For going on seven years we have learned three things about President Obama: 1) He loves the poor so much he continues to create more of them. 2) He loves the poor so much he does everything in his power to keep them poor. 3) He doesn’t see the opposition as loyal, but as bad players — his enemy. This is especially true of Fox News, which Obama ripped as anti-poor bigots during a Wednesday afternoon summit on poverty. We’re used to this Obama, the forever-partisan who has never seen himself as president of all the people but only of those who worship him.
What was most revealing about the president’s comments was his expressed desire to “change how the media reports.”
Speaking of Fox News, the poor, and the way GOP leaders think, Obama said, [W]e’re going to have to change how our body politic thinks, which means we’re going to have to change how the media reports on these issues.”
Here is the full transcript:
I think that the effort to suggest that the poor are sponges, leeches, don’t want to work, are lazy, are undeserving, got traction. And look, it’s still being propagated. I have to say that if you watch Fox News on a regular basis, it is a constant venue. They will find folks who make me mad. I don’t know where they find them. They’re all like, “I don’t want to work. I just want a free Obama Phone, or whatever.” And that becomes an entire narrative that gets worked up. And very rarely do you hear an interview of a waitress, which is much more typical — who is raising a couple of kids and doing everything right but still can’t pay the bills.
And so, if we’re going to change how Rep. John Boehner (R-OH)40% and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY)54% think, we’re going to have to change how our body politic thinks, which means we’re going to have to change how the media reports on these issues, and how people’s impressions of what it’s like to struggle in this economy looks like. And how budgets connect to that. And that’s a hard process because that requires a much broader conversation than typically we have on the nightly news.
After seven failed years, to watch Obama sit there and discuss the poor as though he is part of the solution and not the problem, is laughable.
And let’s not forget that Obama knows nothing about poverty. He has lived a privileged life.
Obama attended prep schools as a child, lived with his well-to-do grandparents in Honolulu as a teen, where he attended Panahou, a fancy private school. Both of his grandparents were well educated; she even worked as the vice president of a bank. For a time, Obama had a nanny! From there Obama attended Occidental College in California, was well off enough to visit Pakistan for 3 weeks; he then attended two of the most prestigious colleges in the country: Columbia and Harvard.
The closest Obama has ever come to experiencing anything close to poverty was during his time as a community organizer in Chicago. And in that dynamic, the poor were just pawns for Obama to manipulate to achieve his political ambitions.
Obama knows nothing of struggle, or what life is like for those who do. And after 7 years of his failed economic policies, we also know he doesn’t give a damn enough about the poor to change his policies in a way that might actually help them.
Obama likes poor people fine — he likes them dependent on the government.
He also likes the news media to do what it’s told.
