The Final Days

by dday

I fully expect one last-minute “Shocking revelation!!! Must credit Drudge!!!eleventy!1!” for each remaining day until the election. John McCain has run his entire campaign from news cycle to news cycle, and so they’ll grasp on to whatever they can manage to find. Today’s big hit is a 2001 interview with Barack Obama about the civil rights movement, where he lamented the movement’s propensity to lean on the courts to mandate changes as opposed to building social change from the bottom up within local communities. That’s pretty much all he said, but because he used the words “redistribute” and “wealth” every conservative in America figures they’ve cracked the Da Vinci Code and revealed Obama for the Maoist-Leninist-Marxist-Communist-socialist that he is. The key quote is this:

“And I think one of the tragedies of the civil rights movement was that the civil rights movement became so court-focused, I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and organizing activities on the ground that are able to bring about the coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change, and in some ways we still suffer from that,” Obama said.

That’s not only a pretty conservative (not in the political sense) argument, it’s echoed by conservative legal scholars.

Now here’s how the McCain campaign deliberately misinterprets it:

“Barack Obama expressed his regret that the Supreme Court hadn’t been more ‘radical’ and described as a ‘tragedy’ the court’s refusal to take up ‘the issues of redistribution of wealth.’ No wonder he wants to appoint judges that legislate from the bench,” Holtz-Eakin continued.

This is reminiscent of the “global test” brouhaha from 2004, where Bush officials went ahead and misinterpreted a line from John Kerry for their own ends. It’s a very common and even tired political trick.

On the substance of whether or not we should accept “redistribution of wealth” in society, perhaps it’s better to flip the question. Does the McCain-Palin ticket defend the extreme concentrations of wealth – with CEOs earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a minute and sitting on the proceeds rather than creating jobs – that exists in this country today? The owners of the top 1% of wealth have more than the bottom 90%. The top 1% wage earners make more than the bottom 50%. Is that in any way sustainable or preferable? Can anyone look into the eyes of the 47 million who have no health care or the other 50-60 million who would go bankrupt if they tried to use theirs and tell them that extreme concentration of wealth is a positive social good?

I would put up the time-honored concept of progressive taxation against the attempt to protect the massive, depression-inducing income inequality we have today.

And furthermore, the definition of socialism, in general terms, is when the state collectivizes the ownership of the means of production and distributes wealth equally across segments of society. You know, like in Alaska.

“And Alaska—we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs. … It’s to maximize benefits for Alaskans, not an individual company, not some multinational somewhere, but for Alaskans.”

The words, folks, of Sarah Palin.