Obama: 'We're going to paint nation purple with SEIU' Explains how he 'built political power on south side of Chicago'

By Chelsea Schilling

During his campaign, President Obama boasted of his track record of working with the Illinois-based Service Employees International Union, helping it "build more and more power" – and he promised to "paint the nation purple with SEIU."

In the following recently surfaced video from January 2008 posted by Breitbart, Obama told a group of SEIU workers that all presidential, gubernatorial and congressional candidates claim they are pro-union when they are looking for endorsements:

"They'll all say, 'We love SEIU,'" he said. "But he question you've got to ask yourself is, do they have it in their gut? Do they have a track record of standing alongside you on picket lines? Do they have a track record of going after the companies that aren't letting you organize? Do they have a track record of voting the right way but also helping you organize to build more and more power?"

Obama referenced his background as a community organizer and his ties to SEIU Local 880, a union for homecare workers and home childcare providers in Illinois that first mobilized through Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN.

"I've been working with SEIU before I was elected to anything," he said. "When I was a community organizer, SEIU local 880 and myself, we organized people to make sure that home-care workers had the basic right to organize. We organized voting registration drives. That's how we built political power on the south side of Chicago

."

He continued, "And now the time has come for us to do it all across this country. We are going to paint the nation purple with SEIU."