About the whole Dred Scott business. . .

. . .a lot of people are discounting that as a sort of goofy thing to say, but they're missing something. You see, a lot of the talking heads in the last campaign used that case as a scaremongering tactic when debating the wisdom of strict constructionism, and much of that was directed toward the black community. I think it's possible that he felt he needed to address that right up front.

Did he do it inelegantly? Perhaps. It didn't strike me as all that goofy a thing at the time, though.