Tom Blumer - "Obama’s Redistributionist Obsession"

"Even by Internet speed standards, the reaction to the YouTube posting of a 2001 radio interview of Barack Obama on Chicago public radio station WBEZ has been fast and furious...

This is, and should be, a big, big deal, because it leaves Obama nowhere to hide. He clearly exposes himself as a far-left socialist who believes that income and wealth redistribution should have been an integral element of the 1960s civil rights movement...

Obama: You know, if you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the courts, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples...But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society...

And one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, because the civil rights movement became so court-focused, I think 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 to bring about redistributive change...

This is astounding stuff from a man who is one election away from the presidency. In politer tones, he is saying things that would make his mentors — Jeremiah Wright, Michael Pfleger, and William Ayers, not necessarily in that order — proud as peacocks. Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez are probably beaming too."