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.”
“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.”
http://dailycaller.com/2012/09/24/full-audio-of-1998-redistribution-speech-obama-saw-welfare-recipients-as-majority-coalition/
Notice also he says nothing about getting people off government dependency. The Lefties among you of course are going to support all these notions, but it has always been understood that the Left views welfare recipients as a much needed and to be created voting block so there's no need to lie about it here though of course the Left is keen to not have the conversation about their creation and maintenance of a victims constituency out in the open. Romney was absolutely right in his comments.