Republicans Say Obama Plans To "Redistribute Wealth"

Washington, D.C. (AHN) - Republicans revved up their charge on Monday that Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) plans to pursue a socialist tax policy, using a comments made by the Democrat seven years ago.

"In 2001, Obama said the Supreme Court failed to pursue a 'redistribution of wealth" and talked positively of 'redistributive change," the Republican National Committee said in a news release.

Doug Holtz-Eakin, the senior economic adviser of Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), also said that Obama had expressed in the interview "regret that the Supreme Court hadn't been more 'radical,'" according to TPM. The McCain adviser added that Obama's comments prove that the Democrat plans to take money "away from people who work for it" and give it to people "Obama believes deserves it."

Following up on his early morning speech warning voters that Obama will "make a recession even deeper," McCain called Obama "Barack the Redistributor."

"That is what change means for Barack the Redistributor: It means taking your money and giving it to someone else. He believes in redistributing wealth, not in policies that grow our economy and create jobs," the Republican candidate said.

At issue is Obama's interview with a Chicago Public radio station in 2001, when he was still an Illinois state senator. Obama had remarked:

"You know if you look at the victories and the 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 peoples so that I would now 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 would be okay.

"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 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 the Warren Court interpreted it in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties says what the states can't do to you..."

"And one of the I think 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 and in some ways we still suffer from that."

Republicans previously seized on another comment by Obama to "spread the wealth." Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin had said, "Now is no time to experiment with socialism," and McCain warned small business owners last week, "My opponent has spoken about the reluctance of citizens and business owners to part with their earnings. He understands that when it's time to spread the wealth around, quote, 'They are not going to give up those profits easily.'"

Obama campaign Bill Burton on Monday reacted to the latest attack from McCain by calling it "a fake news controversy " and that "Obama did not say that the courts should get into the business of redistributing wealth at all." Burton said McCain "apparently decided to close out his campaign with the same false, desperate attacks that have failed for months," and that "no amount of eleventh-hour distractions" from McCain will change the choice in the election, which is "four more years of Bush-McCain policies that redistribute billions to billionaires and big corporations" and Obama's "plan to help the middle class."