Maybe this might help WhiteSwan.
Obama in 1998: (You might recognize the shorten sentence the right & Romney have latched onto but the longer sentence clears that up and the whole section addresses a few of the issues your link brought up but mistakenly tried to denigrate Obama about.)
"Let me just close by saying, as we think about the policy research surrounding the issues that I just named, policy research for the working poor, broadly defined, I think that what we're going to have to do is somehow resuscitate the notion that government action can be effective at all. There has been a systematic -- I don't think it's too strong to call it a propaganda campaign against the possibility of government action and its efficacy. And I think some of it has been deserved. Chicago Housing Authority has not been a model of good policymaking. And neither necessarily have been the Chicago Public Schools.
What that means, then, is, is that as we try to resuscitate this notion that we're all in this thing together, leave nobody behind, we do have to be innovative in thinking, what are the delivery systems that are actually effective and meet people where they live? And my suggestion, I guess, would be that the trick -- and this is one of the few areas where I think there are technical issues that have to be dealt with, as opposed to just political issues -- I think the trick is figuring out how do we structure government systems that pool resources and hence facilitate some redistribution, because I actually believe in redistribution, at least at a certain level to make sure that everybody's got a shot."
https://mediamatters.org/blog/2012/09/21/shame-on-them-obama-co-panelists-fault-media-wh/190052