Barack Obama: A "New Economic Patriotism"; Not So New

    Since September 27, the President has used the phrase "new economic patriotism" seven times according to White House transcripts of his remarks and speeches.  The most recent was on Friday, October 5th, and was promptly tweeted out by the Obama campaign:

    Much has already been made of the Orwellian sound of the phrase, as well as the audacity of linking patriotism to his own economic policies which are far from universally accepted. The president did not coin the phrase "economic patriotism".  It first appeared in 2005 according to an article at EuroTopics , coined by former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin.  It appeared in connection with Barack Obama in the title of an article at The Root back in February 2011, and as recently as August 2012, co-chairman of President Obama’s campaign Ted Strickland hit Mitt Romney for his lack of "economic patriotism."  But the term struck me because of something I read in the recently uncovered course outline of Professor Barack Obama's  Constitutional Law III class at the University of Chicago which I wrote about last Wednesday.

    The Introduction section of the outline, entitled "What is Equality (Thomson)", was apparently based on a rather obscure book published in 1949 by British historian David Thomson called "Equality." Although the book appears to be a general discussion of "equality" and how it has been interpreted over the years in a political context in relation to legal, religious, and economic considerations among others, the term "economic equality" shows up on the first page of the book and appears a total of 32 times in the whole book.  It is noteworthy then that the last point in the Con Law III Introduction outline is:

(10) Centralized Gov’t = development and implementation of egalitarianism.

    For someone who ran for and was elected President of the United States within a decade of teaching this class, this point in the outline seems especially significant in view of where Thomson takes the discussion of equality in chapter 5, which is entitled "Economic Equality."  Thomas writes [emphasis mine]:

Many who would stoutly defend with their dying breath the rights of liberty and equality described above (as would many English or American liberals) shrink back with horror from the notion of economic egalitarianism.  There is no more fundamental task, in any modern discussion of equality,  than to discover why the ideal of equality, so generally accepted in the legal, religious and political arrangements of the modern democratic state, is still so stoutly resisted in its applications to economic life.  Here is the very crux of our whole argument.

    I have not read the whole book (yet), so I cannot say for sure if Thomson is advocating for government-enforced economic equality or just explicating the arguments behind it.  But Professor Obama chose this book as a basis for the introduction for this class on Constitutional Law, so it is not unreasonable to assume it had a significant impact on the development of his views, or at least served to help express those views to his students.  The president famously if inelegantly voiced his views to Joe the Plumber as "spread the wealth around," and now more recently and elegantly as a "new economic patriotism."  But both reflect that final point in the introductory outline above, "Centralized Gov’t = development and implementation of egalitarianism," where equality seems to focus more on outcomes than opportunities.

    When a person swears to defend and uphold the Constitution of the United States, it is reasonable that voters be told what his views are, or were, and how they developed and changed over the years.  When that person actually taught the Constitution in a major university, that information should be widely and readily available.  Instead, information is still surfacing four years after the fact.

    While these views of President Obama are certainly not new or surprising now that we are more than three and a half years into his first term, the fact that this outline and its sources were not available to the American public in 2008 represents yet another failure on the part of the media.  Can this old outline shed light on Barack Obama's call for a "new economic patriotism"?  That largely remains to be seen, but at least now the media and the electorate have one more resource to help make that determination.

Prof. Barack Obama, Constitutional Law III: The Course Outline

    Much has been written about Barack Obama's time at the University of Chicago.  According to the University website:

From 1992 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004, Barack Obama served as a professor in the Law School. He was a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996. He was a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004, during which time he taught three courses per year.

Breitbart explored Obama's teaching in The Vetting back in the spring of 2012.  The New York Times published copies of exams and at least one syllabus from the classes he taught.  One of the courses, added in 1996, was entitled "Constitutional Law III." A former student of Obama's was quoted in the Alumni magazine of the university in 2009:

“In Con Law III we study equal process and due process. He was incredibly charismatic, funny, really willing to listen to student viewpoints—which I thought was very special at Chicago,” says Elysia Solomon, ’99. “There were so many diverse views in the class and people didn’t feel insecure about voicing their opinions. I thought that he did a really good job of balancing viewpoints.”

    Obama was the target of much criticism and analysis for referring to the Constitution as an "imperfect document" in an interview in 2001.   This interview took place during the time he was still teaching Constitutional Law III at the university.  Recently, I discovered a comprehensive outline of that course online at the University of Chicago website that sheds more light on the president's views (at least at the time) on the foundational document of the United States.

    Apparently the collection of class outlines is not actually intended for the public. (Scroll down on that page and under "Constitutional Law III" you find simply "Obama".)  If you click on "home" at the top, you are asked to enter a user name and password, so it may be that these pages were inadvertently placed outside a firewall.  Indeed, if you enter just the domain name ("http://blsa.uchicago.edu/") you are redirected to "http://uchicagoblsa.weebly.com/" which is the Black Student Law Association home page.  Under the "Current Students" menu, the only selection is "Course Outlines".  Selecting this brings up this page:

Click here for access to student outlines.

CONTENT DISCLAIMER:

Each outline was written by one or more students. The University of Chicago chapter of the Black Law Students Association makes no attempt to ensure the accuracy and integrity of class discussions or coursework analysis as communicated in each outline. The outlines may reflect the personal opinions of their student creators.

    Clicking on the indicated link once again brings up the request for a user name and password, so access to these student outlines is apparently inadvertent as I speculated above.  I would assume this loophole might be closed if this blog post receives any publicity, so I have downloaded the Con Law III document that is the subject of this post, but none others so as not to take undue advantage of this hole in the firewall.

    Now onto the outline itself (here is the link to the PDF file), keeping in mind the disclaimer above ("Each outline was written by one or more students," not by Barack Obama himself.)  After an introductory section called "What is Equality", the outline immediately moves into "II. Slavery and the Constitution."  First, the three direct references to slavery in the Constitution are enumerated.  Then these three points are listed:

(a) Constitution is arguably pro-slavery document - 7 of 15 “influentials” were slaveholding planters.
(b) Document seems to put slavery beyond “national regulation.”
(c) “What precisely is the value of the Constitution and of the concomitant nation that would justify even an extra week’s slavery?”

    It is difficult to know exactly how items (a) and (b) were framed by Professor Obama.  Were these his views?  Or are these just restatements of common observations among those in the legal field about the Constitution? Hard to say.  However, item (c) is a quote from a book written in 1988 by Sanford Levinson, a law professor at the University of Texas.  This fall he is a visiting professor at Harvard.  In 2009, Professor Levinson was interviewed by C-SPAN about his book.  The blurb of the interview says:

Professor Sanford Levinson talked about his book, Constitutional Faith, in which he argues that the U.S. Constitution is worshiped to a degree that it is unhealthy for our democracy.

A book signing and speaking engagement with Levinson just this August was promoted as follows:

In his widely acclaimed volume Our Undemocratic Constitution, Sanford Levinson boldly argued that our Constitution should not be treated with "sanctimonious reverence," but as a badly flawed document deserving revision. Now Levinson takes us deeper, asking what were the original assumptions underlying our institutions, and whether we accept those assumptions 225 years later.

Harper's magazine did an interview with Levinson in June 2012.  Here's the opening paragraph:

The American Constitution has been the subject, just as Thomas Jefferson predicted, of a great deal of “sanctimonious reverence,” especially from American politicians who make comments demonstrating they know little about it. But the Constitution has few more-dedicated critics than political scientist and law professor Sanford Levinson, who has offered the most thorough explanation yet of why it has effectively ceased to be an attractive model to other nations around the world. 

    Obviously I am straying somewhat from the original subject of my post, Barack Obama's Con Law III course.  But as many have tried to do for the last six years, perhaps not often enough, is provide context in which to interpret Barack Obama's actions and beliefs.  Does (or did) Barack Obama see the Constitution as a "badly flawed document deserving revision"?  Since there is no recording of his lectures (that I know of,) we have just this course outline and his other public statements and documents on which to rely.  And from this short section towards the beginning of his course, natural questions arise about what kind of attitude Professor Obama displayed for the Constitution when teaching his students.

    I intend to delve further into the course outline in future posts, as I expect others will also with far more legal and Constitutional law background than I possess.  Time will tell what other insights can be gained about the thinking of Barack Obama through this newfound document.