(CNSNews.com) - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, who earlier this month told Joe “The Plumber” Wurzelbacher it was “good for everybody” to “spread the wealth around, lamented in a 2001 radio interview that the civil rights movement had failed to cause “redistributive change” in the wealth of America.
 
In a January 18, 2001 broadcast on WBEZ Radio in Chicago, then-Illinois state Sen. Barack Obama told host Gretchen Helfrich that the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren wasn’t as “radical” as some people thought because it did not force redistribution of wealth in American society.
 
“If you look at the victories and the failures of the civil-rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court,” Obama said, “I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples so that, I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at a lunch counter and order.  As long as I could pay for it, I would be okay.
 
“But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and served more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society and, 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 it’s been interpreted, and the Warren Court (did), 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 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, 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 to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change. And in some ways we still suffer from that,” Obama said.
 
Later on in the broadcast, Obama responded to a question from a caller named “Karen,” who asked: “The gentlemen made the point the Warren Court wasn’t terribly radical. My question is with economic changes. My question is, is it too late for that kind of reparative work economically, and is that (the Court) the appropriate place for reparative economic work to take place.
 
Obama, who at the time was also an instructor at the University of Chicago Law School, answered: “You know, maybe I’m showing my bias here as a legislator as well as a law professor, but I’m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. The institution just isn’t structured that way.
 
“You just look at very rare examples during the desegregation era where the Court was willing to, for example, order changes that cost money to local school districts. The Court was very uncomfortable with it. It was hard to manage. It was hard to figure out. You start getting into all sorts of separation of power issues in terms of the Court monitoring, or engaging in a process that essentially is administrative, and takes a lot of time.
 
“The Court’s just not very good at it and politically it’s very hard to legitimize opinions from the Court, in that regards. So, I mean, I think that although you can craft theoretical justifications for it legally--and I think you can, any three of us sitting here could come up with a rationale for bringing about economic change through the courts--I think it’s a practical matter--our institutions are just poorly equipped to do it.”