country . Unfortunately, I think that recognition requires that we make sacrifices and this country has not always been willing to make the sacrifices that are necessary to bring about a new day and a new age .” (Emphasis added.)
Two points are evident here: (a) Obama believes that the “collective” is superior to the “individual” and that “collective salvation” must take precedence over individual action or freedom; and (b) it’s our fault that the country hasn’t reached that vaunted “collective salvation” yet because we’ve been selfish, capitalist pigs, but he was going to move our consciousness to a higher, less greedy plane.
In 2001, as an Illinois state senator, he gave an interview to WBEZ radio and advocated wealth redistribution as reparations for slavery and other injustices toward “previously dispossessed peoples.” He said, “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. And to that extent as radical as people tried to characterize the Warren court, it wasn’t that radical.”
And then Obama made one of the most revealing statements of his political life: “[The Warren court] didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution , at least as it’s been interpreted, and the Warren court interpreted it in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties.”
Consider his explosive words: “break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution.” This is a revolutionary sentiment. Obama is calling for actively charging against what the Founders intended and enshrined in the Constitution. His comments go further than simple leftist arguments about the “living Constitution” in which the document conceptually passively evolves. He is calling for a concerted and deliberate effort to shatter the very constraints the Founders put in place—to prevent abuses of the kind he’s advocating! This is the very essence of Obama’s redistributive radicalism: it’s all about “breaking free” from the Founders’ constraints to build a wholly different kind of America. His entire kook philosophy is summed up in that one sentence.
He continued: “It says what the states can’t do to you, it says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf . And that hasn’t shifted. One of the I think 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 redistributed change and in some ways we still suffer from that.” (Emphasis added.) In fact, the Constitution explicitly limits the powers of the government because the Founders feared wild-eyed activist power hogs like Obama. But it is those same limits from which Obama would like us to “break free.” No wonder he’ll take any opportunity to get the words “Constitution” and “negative” in the same sentence.
There was, however, one phrase in the Constitution Obama found particularly useful to his mission. As he began running for president in earnest, he and his inner circle, Axelrod, Iranian-born Chicago crony Valerie Jarrett, strategist David Plouffe, and wife, Michelle, kept the focus squarely on the carefully crafted image of Barack as Symbol. He understood the necessity of keeping himself as ambiguous as possible, saying in his second book, The Audacity of Hope , “I am a blank screen, on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” He knew the power intrinsic in the ability to be both a blank screen
Two points are evident here: (a) Obama believes that the “collective” is superior to the “individual” and that “collective salvation” must take precedence over individual action or freedom; and (b) it’s our fault that the country hasn’t reached that vaunted “collective salvation” yet because we’ve been selfish, capitalist pigs, but he was going to move our consciousness to a higher, less greedy plane.
In 2001, as an Illinois state senator, he gave an interview to WBEZ radio and advocated wealth redistribution as reparations for slavery and other injustices toward “previously dispossessed peoples.” He said, “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. And to that extent as radical as people tried to characterize the Warren court, it wasn’t that radical.”
And then Obama made one of the most revealing statements of his political life: “[The Warren court] didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution , at least as it’s been interpreted, and the Warren court interpreted it in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties.”
Consider his explosive words: “break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution.” This is a revolutionary sentiment. Obama is calling for actively charging against what the Founders intended and enshrined in the Constitution. His comments go further than simple leftist arguments about the “living Constitution” in which the document conceptually passively evolves. He is calling for a concerted and deliberate effort to shatter the very constraints the Founders put in place—to prevent abuses of the kind he’s advocating! This is the very essence of Obama’s redistributive radicalism: it’s all about “breaking free” from the Founders’ constraints to build a wholly different kind of America. His entire kook philosophy is summed up in that one sentence.
He continued: “It says what the states can’t do to you, it says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf . And that hasn’t shifted. One of the I think 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 redistributed change and in some ways we still suffer from that.” (Emphasis added.) In fact, the Constitution explicitly limits the powers of the government because the Founders feared wild-eyed activist power hogs like Obama. But it is those same limits from which Obama would like us to “break free.” No wonder he’ll take any opportunity to get the words “Constitution” and “negative” in the same sentence.
There was, however, one phrase in the Constitution Obama found particularly useful to his mission. As he began running for president in earnest, he and his inner circle, Axelrod, Iranian-born Chicago crony Valerie Jarrett, strategist David Plouffe, and wife, Michelle, kept the focus squarely on the carefully crafted image of Barack as Symbol. He understood the necessity of keeping himself as ambiguous as possible, saying in his second book, The Audacity of Hope , “I am a blank screen, on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” He knew the power intrinsic in the ability to be both a blank screen
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