The 2008 presidential election is drawing to a close, and Barack Obama appears on the verge of victory.  One of the most remarkable aspects of the 2008 campaign has been that Obama, although he has occupied the spotlight for more than a year, is still an enigma.  While we know some things about his biography and his sparce public record, we know very little about what he thinks or believes, and we receive no help from our press in any quest for answers.

The Pew Research Center has empirically validated a severe media bias that has resulted in the closeting of many negative stories about Obama.  Disturbingly, the media has resisted suggestions that it ought even to investigate the past of this man who will likely be President, and about whom we know so little.  Shocking accusations–such as that Obama launched his campaign in the living room of domestic terrorist William Ayers, that he embraces ideological Marxism and taught law students at the University of Chicago in Marxist terms, that he had substantial dealings and even purchased his home from Tony Rezko, a corrupt influence peddler currently serving time in federal prison, and his own admission that he took crack cocaine–were passed upon by the media with complete disinterest.  We do not know the truth or falsity of these claims about Obama–but our ignorance on the matter is, largely, the result of the marked disinterest the media has shown in pursuing its traditional investigatory role.

The media not only buried mention of these potential stories–any one of which, if true, would be more scurrilous than the worst scandal in a typical election cycle–reporters were reluctant even to investigate whether or not the claims had a basis in fact.  These same networks gleefully filled “news” hours with reports that Governor Sarah Palin’s husband Todd had been convicted of a DUI sometime in the 1980s, with speculation that McCain might be “too old” to be President, and with poorly-disguised editorials about the superiority of the Obama campaign.  The treatment of the candidates has been so apparently disparate that the media can only claim objectivity if it contends that the drunken driving conviction of the husband of the Republican vice-presidential candidate twenty years ago is so much more newsworthy than the admitted use of crack on an unspecified number of occasions by the Democratic presidential candidate that the latter doesn’t deserve airtime.

This week, in the home stretch of the election, a new and important piece of information floated into the void of public ignorance about Barack Obama.  A radio clip surfaced from an interview of Obama conducted in 2001 in Chicago.  In the interview, Obama discussed the litigation strategy of the civil rights movement.  This, in itself, is harmless enough.  Many law students study the NAACP’s famous and successful pursuit of rights through the courts; a strategy that culminated in the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

In this interview, however, Obama did not stop where most do, praising the rights secured by Brown v. Board and the lawyers who fought to secure them.  Instead, Senator Obama lamented what he considered to be a “tragedy”–that the Supreme Court only gave blacks equal rights under the law; that it failed to go further and effect “redistributive change.”

Obama had an explanation for this tragedy–he believed the Warren court was “tied” to the “traditional” interpretation of the Constitution as a charter of negative rights–that is, a litany of the things government cannot do to you.  Part of the Warren court’s inability to effect redistributive change was, in Obama’s opinion, caused by the court’s reluctance to see “rights” as things “the government is obligated to do for you or on your behalf.”  Obama openly lamented the fact that the Warren court chose to view rights in “fundamentally the same way” as the American Founders.

This viewpoint is unAmerican.  Obama’s focus on “redistributive change” is the language of an ideology that presumes that there is nothing to life but material acquisition, and nothing to government but managing material wealth.  From that perspective, it makes sense for the government to make sure the wealth is divided up fairly.  If material goods are all that matter, there is no reason for a non-material good such as liberty to stand in the way of redistribution, if redistribution is necessary for everyone to have fair amounts of material wealth.

“UnAmerican” does not mean “unpatriotic”–it means contradictory to the fundamental premises that have always undergirded the American conception of self-government.  From its first breath in the Declaration of Independence, America has always been about more than material acquisition.  The American Revolution was certainly partly economic–George Washington and many others resented taxation by what amounted to a foreign sovereign.  But the soldiers who fought the Crown against the overwhelming odds did not do so primarily for fortune.  They fought to free themselves from the abuses of a government with plenary power.  They fought for self-government.  They fought to be part of a republic where the powers of the government were limited; where there were things the government simply could not do to you.

The “traditional” understanding of the Constitution as a charter of negative rights–the understanding that Obama laments as a “tragedy”–is the heart and soul of what America is.  In that 2001 interview, Obama revealed that he believes that America is fundamentally mistaken in its foundational beliefs, and always has been.   According to Obama, expanding what the government does for us is far more important than restricting what the government can do to us.  Obama’s criticism of American ideals is as deep, fundamental, and existentially challenging as the criticism offered by Communism or militant Islam.

We have, although without help from our press, learned something important about Obama this week.  We learned what some of his real beliefs are, and they are simply not compatible with what America was conceived to be and has always, more or less, been.  This is not to say that Obama doesn’t love America or her people.  This is to say that he believes he can do better than our “fundamentally” mistaken Founders.  He believes that the right thing to do is to engage in radical experiment that involves turning the bedrock principles of American polity on their head.  Regardless of how well-intentioned or benevolent his aims, it cannot be denied that they are, definitively, unAmerican.