Does Redistribution lie at heart of Obama 2nd term?
By David Isaac
Texas Insider Report: WASHINGTON D.C. Every now and then President Obama sort of drops his veil GOP vice presidential nominee
Paul Ryan said last month. In some respects the veil dropped years ago. Its just that
the news is only now reaching the American public.
One example is the audio recording released Tuesday in which the Illinois state senator told a Loyola University audience on Oct. 19 1998: I actually believe in redistribution."
President Obama plans to push a redistributive agenda known as regionalism" that will merge the suburban tax base and infrastructure into cities according to a new book by Stanley Kurtz.
Its the sort of sound bite the opposition jumps on. The Republican National Committee sent out an email about the recording while Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney referred to it twice Tuesday. It resembles the uproar that followed similar comments Mr. Obama made to Joe The Plumber" Wurzelbacher in 2008:
When you spread the wealth around its good for everybody.
While its tempting to dismiss Mr. Obamas redistributionist remarks as another ripple in acontinuing campaign of attrition between the two sides in light of a new book by Stanley Kurtz
Spreading the Wealth How Obama Is Robbing the 
Suburbs to Pay for the Cities its worth taking a closer look at what Obama said and how he said it.
Mr. Kurtz explains in his book that Mr. Obama plans to push a redistributive agenda known as regionalism" that will merge suburban infrastructure into cities. This is necessary in order to right what Mr. Obama and his ideological ilk perceive as a historic wrong the flight of white people to the suburbs leaving the inner-city poor to live in poverty blight and squalor with failing schools and high crime rates. Mr. Kurtz believes this transformation of the suburbs will be at the center of a second Obama term.
The strategy for merging suburban infrastructure including schools utilities and other essential services into the cities involves a three-part plan Mr. Kurtz said in a recent interview on the website Family Security Matters.
- First pressure suburbanites back into densely packed urban centers" with a combination of driving fees highway neglect and development boundaries.
- Second require suburbs to construct low-income public housing to bring the urban poor into their areas.
- Third create regional tax-base sharing plans to spread suburban wealth to the cities.
If you follow this three-part plan pressing suburbanites back to the cities forcing the urban poor out to the suburbs and
redistributing the wealth of the remaining suburbanites you will have effectively undercut the suburbs" Mr. Kurtz said.
In the 1998 audio recording before his remark that he believed in redistribution Mr. Obama said I think the trick is figuring out how do we structure government systems that pool resources and hence facilitate some redistribution."
Mr. Kurtz himself immediately identified this comment as referring to the regionalism" he talks about in his book and on Tuesday posted comments about it on National Review Online. Mr. Kurtz wrote:
My first take is that Obama is almost certainly referring here to the regional-equity movement" he supported throughout his time in Chicago and continues to support from the White House today. I lay it all out in Spreading the Wealth.
The whole idea of the regional-equity movement is to restructure government systems so as to pool resources in the service of redistribution. What Obama is describing here certainly sounds like exactly what the regionalist community organizers he was funding and working with were trying to accomplish. There are different regionalist strategies for restructuring government systems so as to pool resources and redistribute.
This is the sort of technical" issue regionalists like to argue about.
So while its interesting and important to hear Obama explicitly endorsing redistribution it is equally interesting to see him apparently pointing toward regionalist strategies for doing so.
I argue in Spreading the Wealth that regionalism has been the sleeper story of Obamas 1st term and will move to the forefront if he gets a 2nd term. At least on first hearing this audio clip from the past has everything to do with Obamas present and future."
In 1998 Mr. Obama was still looking for the trick" to achieve his redistributionist plan. It appears the president has found it with the three-part plan Mr. Kurtz identified.
Whether he gets a chance to implement it depends on whether he wins a second term.
