The right wing is smirking away with an old clip of future President Obama in 1998 advocating "redistribution" that Breitbart picked up in a trashcan somewhere and posted
yesterday.
In a newly-discovered video, Barack Obama, at a 1998 conference at Loyola University in Chicago, said he believed in "redistribution" to "make sure that everybody's got a shot."
Obama said the "notion government action can be effective" needed to be resuscitated and conceded that the failures of the Chicago Housing Authority and the Chicago public school system made people less inclined to have faith in government.
"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's got a shot," Obama said.
Naturally, this was taken out of
contextMitt Romney's campaign this week has pounced on a 14-year-old clip of Obama speaking about "redistribution" in October 1998 at a conference in Chicago, in which the future president seems to extol the virtues of redistributing wealth.
Yet NBC News has obtained the entirety of the relevant remarks, which includes additional comments by Obama that weren't included in the video circulated by Republicans. That omission features additional words of praise for "competition" and the "marketplace" by the then-state senator.
In the whole clip, Obama says:
"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's got a shot. 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 continues in a few words after that to describe the use of tax credits in setting public housing development policy in Chicago as an example before concluding.
The video circulated by Republicans, which has used as fodder for an attack on Obama, includes a longer reflection by Obama about talking about how government action can be effective. But the clip has been cut short after the word "shot;" Obama's words about competition, the marketplace and innovation are omitted from the clip.
Then we have this clipped video from earlier this week:
Yup. More taking out of
context.
In this case, here's what the president actually said: "I'll cut out government spending that's not working, that we can't afford, but I'm also going to ask anybody making over $250,000 a year to go back to the tax rates they were paying under Bill Clinton, back when our economy created 23 million new jobs, the biggest budget surplus in history and everybody did well. Just like we've tried their plan, we tried our plan -- and it worked. That's the difference. That's the choice in this election. That's why I'm running for a second term."
He was comparing tax policies -- Clinton-era tax rates vs. Bush-era tax rates. The RNC simply omitted the part of the quote that makes clear what the president was talking about. Weigel accurately calls this "insanely misleading."
That's true, but let's also not lose sight of the larger pattern.
As we discussed last week, at this point in the race, Republicans aren't just occasionally taking Obama quotes out of context; they're actually building their entire 2012 campaign strategy around sentiments the president didn't actually say. I've honestly never seen anything like it.
Be sure to read the rest...
