The recent video that surfaced on the Daily Caller’s website showing then presidential candidate Barack Obama in 2007 addressing an audience at Hampton University during the Democratic presidential primary. According to The Daily Caller:
In a video obtained exclusively by The Daily Caller, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama tells an audience of black ministers, including the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, that the U.S. government shortchanged Hurricane Katrina victims because of racism.
“The people down in New Orleans they don’t care about as much!” Obama shouts in the video, which was shot in June of 2007 at Hampton University in Virginia. By contrast, survivors of Sept. 11 and Hurricane Andrew received generous amounts of aid, Obama explains. The reason? Unlike residents of majority-black New Orleans, the federal government considers those victims “part of the American family.”
But how much did Obama care about New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina? According to a 2008 CNN report, as a Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama and then Senator Joe Biden, along with 91 other members in the upper chamber, both voted for funding for the Alaska “bridge to nowhere” through the 2005 transportation bill.
However, when another Senator tried to divert the “bridge to nowhere” money to fix a bridge to New Orleans, which was damaged during Hurricane Katrina, Senators Biden and Obama both voted against funding its repair. Eighty other senators voted against this amendment.
