Having established the reality of de jure equality (a negative right), the civil rights movement became habituated to using the courts to push their agenda, when what they were really seeking were positive rights requiring changes to tax codes and civil services.
You might not agree with Obama's position on the way the law, economy, and society interact. I don't agree with it myself. However, nowhere in the Constitution of the United States does it declare that we are a capitalist society, and the phrase in the preamble to "promote the general welfare" gives everyone who wants to argue their position a lot of wiggle room. But the overall sense of the interview I get is that Obama, for all his seeming "radicalism," is pursuing his goals in the most appropriate manner possible. Conservatives should get over their bile and admire both Obama's moral position: he's making the changes he wants the way they want him to.
And Drudge is just a bald-faced liar.
