We now have Barack Obama’s own words describing his strong conviction that redistributing wealth should be a national priority, thanks to the recent YouTube posting of a 2001 interview he gave to the Chicago public radio station, WBEZ. Obama’s words undermine his insistence that he really doesn’t share the radically anti-capitalist views of extreme leftists like William Ayers. During the interview, the former University of Chicago law professor and then-Democratic state senator was critical of the civil rights movement’s strategy in the 1950s and 1960s of focusing on the courts to bring about positive changes “on behalf of dispossessed peoples.” The problem with the strategy, according to Obama, was the fact that the courts wouldn’t do enough to redistribute wealth:

“The Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society,” Obama said. “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’s been interpreted.”