Professor Obama on 'economic justice'

What do you think he's talking about?

The "failures of the civil rights movement . . . dispossessed people"? Really, what do you think he's talking about? It ain't "middle-class tax cuts," I tell you that. Obama in 2001:

If you look at the victories and 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 people, so that now I would 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’d be o.k. But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. 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 Warren Court interpreted 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 doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf, and that hasn’t shifted and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, um, because the civil rights movement became so court focused I think there was a tendancy to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that.

Obama wants a Constitution that requires exactly what its framers intended the Constitution to forbid. That's they kind of postmodernist crap they teach at Harvard Law nowadays.

UPDATE: ABC via Hot Air, Team Obama claims:

It’s just another distraction from an increasingly desperate McCain campaign.

But it didn't come from the McCain campaign, it came from Obama. How is it that Obama advocates "redistributive change" in 2001, but if any critic calls attention to Obama's own words, it's a "smear"? Next thing you know, we'll be told it's "racist" for Republicans to quote Obama.