Sean Hannity, Drudge Report, Daily Caller focus on racial pandering in previously unseen excerpts from 2007 Candidate Obama video

Associated Press reports that “Conservatives on Tuesday used a speech President Barack Obama delivered as a candidate in 2007 to accuse him of using racially charged rhetoric.” —  in the video Candidate Obama praises his “former pastor”  Jeremiah Wright well AFTER  Obama's  earlier announcement speech, where he distanced himself from the Reverend Wright

The AP report quoted former Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich speaking on Fox News (On the Record with Greta Van Susteren), which aired segments of then-candidate Barack Obama’s videotaped speech, as follows: "There’s no way you can listen to this speech and not hear it as a deliberately divisive speech that pits Americans against each other and does so largely with racial innuendoes that are very, very clear when you hear the speech."

Also quoted by the AP was: 1) Fox News host Sean Hannity, who said the speech "contains some of the most divisive class warfare and racially charged rhetoric ever used by Barack Obama...."; 2) Conservative pundit Tucker Carlson of The Daily Caller, which posted video of the speech online, who maintained that the Obama speech featured "racial rhetoric designed to make people fearful...."; and  The Drudge Report, which predicted the airing of the Obama video would "ignite accusations of racism — in both directions!".

The Associated Press report included  responses from President Obama’s and Republican challenger Mitt Romney’s campaigns.  Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt quickly dismissed all the criticism of the 2007 speech, accusing "Mitt Romney’s allies" of recirculating video of a widely covered speech in "a transparent attempt to change the subject" from Romney’s comments about 47 percent of Americans who don’t pay federal income taxes. The Romney campaign did not immediately respond to a request seeking comment. The AP noted that  Romney had previously distanced himself from a conservative group’s proposal of an advertising campaign featuring Obama’s former spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., whose race-related sermons stirred controversy in Obama’s first campaign (Note: In the complete video of Barack Obama’s 2007 speech, which was released yesterday, the candidate is shown specifically praising the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., as  his pastor and close friend long after Obama's announcement speech, in which Candidate Obama obviously and publicly had begun to distance himself from Reverend Wright and Wright's notorious sermons).