Seven years ago, Barack Obama discussed the failure of the Supreme Court to rule on redistributing wealth in its civil rights rulings, and the interview has given fresh ammunition to critics who say the Democratic presidential candidate has a socialist agenda.

The interview -- conducted by Chicago Public Radio in 2001, while Obama was an Illinois state senator and a law professor at the University of Chicago -- delves into whether the civil rights movement should have gone further than it did, so that when "dispossessed peoples" appealed to the high court on the right to sit at the lunch counter, they should have also appealed for the right to have someone else pay for the meal, according to the Fox News network.

U.S. Sen. John McCain, in a speech yesterday, said, "It is amazing that even at this late hour, we are still learning more about Sen. Obama and his agenda."

McCain said, "In a radio interview revealed today, he said that one of the quote -- tragedies -- of the civil rights movement is that it didn't bring about a redistribution of wealth in our society. He said, and I quote, 'One of the tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court-focused I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change.'

"That is what change means for Barack the Redistributor: It means taking your money and giving it to someone else. He believes in redistributing wealth, not in policies that grow our economy and create jobs. He is more interested in controlling wealth than in creating it, in redistributing money instead of spreading opportunity," McCain said.

Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton said the comments have "nothing to do with Obama's economic plan or his plan to give the middle class a tax cut."

In the interview, Obama said the civil rights movement was victorious in some regards, but failed to create a "redistributive change" in its appeals to the Supreme Court, led at the time by Chief Justice Earl Warren. He suggested that such change should occur at the state legislature level, since the courts did not interpret the U.S. Constitution to permit such change, Fox News reported.

"The Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of basic issues of political and economic justice in this society, and to that extent as radical as people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn't that radical," Obama said in the interview, a recording of which surfaced on the Internet over the weekend.

McCain countered: "We've all heard his campaign trail promise -- he says he only wants to tax the rich. But these unscripted moments and his record tell a different story. He supported the Democratic budget plan passed just this year that called for raising taxes on people making just $42,000 per year. And Sen. Obama has voted 94 times for tax increases or against tax cuts.

"Sen. Obama may say he's trying to soak the rich, but it's the middle class who are going to get put through the wringer, because even the tax increase he admits to misses the target."