Well, I don’t know if it’s a game changer — I’m hanging up my prognostication hat until after the election. But the remarks by Barack Obama in 2001 which are now hitting the media are going to be very disturbing to many people, and they should be.

The tape underscores the fact that Barack Obama has been thinking strategically in terms of how to achieve a redistribution of wealth in American society for a long time. And beyond the issue of spreading other people’s money around, it also underscores how radical is Obama’s interpretation — or would-be interpretation — of the U.S. Constitution. He believes that instead of guaranteeing Americans “negative rights” (rights pertaining to that which government cannot do to you, for instance: deny you free speech) the U.S. Constitution ought to be interpreted in a “positive” way as compelling government to do things for you. That’s where redistribution of wealth comes in; in Obama’s view, in order to achieve equality it’s not enough to recognize people’s civil rights. Wealth ought to be spread around by force of law in order to compel equality. Fit all this in with Obama’s other known positions on constitutional issues and you get a consistent picture. In the last presidential debate, he attested to his view that Roe v. Wade was correctly decided. Even many pro-choice legal scholars find serious problems with how Roe was arrived at. It is possible to be pro-choice and still think that that was a flawed decision, and many Democratic politicians side-step the issue by simply asserting that they believe in “a woman’s right to choose” and evading the legal arguments. Not so for Barack Obama: he loves the intellectually bankrupt power-grab by the Supreme Court that was Roe v. Wade, and he’ll tell anyone. On the Second Amendment: Obama, during this election cycle, has expressed his “belief” in the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms. Yet, he also believes that there is room within it for local governments to ban handguns. That’s like saying that he believes in the First Amendment, but of-course there’s wiggle room in it for state or city governments to ban newspapers and establish official religions.

Barack Obama, we are told, is a constitutional scholar. What this means more than anything else is that he’s thought about these things for a long time, and his positions are not accidental or subject to easy refinement. They are strategic.

With a Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate, and quite possibly a filibuster-proof one, a President Obama will have an opportunity to fill the very large number of vacancies which exist in the federal courts (thanks to President Bush’s choices being blocked) and will be able to appoint many individuals to the bench who share his radical views of the U.S. Constitution. This will affect the fabric of the judicial system in this country for decades.

Regarding the U.S. Supreme Court, some on the conservative side are quite sanguine, noting that the judges most likely to retire soon are dedicated liberal activists (Stevens, Ginsburg) and who could Obama put there that would be any worse? There are two problems with this reasoning: (1) We very badly need another good judge, rather than just to replace one extreme liberal with another. (Not to put too fine a point on it, but there are lives at stake.) And: (2) It is the height of reckless conceit to think that we actually know how the health of any of the Supreme Court Justices will hold up over the next four to eight years. John Roberts (and God forbid it, because he’s apparently a Bob Dylan fan) could die tomorrow for all we know. Antonin Scalia is not as young as he looks and anything could happen that might compel his retirement. Justice Thomas’s Winnebago could be involved in a high-speed pile-up. The point is that nothing is so unpredictable and fragile as human life and health itself, and you cannot simply assume that because the oldest judges are the most liberal that theirs will be the only vacancies to arise.

So, the newly emerged tape of Barack Obama expressing his genuinely radical views in 2001 is very timely as a reminder and a reinforcer of what is at stake. For all of these reasons and more, the message for November 4th is now and must remain: Trust no one. Just vote.

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