Well, you have now officially been forewarned. A vote for Obama is a vote for wealth redistribution. No if or buts. Obama argues that the Warren court and the civil rights movement should have established a Federal right to distribute wealth. He made the argument in a 2001 interview with Boston public radio. Since the Gallup poll found that 84% of Americans oppose wealth distribution and only 13% approve of it, you may wish to reconsider your vote. He said:

If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court. I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed people, so that now I would have the right to vote. I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order as long as I could pay for it I’d be o.k.

But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical.

It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as its been interpreted and Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you.

Says what the Federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf, and that hasn’t shifted and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, um, 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 coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that.

He later adds that though it would be easy to come up with legal arguments justifying the Supreme Court mandating wealth redistribution, he does not believe it to be politically achievable. Hence, he suggests using legislative means to achieve that goal. But listen for yourself: