The Wall Street Journal reports on a testy exchange between President Obama and Congressional Republicans at the White House yesterday.
“At one point, the president told Republican leaders to ‘stop trying to frighten the American people,’ displaying a chart showing diminishing job losses over the past four quarters, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) said after the meeting.”
That made me wonder if President Obama has ever sunk so low as to try frightening the American people.
Oh my gosh, he has!
Consider this from his speech to the Democratic convention in 2008:
“Tonight, more Americans are out of work and more are working harder for less. More of you have lost your homes and even more are watching your home values plummet. More of you have cars you can’t afford to drive, credit card bills you can’t afford to pay, and tuition that’s beyond your reach.”
He went on to describe “a woman in Ohio [who], on the brink of retirement, finds herself one illness away from disaster after a lifetime of hard work.”
And “a man in Indiana [who] has to pack up the equipment he’s worked on for twenty years and watch it shipped off to China, and then chokes up as he explains how he felt like a failure when he went home to tell his family the news.”
And “a government that lets veterans sleep on our streets and families slide into poverty; that sits on its hands while a major American city drowns before our eyes.”
Quite frightening. And that was just in the first five minutes!
We’ve seen this act more recently, too. We all remember President Obama’s address to Congress on health care reform. After telling several disturbing tales about people who lost insurance and faced cataclysmic consequences (which turned out to be mostly untrue), the president lamented, “Instead of honest debate, we’ve seen scare tactics.”
Then, days later, he put on his best scary voice to warn that none of us are safe from the deprivations of insurance companies: “We’ve got to do something because it can happen to anyone. There but for the grace of God go I. It could happen to anyone.”
Scaring people into thinking the other party is going to ruin their lives is a political tradition as old as the republic. President Obama engages in the ritual as vigorously as his Republican opponents do. Much as he may try to ride his high horse, he, too, spends plenty of time in the mud.
