Bloomberg: Mr. Hope and Change Can Feel No One's Pain: Margaret Carlson

[nonniey]

Ok, hell has frozen over this is from Margaret Carlson. Margaret Carlson! Eugene Robinson is the only columnist I'd be more surprised to see a critical piece on the President from. When even Carlson has turned on the President you know he is sinking.

"We don’t get many do-overs in life. President Barack Obama got one on Monday, a chance to correct the impression that he can’t identify with Joe and Josephine Six Pack except when telling them to eat their spinach and not be upset that the bankers who got us into this mess are dining on caviar.

His opening came in the form of a long, compelling question from Velma Hart at a town hall meeting at the Newseum in Washington. As an exemplar of the middle class, sitting at the kitchen table at the end of the month asking why it’s going so wrong, you couldn’t do better than Hart.

You just know she plays by the rules, wakes early to get to her job as chief financial officer of the veterans’ group Amvets, and raced to the polls in November 2008 to vote for Obama.

Velma told the president that she’s “exhausted of defending you,” “deeply disappointed with where we are right now,” and waiting for him finally “to change things in a meaningful way for the middle class.”

A veteran of the U.S. Army Reserve, Hart is married to a facilities manager and lives in suburban Maryland. With two daughters in private school, one about to go to college, she told the president she’s afraid of having to revert to serving hot dogs and beans, the universal symbol of scrimping. The room was with her.

Bill Clinton would have been feeling Velma’s pain at “Hello.” He would undoubtedly have gone overboard, biting too hard on his lower lip. But too much empathy is better than treating a plea from the heart as a request to the professor for a make-up exam.

Clinton’s Embrace

Empathy helped Clinton beat George H.W. Bush in 1992. At a presidential debate in Richmond, Bush fumbled when asked by a woman in the audience how the federal debt affected him personally. “I’m not sure I get it,” Bush said. “Help me with the question, and I’ll try to answer it.”

Clinton, naturally, embraced the question, the questioner, the room and the country. He’d met people like her “all over America, people that have lost their jobs, lost their livelihood, lost their health insurance.” He may have clinched the election that night.

Obama is less Clinton and more Bush, itching to check the time or, in Obama’s case, his BlackBerry. But even by the standards of, say, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, whose party believes extending unemployment benefits encourages sloth, Obama’s response was removed and cold.

‘Times Are Tough’

“Now, as I said before, times are tough for everybody right now, so I understand your frustration,” he told Hart, after rather clumsily praising her as part of “the bedrock of America” and before citing new credit-card rules and student- loan procedures as evidence of progress.

“As I said” always carries with it the implied question, Weren’t you paying attention? “For everybody” telegraphs you’re one out of millions, nothing special.

And “everybody” isn’t suffering, which is the truth that gets to the heart of Obama’s problem and makes his brushing off Hart as much substance as theater.

Ticking off government initiatives isn’t recognizing how unfair life feels when the rich are getting richer, thanks to government support, and you aren’t. Obama’s one moment of connection came when he joked to Hart that even the most responsible person might want to go buy a new pair of shoes.

Hart said of the man who was going to change things, “I’m waiting. I don’t feel it yet.”

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Click link for the rest of the story.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-22/mr-hope-and-change-can-feel-no-one-s-pain-margaret-carlson.html

[Teller]

"Here's the pitch, she swings, oh my, this is hit well...it's back, back, back.....it's goooooone!!!!!"

[Hubbs]

People voted for change because they recognized that Washington was doing more harm than good.

Unfortunately, the only change that has occurred is in areas which barely matter at all.

The rallying cries of the Republicans right now are eerily similar to the rallying cries of Democrats in 2008. "No more business as usual!" "We're tired of the way things work in Washington!" "It's time to vote the bums out!"

Both Democrats and Republicans, however, qualify as "the bums." You want change? Then you don't want either of these parties to have any power whatsoever.

[Thiebear]

I'm old enough now to see that "change' doesn't come when you pull subject 141 from SubGroup A2 and move him up to Group A.

As was done with Senator Obama and the Clinton appointees. I only wish President Obama acted as Clinton term 2

[Ellis]

Dead on, Hubbs. Dead on!

[China]

The Daily Show had a good bit on it:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-september-21-2010/meet-the-depressed?xrs=share_copy

[Burgold]

If President Obama can not feel our pain and has lost sensitivity in his nerves that is just one more reason for health reform. We need to learn if this insensitivity will lead to paralysis.