Video: In 2007, "Bridge-Building" Obama Says US Government Is Racist

The Daily Caller has posted a video of a heated 2007 speech, where Obama proclaims that the federal government "don’t care" about New Orleans:

In a video obtained exclusively by The Daily Caller, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama tells an audience of black ministers, including the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, that the U.S. government shortchanged Hurricane Katrina victims because of racism.

“The people down in New Orleans they don’t care about as much!” Obama shouts in the video, which was shot in June of 2007 at Hampton University in Virginia. By contrast, survivors of Sept. 11 and Hurricane Andrew received generous amounts of aid, Obama explains. The reason? Unlike residents of majority-black New Orleans, the federal government considers those victims “part of the American family.”

The racially charged and at times angry speech undermines Obama’s carefully-crafted image as a leader eager to build bridges between ethnic groups. For nearly 40 minutes, using an accent he almost never adopts in public, Obama describes a racist, zero-sum society, in which the white majority profits by exploiting black America. The mostly black audience shouts in agreement. The effect is closer to an Al Sharpton rally than a conventional campaign event.

Read the whole thing.

Here is the video:

The Love Song Of J. Alfred Obama

Elliot was wrong--November is the cruelest month: In an election year, it messes up all the months leading up to it.

Legal Insurrection writes about The truest form of love known to mankind, which in this case is "when a Senior Editor of The New Republic pens a guest column in The NY Times about young Obama, Young Obama’s Poetic Politics":

One of the things that most excited writers and intellectuals about Obama the candidate in 2008 was his literary sensibility. In her essay “Speaking in Tongues,” the novelist Zadie Smith enthused about Mr. Obama’s ability, in his memoir, to convincingly channel a wide range of voices: “Obama can do young Jewish male, black old lady from the South Side, white woman from Kansas,” and on and on. This gives him something in common with the author of “The Waste Land,” that chorus of disparate characters, whose working title was “He Do the Police in Different Voices.”