BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski posts the brief clip, with some context. It’s from 1991, at a time when Harvard was embroiled in a controversy over racial preferences in tenure. Obama, then editor of the Harvard Law Review, took the unsurprising position in favor of preferences.
Kaczynski adds:
Obama was a major figure on campus, the first black president of the Law Review. Some friends, in a prescient joke, just referred to him as “the first black president.” He had a reputation as a conciliatory figure, not a confrontational one like Bell.
“”How Obama would react to Derrick Bell’s protest was a matter of some interest,” New Yorker editor David Remnick wrote in his exploration of Obama and race, The Bridge.
It was a situation in which clear lines had been drawn, and Obama sided with Bell. In a speech before the law school’s Harkness Commons — and sounding very much like his future presidential self — he described Bell as “the Rosa Parks of legal education.”
Obama’s stand provided a major boost to the protests, Keith Boykin, one of their organizers, later recalled.
Barack was always supportive and sympathetic to our campaign for faculty diversity. He spoke about it at one of our rallies. But he was not actively involved in the protest movement. Nor did he need to be. As I said, his presence alone made the case. And even if he agreed with the cause of the movement, he didn’t need to be involved in the more radical protests we launched because our tactics were controversial on campus.
That pattern, of siding with radical or hardline positions while positioning himself as the conciliatory figure, persists. Obama plays the good cop to Van Jones’ bad cop. Or Eric Holder’s bad top cop. But Obama pursues the same radical goals that Holder et al pursue. He’s the smiley face masking extreme aims.
The content of the speech itself isn’t all that interesting (this clip isn’t whatever Andrew Breitbart had drummed up). Obama exhibits the same pomposity that we see today, only without a teleprompter. His speech cadence hasn’t changed since his college days. His tendency to win audiences over with an easy joke, and sound like a preacher without the overt altar call, was already there too. It’s not hard to see what Rev. Jeremiah Wright et al saw in the man who came to them in Chicago a few years later. Obama was born with a natural and useful charm, and he knew it early, and he has cultivated it well. He’s a perfect demagogue.
Update: Hmmmm.
He is the perfect demagogue. As such, he’s scary as hell.
I watched him give his victory speech when he won his US Senate seat, and knew right then that he was dangerous and a threat to be president someday. Just didn’t figure it would happen so soon.
Since buzzfeed has licensed the video, (whatever that means), why the dead audio space toward the end of the clip (1:08-1:09)? Is Buzzfeed commenting on that? I would think they have noticed and considered that as part of they releasing the tape.
He is in fact a demagogue, and he is not going to win, not ever, even if things in this nation have got to be torn out root and branch to get to that point.
so true, just another Alinskyite, America-Hater, and Crookago Illinois rable rouser Democrat Machine Politician, out to line his pockets while spewing bullshit.
Interesting, Obama was a big man on campus, at Harvard, and yet, we know very little about his time there. This is the first video we’ve seen. There have been no march of the Crimson articles much less the Boston papers. Hmmm?
What a Blow-Hard, corrupt, rabble-rouser Politician from the Ultra-Corrupt Crookago Illinois. Look at all the Doofis’es listening to him, what a joke, they don’t even look half-interested, nor should they be.
It’s plain to see that his choice of wardrobe, when addressing a crowd, hasn’t changed much.
I don’t know about that. I haven’t seen the President in Dockers and a blue chambray shirt lately.
Obama is a fanatical Marxist from day one. Tom Fife was telling the truth; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJty-It1cS0
This is why someone *might* get heart attacked by a foreign agent hanging around their local pub. Putin having an asset in the White House to bring America crashing down is high stakes business.
Homeland Stasi, I see you looking at this post. Nothing more to see, just move along to my gmail archives now.
“He’s a perfect demagogue.”
Others jumped on this, too. This was profound insight. It perfectly encapsulates the man. Nothing else describes him so well. It almost describes him completely.
Well done, Mr. Preston.
Obama didn’t edit the Law Review. He presided over it…from a distance (the joke among staffers was “Where’s Barack. Oh, he’s working from home.”).
I can’t get the video to play, but as I recall, the whole Derrick Bell protest had to do with Harvard’s declining to grant his protégée Patricia Williams a tenured position. Both were proponents of Critical Race Theory, which, simply put, asserts that existing law (including civil rights and affirmative action law) and the common culture favor whites and inhibit black advances. CRT, among other things, replaces “story telling” for legal theory and advocates for different rules/laws for different races.
Obama was no doubt too politic to publicly support CRT, but it goes hand-in-hand with the Black Liberation Theology he embraced some years later. His whole “there’s no white or black America, only America” schtick was utter BS. Nothing that he does today should surprise us. He has to demagogue because there’s no rational argument for the things he truly believes.
NOT THE FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT — He is not even a black, he is a half-breed arab and white. Mentally, he is another Adolph Hitler with the arrogance of Benito Mussolini. Either way, a VERY dangerous power against Freedom and American well being.
I wish I was a body language expert. What’s up with all the hand in and out of the pocket?
Shocking video of Obama with black people found.
Your paranoia is truly amazing. I was paranoid in the bush in the Nam, but the NVA and VC were actually trying to kill me. You so-called patriots disgust me. None of you could hump 80 lbs of gear, let alone survive an ambush. Most of you are military avoiders, who couldn’t march 20 miles without dropping and getting a heat evacuation. Don’t get me started on the draft dodgers.
http://video.pbs.org/video/1082086783/
footage similar to the above tape was included in this 2009 PBS frontline program (Chapter 3 of 6)