Not content with calling Obama's middle class tax cuts "welfare" or pushing reporters to cover the Ashley Todd hoax, the McCain campaign is going for the full Willie Horton, based on that 2001 radio interview (see Tim's take here):
ABC News' Imtiyaz Delawala Reports: Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin went beyond her running mate's recent attack on Sen. Barack Obama -- inaccurately claiming that Obama called the lack of "redistributive change" during the civil rights movement a "tragedy" -- and used Obama's 2001 interview to insinuate that he wants to re-write the U.S. Constitution and appoint radical Supreme Court justices and judges who would confiscate the property of American citizens.
[...]
"There he was talking about the need for quote 'redistributive change,'" Palin said on the campus of Shippensburg University Tuesday night. “Sen. Obama said that he regretted that the Supreme Court hadn't been more radical. And he described the Court's refusal to take up the issues of redistribution of wealth as a tragedy. And he said he also regretted that the Supreme Court didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers there in the Constitution”.
ABC does a great job of pointing out that Obama actually said the opposite, that the court's job isn't to focus on redistributive change, and that in fact the "tragedy" was in reference to civil rights activists relying on the court for change. What Obama actually said was:
I think the tragedies of the civil rights movement was, because the civil rights movements became so court-focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing, and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change.The only way Palin's insinuation makes sense is if you pretend that all those other words were never said, which is something the McCain campaign has a real habit of doing. It's incredibly childish.
But the basic idea behind the "redistributionist" language, complete with welfare references, is that as a black person, Obama will take away white people's property and give it to black people. As Michelle Malkin pointed out, Zimbabwe tried having a black leader, and white people were deprived of their property, so it's only natural to assume the same thing would happen if Obama was elected.
--A. Serwer
