Molly Ball, political correspondent for The Atlantic, said Wednesday that recently unearthed audio of President Barack Obama endorsing the concept of redistributing government resources was not likely to harm his re-election campaign.

“I don’t think [redistribution] is a popular concept with the public, but this is also not a shocking revelation about President Obama,” she said on Current TV. “This is essentially the same thing he said much more recently in 2008 to Joe the Plumber, when he said that he believed in spreading the wealth around. This is not a real gotcha, this is something that a lot of liberals and indeed most Republicans agree with on some theoretical level.”

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Conservative news outlets like The Drudge Report have posted an audio clip of Obama speaking at a conference at Loyola University in 1998. In the clip, Obama says it is necessary to “resuscitate the notion that government can be effective at all.”

“I think the trick is figuring out how do we structure government systems that pool resources, and hence facilitate some redistribution, because I actually believe in redistribution, at least at a certain level, to make sure that everybody has got a shot,” he explains.

Romney highlighted the video on Tuesday, saying “the right course for America is to create growth, create wealth, not to redistribute wealth.”

Watch video, courtesy of Current TV, below: