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Barack Obama

Scandalous Video: Obama Talks Sense About Road Building

4:51 PM EDT on October 3, 2012

You all excited to watch the presidential debate tonight? Here's a glimpse back to 2007, when the old Barack Obama was getting us all hyped up on a sugar rush of hope and change. Check out this video, care of the conservative Daily Caller, which is making a lot of hay about some racially-charged remarks Obama made on the campaign trail back then.

The part that interests us comes at about 3:45, and it’s not the part Tucker Carlson is crowing about. It’s where then-candidate Obama says:

That’s why we need additional federal public transportation dollars going to the highest need communities. We don’t need to build more highways out in the suburbs if we have people in the cities right now who want to work but have no way to get to those jobs. We got to help connect them to the jobs that exist. We should be investing in minority-owned businesses in our neighborhoods so people don’t have to travel from miles away.

The Washington Post’s Brad Plumer took this to mean that Obama was advocating a fix-it-first strategy. But that’s not quite the way I see it – it looks to me like a more incisive critique of the way urban areas get the shaft in favor of rural and suburban areas. It’s specifically an argument for urban transit instead of suburban road-building. It’s even a rejection of job sprawl and a promotion of urban businesses where people could get to work without driving.

Wonder if he’ll bring back any of that fiery urbanist zeal tonight?

Tanya Snyder
Tanya became Streetsblog's Capitol Hill editor in September 2010 after covering Congress for Pacifica Radio’s Washington bureau and for public radio stations around the country. She lives car-free in a transit-oriented and bike-friendly neighborhood of Washington, DC.

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