It's pretty clear that, having finally found their narrative at the very last minute in the form of a plumber named Joe in Ohio who thinks that Obama is poised to envelope his plumbing dreams in a web of William Ayers-conceived Stalinism, the McCain campaign is prepared to flog the issue of wealth redistribution to death, whilst hoping that nobody notices that AIG and every bank in the world is carting off tall stacks of cheddar by the wheelbarrowful. So, at the behest of some crazy Drudge pimpage, the McCain campaign is all a-flutter over a 2001 interview Obama gave on a Chicago public radio station. Here's Jake Tapper on the matter:
Today, aides say, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., will seize on some of those remarks, as hyped by Mr. Drudge.
Obama in that interview said, "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 okay."
"But," Obama said, "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."
Obama spokesman Bill Burton had to shrug and point out the obvious: "In the interview, Obama went into extensive detail to explain why the courts should not get into that business of 'redistributing' wealth. Obama's point -- and what he called a tragedy -- was that legal victories in the Civil Rights led too many people to rely on the courts to change society for the better."
Obama legal adviser Cass Sunstein also defended Obama's radio remarks:
"What the critics are missing is that the term 'redistribution' didn't mean in the Constitutional context equalized wealth or anything like that. It meant some positive rights, most prominently the right to education, and also the right to a lawyer...What he's saying - this is the irony of it - he's basically taking the side of the conservatives then and now against the liberals."
In other words, Obama, at some point in the past, used the word "redistribution," which to the McCain campaign is always a code word for Marxist terror-abortions performed by the ghost of Lenin. The end.