Beyond the Dome

Here’s what the final week of the campaign is looking like for Barack Obama. He’s going all out, trying to make sure voters see him as a calm, non-radical guy who just wants to restore “competence” to the federal government.

He’s been giving interviews to Colorado TV stations, promising no “lurches to the left” if he wins the White House and the Democrats keep control of Congress, and pledging to “focus on a few things that have to be done well” and make sure taxpayers’ money isn’t wasted. In Canton, Ohio today, he declared that “we don’t need bigger government or smaller government. We need a better government — a more competent government — a government that upholds the values we hold in common as Americans.”

And then, someone found an old broadcast from a Chicago public radio program in 2001 in which Obama seemed to regret that the Supreme Court never took up “redistribution of wealth” during the civil rights movement. He also said one of the “tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement 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.”

See? Scary socialist.

John McCain called him “Barack the Redistributor” in Dayton, Ohio today, arguing that Obama “believes in redistributing wealth, not in policies that grow our economy and create jobs.” House Minority Leader John A. Boehner warned in a statement that Obama “still wants to ‘redistribute’ our tax dollars and ‘spread the wealth around,’ giving money to people who don’t pay taxes rather than growing our economy for everybody.”

This one has been harder than the usual job for Obama’s rapid-response team. Not because it’s clear-cut that Obama actually meant what McCain and Boehner say he meant — it isn’t — but because his remarks came in the context of such a long, dry panel discussion with legal scholars that it isn’t easy to explain what he actually said.

Obama spokesman Bill Burton simply declared in a statement that Obama “did not say that the courts should get into the business of redistributing wealth at all,” and left it at that.

Here’s the full audio of the interview. (It’s one of four Obama appearances from that year — the “court and civil rights” program of Jan. 18, 2001.)

Earlier in the program, Obama talks about equalizing school funding and providing equal opportunity for education, which muddies the waters just enough to suggest that “redistribution of wealth” might not mean taking Joe the Plumber’s hard-earned tax dollars after all.

And Cass Sunstein, an Obama adviser who was one of his colleagues at the University of Chicago law school, argued in a blog post for The New Republic that Obama actually was criticizing the civil rights movement for relying on the courts too much in general, and that “redistribution” is a general term that applies to lots of things, including education, health care, the Earned Income Tax Credit, the progressive income tax, and even Social Security.

If anything, the biggest revelation of the Chicago public radio interview isn’t Obama’s economic views, but the way he talked about constitutional law back in the days when he was still teaching students as well as serving in the Illinois Senate. It’s probably the closest most people will come to hearing one of his lectures, and it’s much more consistent with the non-threatening image he’s trying to project now than the “Barack the Redistributor” image McCain would like voters to see.

On the down side, you need a really strong cup of coffee to sit through it.