Obama '07 video: Shock or schlock?

A videotape surfaced Tuesday of a 2007 speech by then-Sen. Barack Obama in which Obama said that when it came to the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina, “the people down in New Orleans, they don’t care about as much.”

In the tape — which was released by conservative news outlet The Daily Caller and Sean Hannity’s program on Fox News on the eve of the first presidential debate — Obama says the government gave aid to the victims of 9/11 and Hurricane Andrew but less to the predominantly minority victims of Katrina.


The first clip Hannity played — crediting Daily Caller editor Tucker Carlson for getting his hands on the full tape — shows Obama greeting the Rev. Jeremiah Wright in the crowd at the speech, which the then-senator delivered to thousands of African-American religious leaders. Wright’s racially charged sermons became a major flash point during the 2008 campaign.

Wright, Obama said, is “my pastor, the guy who puts up with me, counsels me, listens to my wife complain about me. He’s a friend and a great leader. Not just in Chicago but all across the country.”

But as with other parts of the tape, that quote is not new — Obama’s ad-libbed shout-out made it to No. 3 on a POLITICO list of the top gaffes of the 2008 campaign.

During the 2008 campaign, Obama made clear that he felt the federal government had let down the predominantly minority victims of Hurricane Katrina — so those sentiments also are not new. But Obama’s words in the video come across as much more raw and more visceral than his usual carefully measured words about race.

Some conservatives have long believed that Obama got through the 2008 election without a serious look at his feelings about racial issues, particularly after his GOP rival John McCain took Wright off the table in his own campaign. The tape’s release by a conservative news outlet and a top conservative commentator seemed an attempt to thrust race — and Obama’s views of racial issues — into the 2012 election at a particularly important moment, on the eve of the first presidential debate.

In the view of some on the right, the video shows that Obama’s claim to be a bridge-building unifier on race is less of a genuine conviction than a political expediency — a role he turns on and off to fit the occasion.

The political world was abuzz from the late afternoon into the evening as the Drudge Report teased plans for Fox News and The Daily Caller to release a video of Obama delivering a never-before-seen, racially charged speech. The video would — some on the right asserted — upend the election just as Obama and Mitt Romney prepare to face off in Denver on Wednesday and erase the leads the president holds in most national and battleground state polls.

The video played at the start of Hannity’s Fox News show and posted on The Daily Caller website was of an open-press speech that Obama delivered to a crowd at Hampton University in June 2007, months after he launched his presidential campaign. The speech was covered at the time, including by Fox News and Carlson on the MSNBC show he then hosted, but had never been released in full before.

Hannity introduced the tape as a “bombshell” that includes “some of the most divisive class warfare and racially charged rhetoric ever used by Barack Obama.” Though a local newspaper posted videos of some of the remarks online and reporters from major news organizations covered it, Hannity said all of that attention “omit[ted] the most inflammatory comments” from Obama.

But a portion of the speech — including Obama’s introduction of Wright — has been on YouTube since 2007.

Also already public was Obama’s discussion of “quiet riots that take place every day [that] are born from the same place as the fires of destruction and the police decked out in riot gear and death.” President George W. Bush, he said, had done nothing to ease the tensions. Discussing the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Obama said that “the poverty and the hopelessness was there long before the hurricane. All the hurricane did was to pull the curtain back for all the world to see.”

Other parts are newly unearthed. Poor people “need help with basic skills, how to shop, how to show up for work on time, how to wear the right clothes, how to act appropriately in an office,” Obama said in what Drudge teased for hours as a particularly explosive line.

“We don’t need to build more highways out in the suburbs. We should be investing in minority-owned businesses, in our neighborhoods,” Obama also said, in another line that hadn’t been quoted until Tuesday.

Though the speech at Hampton, a historically black Virginia college, hasn’t been part of the debate in 2012, Carlson and others discussed it at the time it was delivered. Carlson said Tuesday that he’d relied on the text of Obama’s prepared remarks in covering the speech on his MSNBC program in 2007, though he did air a clip of it then.

The video’s promotion Tuesday was the latest effort to reignite the controversy over Obama’s connections to Wright, the former pastor of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ, who expressed anger toward white Americans and the U.S. government in multiple sermons. “God damn America,” the pastor famously repeated in one.

After Wright’s remarks emerged during the 2008 Democratic primary, Obama initially responded with a major speech on race, delivered in Philadelphia that March. But, by May, he had severed his ties to Wright and the church, and said he was “outraged” and “saddened” by remarks the preacher had made.

Obama campaign press secretary Ben LaBolt quickly pounced on the video’s release as “a transparent attempt to change the subject from [Romney’s] comments attacking half of the American people,” he said, referring to the Republican candidate’s comments about the “47 percent.”

“The only thing shocking about this is that they apparently think it’s wrong to suggest that we should help returning veterans, children leaving foster care and other members of Mitt Romney’s 47 percent get training that will allow them to find the best available jobs,” LaBolt said. “If the Romney campaign believes that Americans will accept these desperate attacks tomorrow night in place of specific plans for the middle class, it’s they who are in for a surprise.”

Romney has tried to distance himself from any attacks on Obama that rely on his ties to Wright. “Having a campaign focused on character assassination is one thing I find offensive among many others,” he said in May, after The New York Times reported on a plan presented to billionaire Republican donor Joe Ricketts that would have relied on the Wright connection to attack Obama.

“I want to make it very clear: I repudiate that effort,” Romney said. “I think it’s the wrong course for a PAC or a campaign. I hope that our campaigns can be respectively about the future and about issues and about vision for America.”

But, earlier in the year, Romney mentioned Wright in an interview with Hannity, saying “I’m not sure which is worse, him listening to Reverend Wright or him saying that we … must be a less Christian nation.” Asked about those remarks in May, he responded: “I stand by what I said, whatever it was.”

Romney spokesperson Andrea Saul said Tuesday that the campaign “did not have any involvement” in the release of the video.

The Republican National Committee said Tuesday night it would not be commenting on the video.

Speaking after the video aired on Fox News, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said he didn’t think the video would have a major impact, but reflected a tendency toward dishonesty he charged was also there in the White House’s response to the Sept. 11 attack that killed four Americans in Libya.

“I don’t think this particular speech is definitive, but it’s a reminder,” Gingrich said. “Notice on Benghazi, for example, you have the same pattern of dishonesty in the Obama White House that you have in that speech you just showed from 2007.”

Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.), one of the few African-American members of Congress, said on Fox News that “there is a tinge of racially motivated comments that he is making there.” But, like Gingrich, he wasn’t all that impressed. “What’s the ‘So what’ of this video? I don’t think it’s going to really go anywhere,” he said.

Democratic strategist Donna Brazile attacked the outlets that returned to the old video.

“Sad to see Fox News and Drudge try to take us back …. Again. #pathetic,” she wrote on Twitter.