NYC Letter: The Common Man Presidency IX -- On The Hustings

Day 1,013 of CHOPE

We're just not that far removed from what most Americans are going through.

Mr. Obama,
millionaire, employed with perks,
and living large, stooping to empathize
GOOD MORNING AMERICA INTERVIEW
WASHINGTON July 23, 2010 (ABC News)

The Obamas, husband and wife, are out among us, the common folk, to feel our pain at $35,800 pot-lucks, to capture the empathic moment forever in a $10,000 family happy snap. They have descended from the perch of the presidency to eat wings and waffles and make national headlines with page-six Target forays. They want to be re-elected as America's first couple so they can go on being just like us if we were them.

MICHELLE OBAMA AND 'THE FEW AT THE TOP'
By Victor Davis Hanson

OP-ED October 29, 2011 (NRO) - The other day, [Mrs. Obama] thundered, "Will we be a country that tells folks who’ve done everything right but are struggling to get by, 'Tough luck, you’re on your own'? Is that who we are?"

Given that the federal budget has increased by $2 trillion in just a decade, entitlements are at record levels, and this administration is now running $1.5 trillion annual deficits, it is hard to imagine that any government has told anyone "tough luck." And it is even harder to suggest that nine months of a Republican-controlled House — voted in as part of the largest midterm correction since 1938 — has had much effect on the Obama employment agenda of nearly three years, the majority of which time Obama controlled both houses of Congress and borrowed nearly $5 trillion in sending unemployment over 9 percent.

And when Ms. Obama charges, "Will we be a country where opportunity is limited to just the few at the top? Who are we?" one wonders, why, then, in the past three years of hard times, did she insist on vacationing, in iconic fashion, at Vail, Martha’s Vineyard, and Costa del Sol, the tony haunts of "the few at the top"? In these rough times, surely a smaller staff, less travel, and budgetary economies would have enhanced her populist message of some at the top enjoying perks at the expense of others.

Mrs. Obama makes a poor messenger for the hard life. She is an ostentatious sybarite (and this) who both enjoys privilege and exploits presidential perks. She is not little people. In the Obamas' quest for campaign money, Mrs. Obama pleading the distress of America's middle class and working poor sounds phony because it is phony.

CHOPE.

Just like you if you're them.