Another new old tape!

Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller website has a tape of Barack Obama, first aired in 2007, where he tells a mostly black audience he thinks the federal government shafted the people of New Orleans after Katrina.

“Tells me that somehow the people down in New Orleans they don’t care about as much.”

Carlson summarized it this way:

“He is telling a predominently black audience that the ‘government doesn’t like you because you are black.'”

Divisive, he said. But what Obama said was actually a little more boring. He was talking about something called the Stafford Act.

“There’s a federal law where you get reconstruction money from the federal government called the Stafford Act.”

The act imposed so much red tape on disaster relief that Congress suspended it for the 9/11 disaster, but did not suspend it immediately after Katrina. PBS’s Frontline reported that it slowed down the recovery.

So by making this a story, what are we saying – we suddenly like red tape now? Seems weird.

But the recording does show that Obama did get a black audience excited and probably won a fair number of votes just by virtue of being black. Although we don’t seem to be overwhelmed by black presidential candidates, so the advantage must be limited.

Now, if you want some news, there is one part of the recording I haven’t heard mentioned. This part, where he thanks his mentor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright:

“He helped me on a another journey and introduced me to someone named Jesus Christ.”

To the 17% of registered voters who still think he’s Muslim, that would be news.