STREAM EXCLUSIVE ORIGINALS

Conservatives Hope Old News Will Be Bad News for Obama

Fox News and conservative publication the Daily Caller are calling a 2007 video of President Obama "Obama's Other Race Speech," a video recording of him in 2007 addressing a group of African-American ministers and others at Hampton University.

It's that time of the presidential campaign cycle when people start wondering whether there will be an "October Surprise," an unforeseen event that can make or break a candidacy. Fox News and the conservative website The Daily Caller think they've found the game changer that could derail President Obama's lead in the polls and pull voters' attention from Mitt Romney's comments about the "47 percent." The problem is it's really old news and was previously covered by media outlets.
They're calling it "Obama's Other Race Speech," a video recording of him in 2007 addressing a group of African-American ministers and others at Hampton University.

In his remarks, Obama criticized the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina and slow stream of aid to its victims, contrasting it to the support given victims of Hurricane Andrew in Florida.
"What's happening down in New Orleans? Where's your dollars?" he asked the audience. "Makes no sense. Tells me the bullet hasn't been taken out. Tells me that somehow the people down in New Orleans, they don't care about it as much."
And in a "shout out" to his then-pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama called him “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.”

Daily Caller editors in a blog post described Obama's remarks as "racially charged and at times angry" and delivered "in an accent he almost never adopts in public."
The video is the far right's latest attempt to tie the president to his incendiary minister and it's also a ploy that Romney has rejected in the past. Romney adviser Kevin Madden said on CBS This Morning Wednesday that the campaign believes "what's most relevant are the president's policies and how they are affecting people's bottom line."
Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt accused "Mitt Romney's allies" of making "a transparent attempt to change the subject" from Romney's comments in which he claimed that 47 percent of Americans don't pay income taxes and prefer to be dependent on the government.
So the real October Surprise, for those promoting the video at least, is that nobody cares. Even Rep. Allen West didn't see the point.

“What’s the ‘So what’ of this video? I don’t think it’s going to really go anywhere,” he said on Fox News.

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(Photo: The Daily Caller)

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