If you were watching the third Presidential debate, you may have noticed that John McCain had hit on a new line of attack: Barack Obama wants to "redistribute wealth." To those of us who interpret phrases by attaching meanings to the individual words within them, this comes off as pretty weak sauce. Of course Barack Obama wants the government to redistribute wealth; so does John McCain. That's one of the things that government does. Every time the government takes money in the form of taxes or fees, or spends money on social services or public works or anything else at all, it redistributes wealth. Most obviously, we have a progressive tax system: people with higher incomes (supposedly) pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes. This is nothing new, and no mainstream candidate for national office proposes to do away with it. Admittedly, as a country we are not very good at redistributing wealth. The gap between rich and poor in the U.S. is larger than in any other developed country. And progressive taxation isn't nearly what it appears at first blush:

Even in the United States, the rich pay a disproportionate share of the federal income tax, which mildly reduces inequality. Other taxes, however, like Social Security, are regressive: the rich pay a lesser share. Thus, the upper tenth of households pay 70 percent of the income tax, but only 52 percent of all federal taxes. State sales taxes make the system even more regressive, because poorer people spend a higher share of their total income on them. Kevin Hassett, of the American Enterprise Institute, estimates that a family of four earning $50,000 pays exactly the same share of its income (30 percent) on taxes as one earning $150,000.

There's little question that Obama's policies would be slightly more redistributive than the status quo. Most obviously, he wants to raise taxes on the upper few percent of earners, and cut taxes to the middle class; he also proposes to expand health care coverage quite a bit. These are concrete policy proposals that are squarely in the mainstream of popular debate -- his health care proposal was notably less ambitious than those of Hillary Clinton or John Edwards -- but are certainly arguable; a freeze on health-care spending and a giant tax cut for the wealthiest Americans is also squarely within the mainstream of popular debate. Here is the graph of the impact that Obama's and McCain's tax proposals would have on different income groups:

Obama's plan would hit the upper 1%, who benefited the most from Bush's tax cuts, and it would lighten the burden on the lower 80%; McCain's help is targeted at the top 20%, and (by virtue of not raising taxes on anyone) would cost an extra trillion dollars over ten years. Given what passes for a mainstream consensus in contemporary U.S. politics, the choice between these two options is considered to be a close one. So there is nothing crazy or desperate about criticizing Obama's proposals on the merits. But McCain and his supporters aren't fretting over graphs of the growth of American inequality, or even over the distribution of tax rates. They are fretting over this, the histogram of likely electoral-college outcomes from fivethirtyeight.com:

As a response to this stark reality, they have decided to seize upon "redistribute wealth" not in terms of the actual meaning of its actual words, but as a slogan of SECRET SOCIALISM. For whatever reasons -- this is a matter for future psychohistorians, not for humble physicist/bloggers -- a substantial segment of right-wing punditry refuses to believe that Barack Obama is what he says he is, or what he has actually acted like his entire adult life: a thoughtful center-left politician. They have no doubt that he is

the most radical figure ever to come this close to the Presidency

.

Obama's entire campaign is built on class warfare and human envy. The "change" he peddles is not new. We've seen it before. It is change that diminishes individual liberty for the soft authoritarianism of socialism... Unlike past Democrat presidential candidates, Obama is a hardened ideologue. He's not interested in playing around the edges. He seeks "fundamental change," i.e., to remake society.

To these folks, "redistribute wealth" isn't a straightforward description of how the government operates under the present system. Rather, it's a slip of the tongue, revealing the dictatorship-of-the-proletariat leanings hidden behind the nonthreatening exterior. And here is the revealing moment to which McCain was referring in that debate, when Obama explains to Joe the Plumber how his plans will remake Amerikkka as a socialist utopia: Whew. Scary. This sort of wild-eyed communism is just what leads to endorsements from the Financial Times. Which is why McCain's allies are crowing with glee over the discovery of a 2001 radio interview with Obama, in which he again uses the phrase "redistributive change," which is not precisely the same but close enough. Here is the kind of reaction this dramatic finding is receiving:

We have, in our storied history, elected Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives and moderates. We have fought, and will continue to fight, pitched battles about how best to govern this nation. But we have never, ever in our 232-year history, elected a president who so completely and openly opposed the idea of limited government, the absolute cornerstone of makes the United States of America unique and exceptional. If this does not frighten you — regardless of your political affiliation — then you deserve what this man will deliver with both houses of Congress, a filibuster-proof Senate, and, to quote Senator Obama again, "a righteous wind at our backs." That a man so clear in his understanding of the Constitution, and so opposed to the basic tenets it provides against tyranny and the abuse of power, can run for president of the United States is shameful enough. We’re just getting started.

You can listen to the entire interview here, in RealPlayer. As an Obama supporter, all I can say is: please listen. (The interview was conducted on the late, lamented WBEZ program Odyssey, hosted by the redoubtable Gretchen Helfrich. Other Obama appearances here.) The response of any non-crazy person to that interview would be "Hmm, he sounds like a thoughtful guy. It sure would be nice to have someone as President who understood some of the nuances of separation of powers and the role of the Supreme Court in the federal government." Because that's all the interview is about. Obama is talking about the role of the Warren Court in the civil rights movement. He makes a simple and true point, one that conservatives should love to hear: policy-making should not be done through the courts. The Warren Court, he says, was not very radical, even if it was painted as such at the time; it was essentially reactive, and that's always going to be a feature of the appellate court system. If you actually want to enact substantive changes that have a chance of sticking, the right mechanism is political action and the passage of legislation, not relying on the courts to fix things.

You know, I’m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. The institution just isn’t structured that way. [snip] You start getting into all sorts of separation of powers issues, you know, in terms of the court monitoring or engaging in a process that essentially is administrative and takes a lot of time. You know, the court is just not very good at it, and politically, it’s just very hard to legitimize opinions from the court in that regard.

Communist! Oh wait, sorry, that didn't seem very communist at all. The above quote is in response to a question from a caller, who wants to know whether the Court is "the appropriate place for reparative economic work to change place." And Obama's response is: no. Hardly very dramatic, really. As David Berstein at the Volokh Conspiracy, usually a reliably conservative voice, puts it:

The whole interview is worth listening to for another reason: Obama gives a very impressive performance as a constitutional scholar. Even though he was holding down other jobs while teaching at Chicago, he clearly had thought a lot about constitutional history, and how social change is or is not brought about through the courts... What I don't understand is why this is surprising, or interesting enough to be headlining Drudge [UPDATE: Beyond the fact that Drudge's headline suggests, wrongly, that Obama states that the Supreme Court should have ordered the redistribution of income; as Orin says, his views on the subject, beyond that it was an error to promote this agenda in historical context, are unclear.]. At least since the passage of the first peacetime federal income tax law about 120 years ago, redistribution of wealth has been a (maybe the) primary item on the left populist/progressive/liberal agenda, and has been implicitly accepted to some extent by all but the most libertarian Republicans as well. Barack Obama is undoubtedly liberal, and his background is in political community organizing in poor communities. Is it supposed to be a great revelation that Obama would like to see wealth more "fairly" distributed than it is currently? It's true that most Americans, when asked by pollsters, think that it's emphatically not the government's job to redistribute wealth. But are people so stupid as to not recognize that when politicians talk about a "right to health care," or "equalizing educational opportunities," or "making the rich pay a fair share of taxes," or "ensuring that all Americans have the means to go to college," and so forth and so on, that they are advocating the redistribution of wealth? Is it okay for a politician to talk about the redistribution of wealth only so long as you don't actually use phrases such as "redistribution" or "spreading the wealth," in which case he suddenly becomes "socialist"? If so, then American political discourse, which I never thought to be especially elevated, is in even a worse state than I thought.

It is in a worse state, Prof. Bernstein! You have every right to be concerned about that. The generous reading of the spectacle of right-wing pundits leaping on the word "redistribute" is that it serves as a litmus test -- to most people, it's straightforwardly descriptive, but to a certain segment of the punditocracy that has long been convinced that Obama is a closet radical, it's a rare glimpse at the socialist core of this man's being. The less-generous reading (depending on one's preferred mode of generosity) is that they know exactly what they are doing, and they understand perfectly well that Obama is not any more socialist than any other mainstream Democrat, but they are desperate to sling poop around and hope that something sticks, because the electoral college prognostications are not good. If those prognostications hold true, and Obama wins on November 4, the conservative movement is going to have to do some serious soul-searching. Do they want to engage politically with the other side and discuss different policy options on the merits, or do they prefer the screeching-monkey approach? Do thoughtful economic free-marketers want to continue to tie their hopes for success at the ballot box to goggle-eyed know-nothing social conservatives, or do they want to try to construct a winning coalition among intellectually respectable lines? Politics is cyclical, and there is no question that conservatives will bounce back. But it's not clear how quickly it will happen, or what form the resurgence will take; that's up to them.