Here is a tape of Barack Obama speaking at Loyola University in 1998.
The key quote:
How do we structure government systems that pool resources and hence facilitate some redistribution, because I actually believe in redistribution …
Obama’s way of speaking very much reminds us of what George Orwell said in his essay on “Politics and the English Language”:
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible … thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness … The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
Indeed, there is a large gap between Obama’s real and declared aims, as demonstrated in this clip, and it is reflected in the way he speaks. His inflated rhetoric is not a sign of intelligence, but of insincerity and a desire to obfuscate. If he plainly stated what he wanted to say in this clip, then he would never have been elected president to begin with, and would not be nearly as popular now.
So, to cut through all the verbiage and get to the point, let us ask: When did Obama stop being a communist?
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