John McIntyre of RealClearPolitics and I were both on Larry Kudlow's radio program on Saturday afternoon. Larry asked us both the same question: "Is there anything that Obama could say on Tuesday that will make you feel good about where he is taking the country?"
I answered that it's not what he might say; it's about what he definitely will say. Obama will swear an oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America, so help me God." The question isn't whether he'll say it; the question is whether he'll mean it. You see, Barack Obama is, to my knowledge, the first American president to take this oath having in recent memory openly and publicly criticized the Constitution.
In 2001, he said the following on National Public Radio:
"But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth ... didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution ... that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties ... that 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. ... One of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was ... a tendency to lose track of the ... activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change."
Obama sees the constitutional limits placed on the power of government set by the founders as creating a tragedy in which the civil rights movement was unable to move from negative liberties to positive entitlement--that is, redistribution of wealth from propertied classes to the dispossessed peoples. No one else who has ever taken the office has so openly stated his disagreement with the document whose protection is his chief responsibility.
