The Independent View

I have writ­ten a full arti­cle dis­cussing this radio inter­view — Click Here — and cross-​posted at NoQuarterUSA.

Here is a 2001 inter­view, record­ing and tran­script, with then-​state sen­a­tor Barack Obama at WBEZ radio in Chicago:

The tran­script (less um’s and ah’s):

Announcer:

Good morn­ing and wel­come to Odyssey on WBEZ Chicago, 91.5 FM, and we are joined by Barack Obama, who is Illi­nois State Sen­a­tor from the 13th Dis­trict and a senior lec­turer at the law school at the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago.

[appears to be a break in the audio clip]

Obama:

“…you know, if you look at the vic­to­ries and fail­ures of the civil rights move­ment and its lit­i­ga­tion strat­egy in the courts. I think where it suc­ceeded was to vest for­mal rights in pre­vi­ously dis­pos­sessed peo­ple. So that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at a lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it I’d 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 has been interpreted.

And the War­ren Court inter­preted it in the same way that gen­er­ally the Con­sti­tu­tion is a char­ter of neg­a­tive lib­er­ties — it 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 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 there was the 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.

Announcer:

Let’s talk with Karen. Good morn­ing, Karen you are on Chicago Pub­lic Radio.

Karen:

Hi. The gen­tle­men made the point that the War­ren Court wasn’t ter­ri­bly rad­i­cal. My ques­tion is with eco­nomic changes. My ques­tion is it too late for that kind of repar­a­tive work eco­nom­i­cally and is that the appro­pri­ate place for repar­a­tive eco­nomic work to take place?

Announcer:

You mean the court?

Karen:

Courts, or would it be leg­is­la­tion at this point?

Obama:

You know maybe I’m show­ing my bias here as a leg­is­la­tor as well as a law pro­fes­sor, but, I am not opti­mistic about, major redis­trib­u­tive change through the courts. The insti­tu­tion just isn’t struc­tured that way.

You can just look at some very rare exam­ples of deseg­re­ga­tion era where the court will­ing, for exam­ple, order changes that would cost money to local school dis­trict. And 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 pow­ers issues in terms of the court mon­i­tor­ing or engag­ing in a process that essen­tially is admin­is­tra­tive and takes a lot of time. The court is just not very good at it and polit­i­cally it is just very hard to legit­imize opin­ions from the court in that regards. So 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.

Spe­cial thanks to Geoff who pointed out this new video at NakeEm­per­orNews.

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