It's late, but thankfully the professors at the Volokh Conspiracy are awake and alert. I love Volokh because it (usually) provides a counterbalance to my political leanings. All of the posters are law professors; most of them are tenured; most lean center-right libertarian (the branch of the party that the Republicans will need to bring back into the fold if they hope to reach viability again).
Orin Kerr is one of my favorite authors at the site. He worked as a federal prosecutor, which is somewhat rare amongst law professors. Many law professors spend their entire legal careers, sans brief federal clerkships, in the ivory tower without substantive experience actual practicing law. I especially like Professor Kerr's take on criminal procedure. Again, I trend a little more towards civil liberties than him, but its a gift to have a prosecutor/venerable law professor to assist me in examining my beliefs.
I consider Orin Kerr as the perfect person to evaluate the Drudge claims, and make sure my take isn't colored by my Obama lean. Thankfully, we appear to be of one mind on the tapes.
Obama on the Warren Court
Based on the accompanying video, it seems that the person who posted the audio is trying to paint Obama as a radical: The suggestion is that the audio shows Obama lamenting the Warren Court's lack of radicalism in the area of economic redistribution.
Based on the audio posted, however, I find it hard to identify Obama's normative take. When Obama says that he's "not optimistic" about using the courts for major economic reform, and when he points out the practical and institutional problems of doing so, it's not entirely clear whether he is (a) gently telling the caller why the courts won't and shouldn't do such things; (b) noting the difficulties of using the courts to engage in economic reform but not intending to express a normative view; or (c) suggesting that he would have wanted the Warren Court to have tried to take on such a project.
Kerr ends by stating that it appears that Obama is arguing that we shouldn't rely on courts for economic reform; but at the least, there are no grounds to assume that Obama was suggesting the Warren court should have attempted to enforce economic change through the judicial process. Kerr ended by stating that we should attempt to find the rest of the interview to provide context to understand Obama's use of "major redistributive change," so we can see how/why he was using the term.
Please check the link: I feel uncomfortable including any more of his post but he has summarized better than I.
This was my initial impression as well. Obama begins by making the argument that the Warren court was not acting in a radical fashion by aiding the civil rights movement because they were enforcing positive rights that are already granted in the Constitution. This is a far cry from making the assumption that Obama is advocating for radical economic change through the court system. It's just not there without further context to lend validity to those claims. And the brief clips certainly don't assist us in trying to understand why Obama used the phrase "major redistributive change."