Obama’s disaffection with the Constitution and his pleas for larger unconstrained government go against the grain of American thinking.

In 2001, then state senator and University of Chicago law lecturer, Barack Obama, sat down for a public radio interview. At the time, he did not anticipate a near-term run for the presidency. He spoke candidly and deliberately about how to “break free” of Constitutional constraints against redistribution to provide “economic justice.” In the course of his interview, Obama laid out the electoral strategy of cobbling together the “power coalitions” that have been the hallmark of his 2012 re-election campaign. Politicians are said to speak the truth only by mistake. As his political career took off unexpectedly, Obama subsequently hid his views on redistribution, except in unguarded moments, such as “you didn’t build that” or “spreading the wealth around is good.” But on that day in 2001 in a Chicago public radio station, Obama candidly expounded his political and social philosophy as shaped by his critical-legal studies professors at Harvard and his experience as a community organizer in Chicago. The 2001 “Obama Raw” interview remains the one definitive Obama soliloquy on the Constitution, redistribution, and economic justice. Strangely, it has not entered the discourse of the 2012 campaign, although a diluted version (“I actually believe in redistribution, at least at a certain level, to make sure that everybody’s got a shot,” Loyola University, October 1998) is currently making the rounds. But it is Obama’s 2001 interview that represents, if ever there was one in politics, the smoking gun. Obama’s radio interview offers four main take aways, which I summarize using his own words where possible: First: “We still suffer from not having a Constitution that guarantees its citizens economic rights.” By positive economic rights, Obama means government protection against individual economic failures, such as low incomes, unemployment, poverty, lack of health care, and the like. Obama characterizes the Constitution as “a charter of negative liberties,” which “says what the states can’t do to you (and) 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.” (Ask not what you can do for your country but what your country can do for you, to paraphrase John F. Kennedy).

Second, Obama regrets that the Constitution places “essential constraints” on the government’s ability to provide positive economic rights and that “we have not broken free” of these Constitutional impediments. Obama views the absence of positive economic liberties that the government must supply as a flaw in the Constitution that must be corrected as part of a liberal political agenda. 

Third,

Obama concludes that we cannot use the courts to break free of the limited-government constraints of the Founders. The courts are too tradition and precedent bound “to bring about significant redistributional change.”

Even the liberal Warren Court “never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society.” Obama opines that the civil-rights movement’s court successes cannot be duplicated with respect to income redistribution: The “mistake of the civil rights movement was (that it) became so court focused” and “lost track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground…In some ways we still suffer from that (mistake).”

Fourth, Obama argues that economic rights that the state must supply are ultimately to be established at the ballot box. Those who favor redistribution must gain legislative control through an “actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change.” The electoral task of a redistributive President is therefore to craft coalitions of those who stand to benefit from government largess. The legislature, not the courts, must do this “reparative economic work.” In sum, Obama views the Constitution as a flawed document from which we must “break free.” We need, instead, a “living” Constitution that refocuses from “negative rights” to requiring income redistribution from the Haves to provide “positive economic rights” to the Have Nots.

Obama’s 2001 interview provides a clear statement of a judicial philosophy that displays little interest in the original intent of the Constitution.

A second-term Obama would surely nominate judges who share his “living Constitution” principles.

The 2012 election is the first test of Obama’s “slice and dice” strategy of assembling power coalitions in favor of redistributive change. In 2008, extreme voter disaffection with George Bush and the alarming economic downturn allowed him to run as the “Hope and Change” candidate, reaching across party lines and racial divides. Three and a half years later, “power-coalition” Obama has replaced “president-of-all-the-people” Obama. His administration has granted government largess to organized labor (the GM bailout), green environmentalists (Solyndra), minorities of all stripes (racial quotas), and single women (free birth control). He counts on each to deliver their bloc votes. He is, apparently, prepared to write off major voting groups, such as white men and married women, but if he can patch together enough disaffected interest groups, he can win.

Obama must, however, attract enough voters who do not stand to gain materially from his electoral victory. He needs idealists, feel-gooders, and others so oriented who buy his argument that the government must take care of  his coalition members as a positive right.

The candid 2001 Obama openly conceded that positive economic rights and redistribution are part and parcel of the same package. The 2012 Obama argues for positive rights to income, jobs, health care, food, and other transfers without admitting they require massive redistribution. Instead, he intimates they can be covered by “those who do not pay their fair share.”

Crafting an electoral majority from power coalitions in favor of redistribution is not an easy matter. Obama’s disaffection with the Constitution and his pleas for larger  unconstrained government go against the grain of American thinking. Public opinion polls show that Americans favor limited government, are not jealous of success (which they hope to achieve for themselves), and fear big government “as the greatest threat.” If Obama clearly admitted that positive economic rights require fundamental redistribution, he would lose too many votes from outside of his power coalitions.

The 2012 election stacks up as a stark choice between two competing political philosophies. The Democrats favor expanding entitlements, big government, and redistribution. The Republicans carry, albeit inarticulately, the banner of limited government, less redistribution, and protection of private property. Voters must decide whether they want a government that “first…controls the governed; and in the next place obliges it to control itself” or to “break free” from the Constitution’s “negative liberties” that constrain redistribution. If we want to be protected from government, vote Romney/Ryan. If we want government protect us, as government sees fit, vote Obama/Biden.

An Obama electoral victory based on “power coalitions” unconstrained by “negative rights” would fulfill the Founders’ dread of  an “overbearing majority.” As James Madison warned in 1787:  “Measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.…. If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure.”

The Constitution’s framers used the separation of powers and the Bill of Rights (most importantly the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment) to render “the overbearing majority …unable to concert and carry into effect schemes of oppression.” It is these “negative rights” that Obama proposes to eliminate. With them disappear restraints on limited government, and anything goes.

The Obama administration has given us a taste of an overbearing majority’s “schemes of oppression” (to use Madison’s words) not decided “according to rules of justice and the rights of the minor party:” the blackmailing of Chrysler bondholders, the transfer of property from creditors and shareholders to organized labor in the GM bailout, the attempted destruction of whole industries, such as coal,  through regulation rather than legislation, transfers of income from lenders to borrowers under forced loan renegotiations, and the use of unelected and unapproved economic czars to redistribute income and wealth by executive fiat.

The “overbearing majority” will not understand the destructive consequences of positive economic rights and redistribution until it is too late. In the meantime, they will have killed the goose that lays the golden eggs. People are prepared to voluntarily redistribute income through private charity, but large-scale forced redistribution has always led to economic catastrophe, irrespective of time and place. If lenders are forced to renegotiate terms of loans, why should they lend? If manufacturers are required to hire only expensive union labor, why should they not relocate abroad? If political decisions are dictated by a majority that does not pay taxes, why should tax payers not earn less, report less, or move elsewhere?

In a burst of what today might be regarded as political incorrectness, Madison wrote in 1787: “The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties (by what Obama calls “negative rights”) is the first object of government.” In modern English: It is government’s job and duty to protect the rights of those who succeed, even if the majority wishes to take these rights away. That is the test of character of a democratic government.

Why the Fuss? Obama Has Long Been On Record In Favor Of Redistribution – Forbes.