Obama saw welfare recipients as 'majority coalition'

[BurfordTJustice]

http://dailycaller.com/2012/09/24/full-audio-of-1998-redistribution-speech-obama-saw-welfare-recipients-as-majority-coalition/#ooid=w4N2d5NTpRvoDqq-uk56825aahsPQkDa

Full audio of 1998 'redistribution' speech: Obama saw welfare recipients as
'majority coalition'
The Daily Caller has obtained a complete audio recording of the October 19,
1998 Loyola College forum on community organizing and policymaking during
which a future President Barack Obama said he favored the government
redistribution of wealth. The audio demonstrates the context of that remark
and reveals other far-left positions that Obama held as a state senator.

Those positions encompass issues as wide-ranging as gun control, universal
health care and welfare reform. Obama also said he viewed welfare recipients
and "the working poor" as "a majority coalition" that could be mobilized to
help advance progressive policies and elect their champions.

Last week the liberal Mother Jones magazine published video footage, shot
during a campaign event, showing Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney
opining that 47 percent of Americans are captive Democratic voters because
they receive government benefits without paying income taxes.

Loyola College refused repeated requests from TheDC for a copy of the full
one-hour and 42-minute videotape from 1998. But a source in Chicago who
gained permission to view it recorded the sound secretly, confirming the
accuracy of - and expanding on - initial accounts that featured only a brief
audio excerpt.

"I actually believe in [wealth] redistribution," Obama said in that
96-second excerpt, published September 18 on YouTube. "At least at a certain
level, to make sure that everybody's got a shot."

The following day, NBC News said it had obtained what it called "the
entirety of the relevant remarks," and complained that Republicans had taken
the original lines out of context.

NBC published only 35 seconds of video, however, more than half of which
overlapped with the YouTube audio from a day earlier. The news agency
claimed the full context demonstrated that Obama only "seems" to support
"redistributing wealth."

"How do we pool resources at the same time as we decentralize delivery
systems in ways that both foster competition, can work in the marketplace,
and can foster innovation at the local level and can be tailored to
particular communities?" Obama asked in the seconds NBC added to the
national discussion.

But Obama's voice is heard during more than 29 minutes of the recording,
including his prepared remarks and his answers to questions from the
audience. At one point on the tape he suggests that the "working poor" on
welfare are a political voting bloc that can be harnessed.

Obama is also heard lamenting Americans' distrust of "government action";
identifying his political opponents - that is, Republicans - as "the bad
guys"; declaring his support for labor unions and community organizers;
endorsing the public financing of political campaigns; and staking out
liberal positions on gun control, government-run health care and welfare
reform.

Many of those positions, he conceded, had "no chance of seeing the light of
day in Springfield" - the Illinois state capital - "or in Washington."

It's unclear if NBC News had a complete recorded copy including Obama's
unedited remarks.





"I think that what we're gonna have to do is somehow resuscitate the notion
that government action can be effective at all," he told an audience that
reportedly consisted of some 400 people. "There has been a systematic - I
don't think it's too strong to call it a propaganda campaign - against the
possibility of government action and its efficacy," he said.

"And I think some of it has been deserved. The Chicago Housing Authority has
not been a model of good policymaking. And neither, necessarily, has been
the Chicago public schools."

"What that means, then is that as we try to resuscitate this notion that we're
all in this thing together - 'leave nobody behind' - we do have to be
innovative in thinking.'What are the delivery systems that are actually
effective and meet people where they live?'" he said.

It was at this point that Obama launched into his now-famous line about
constructing government systems that redistribute wealth.

The full recording reveals that Obama saw welfare recipients and the working
poor in Chicago as a "majority coalition" who could be leveraged
politically. "What I think will re-engage people in politics is if we're
doing significant, serious policy work around what I will label the 'working
poor,'" he said, "although my definition of the working poor is not simply
folks making minimum wage, but it's also families of four who are making
$30,000 a year."

"They are struggling. And to the extent that we are doing research figuring
out what kinds of government action would successfully make their lives
better, we are then putting together a potential majority coalition to move
those agendas forward."

Obama also said he did not support the bipartisan welfare reform Newt
Gingrich and Bill Clinton hammered out during the 1990s, despite more recent
claims that he favored the legislation. In the 1998 recording, he called it
a bill that "I did not entirely agree with and probably would have voted
against at the federal level."

"But one good thing that comes out of it," he conceded, "is that it
essentially desegregates the welfare population," merging urban blacks with
"the working poor, which are the other people."

"Now you just have one batch of folks. . That is increasingly a majority
population," Obama concluded, and one whose policy needs would grow to
encompass, health care, job training, education and a system where
government would "provide effective child care."

The recording also shows Obama in 1998 identifying with what he said was an
American majority angling for new limits on the Second Amendment.

"The vast majority of Americans would like to see serious gun control," the
future president said, noting that "it does not pass. Why does it not pass?
It doesn't pass because there is this huge disconnect between what people
think and what legislators think and are willing to act upon."

Obama also revealed his early disdain for Republicans, referring to his
policy opponents as "the bad guys" who stood in the way of crucial reforms -
while progressive activists often failed on their own to protect oppressed
minority communities.

"The people who are guilty of disempowering the population are not only the
bad guys - I won't be partisan here and say who the bad guys are," Obama
said. "It's not only the folks who are representing the special interests,
quote-unquote, and the guys with the pinky diamond rings and the fat cats.
Sometimes it is also us."

Some of the mechanisms Obama suggested to create a more engaged voter base
included progressive policy prescriptions that would be easily recognizable
in his 2012 White House - among them the need to give unions and community
organizers more "access" to the political decision-making process.

"How do we think about some of the systemic changes that might be required
to reengage the citizenry on these policy issues?" Obama asked. "I would
have some suggestions that I would be happy to toss out during the
question-and-answer: things like public financing for campaigns. How do we
strengthen the mediating institutions like churches, unions, and community
organizations and provide them with the resources and access to decision
making?"

On health care, Obama laid the groundwork for his eventual
government-controlled system.

"In the midst of the greatest economic boom in my lifetime and probably most
of yours," he said, "we have actually record numbers of persons with no
health insurance. And yet there is virtually no movement of, 'How do we
provide insurance to these uninsured?'"

"There's a lot of talk about HMO reform, which looks good, partly because it
doesn't cost that much. It's a matter of just passing a couple of laws. I
support this HMO reform but it certainly doesn't get at the more fundamental
issue of, 'What do we do with this burgeoning number of people who have no
health insurance and are one illness away form bankruptcy or worse?'"

During the question-and-answer session that followed, Obama singled out
United Power for Action and Justice, a left-wing community organizing
outfit, for high praise for "incorporating unions in the organizing
process."

"It's that kind of community organizing model that ends up being absolutely
vital to connecting policy with actual implementation, and empowering
citizenry to make these decisions."

Obama also said the community-organizing political model held advantages,
"particularly institutional-based organizing, church-based organizing, [and]
incorporating unions in the organizing process."