McCain attacks Obama on redistribution
John McCain yesterday sought to use a seven-year-old radio interview to buttress his argument that Democrat Barack Obama wants to redistribute wealth.
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The interview - first reported by the Drudge Report and highlighted by conservative bloggers and websites - was with a Chicago radio station on Sept. 6, 2001, while Obama was an Illinois state senator and a law school lecturer.
Obama, talking about the civil rights movement and Supreme Court, says: "I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples so that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order [and] as long as I could pay for it I would be OK. 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."
Calling it one of the "tragedies" of the movement, he added 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 and in some ways we still suffer from that."
The sentiment isn't all that different from those of civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., who after the voting rights triumphs moved toward greater emphasis on poverty and economic justice.
But at a rally in Dayton, Ohio, McCain mentioned the interview, saying that "it is amazing that even at this late hour, we are still learning more about Senator Obama and his agenda."
"That is what change means for Barack the redistributor," the Republican said. "It means taking your money and giving it to someone else. He believes in redistributing wealth, not in policies that grow our economy and create jobs."
Obama spokesman Bill Burton dismissed the interview as "a fake news controversy drummed up by the all too common alliance of Fox News, the Drudge Report, and John McCain, who apparently decided to close out his campaign with the same false, desperate attacks that have failed for months."
"Obama did not say that the courts should get into the business of redistributing wealth at all," Burton said in a statement.
The Obama campaign also referred to comments made by Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor who is advising Obama, to the Politico website. Sunstein said Obama was discussing redistribution in a narrow legal context of whether the Supreme Court would create rights to education and welfare, and was actually taking the conservative position that those rights should be won through legislative action and not the courts.
FOON RHEE
Sandra Schultz Newman said she regrets that she did not review the final draft more carefully before it was released.
The e-mail sent Thursday to 75,000 Jewish voters in Pennsylvania warns of the danger of a second Holocaust because of the threats to Israel from its neighbors.
Republicans quickly disavowed the e-mail and fired the campaign consultant who helped draft it.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
HOLD ON TO YOUR PURSE STRINGS, YOUR MONEYBELTS, YOUR MATTRESSES...
BECAUSE OBAMA WILL BE ABLE TO APPOINT 3 SUPREME COURT JUSTICES, AND YOU KNOW WHAT'S GOING TO HAPPEN THEN!
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