The Latest Obama Bombshell....fizzle

I was getting all psyched...Drudge reported a major find - someone dug up a 2001 interview with Obama lamenting the Supreme Court's not getting involved in income re-distribution...that the constitution was flawed and too limiting...that it was a tragedy "economic justice" was not on the court's agenda. In my car in the early afternoon, I heard Rush blasting Obama over the same thing, echoed later by Sean Hannity. Surely, I thought, surely this would be the smoking gun to knock Obama down a peg or too (that's all I can hope for these days - his winning is a fait accompli, and I'm not much interested in seeing a President McCain anyway). So I was anxious to get home to play the recordings.

Alas, Obama said nothing of the sort. In typical Obama fashion, he circumnavigates with his arguments rather than just making his point. But what he was actually saying was kind of conservative - that "economic justice" issues should be pursued through the legislative process, not the courts. He argued that the Warren Court wan't that radical - "it didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the constitution." When he spoke of one of the "tragedies of the civil rights movement," he meant that rather than getting things done through the political process, it tried to get everything accomplished through the courts and that this flawed approach continues to this day. While I would disagree that it's a 'tragedy' - 'blessing' would be my judgement - I wholeheartedly agree that political goals should be pursued politically rather than judicially.

He goes on to suggest that you could come up with legal rationales for "redistributive" policies, but says that this would present separation-of-powers concerns as well as administrative pitfalls that the courts are ill equipped to deal with. Again - a basically moderate position toward the role of the courts. The recording does suggest he has some very liberal views and may well believe in redistributing wealth, but in an economy that sinks further by the day, how many people is that going to scare?

UPDATE: Steve Sailer has a much more skeptical and needless-to-say incisive commentary on Obama's musings. I still think this is going nowhere as a campaign issue because a) people aren't really in a particularly anti-redistributive mood at the moment and b) the racial angle to Obama's thoughts (that he's interested in white-to-black redistribution specifically, as evidenced by the civil-rights context of the discussion) will simply not be discussed publicly in this campaign because such discussion is simply off-limits.