Obama blaming Trump for his bad economy?
Drudge's headline is that President Obama is playing the race card. I'd rather say that he is playing the "blame card" or what he does whenever reality and "hope and change" collide.
This is the story at the New York Times:
President Obama said in a radio interview airing on Monday that Donald J. Trump, a leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination, is exploiting the resentment and anxieties of workingclass men to boost his campaign.
Mr. Obama also argued that some of the scorn directed at him personally stems from the fact that he is the first AfricanAmerican to hold the White House. Demographic changes and economic stresses, including “flatlining” wages and incomes, have meant that “particularly bluecollar men have had a lot of trouble in this new economy, where they are no longer getting the same bargain that they got when they were going to a factory and able to support their families on a single paycheck,” Mr. Obama said in the interview with National Public Radio.
“You combine those things, and it means that there is going to be potential anger, frustration, fear — some of it justified, but just misdirected,” the president added. “I think somebody like Mr. Trump is taking advantage of that. That’s what he’s exploiting during the course of his campaign.”
First of all, I have to laugh because the Democrat Party has been exploiting economic anxiety or stress as long as I can remember. We've been hearing about "blue collar blues" even when there was nothing to sing the blues about. We had 4.8% unemployment when President GW Bush was running for reelection but all you heard from Senator Kerry that things were horrible.
Second, and more important, the Obama years have not been good for blue collar workers. To be fair, it's not all Obama's fault since there are forces in play that have hurt U.S. workers for years.
At the same time, President Obama is not talking to those blue collar white workers who were an automatic vote for Democrats.
Instead, he talks about global warming or "climate change", a couple of foreign topics to a guy fearing job losses or watching his pay check shrink.
He talks about legalizing illegal immigrants, something that many of these blue collar workers see as a threat to their wages or even jobs. Add gun control to the message and President Obama speaks a language that they don't understand between New York City and San Francisco.
In other words, he does not seem to be aligned with working people, no matter how many times he claims to be.
Yes, Mr Trump is talking about blue collars issues but it has nothing to do with President Obama's skin color. It has to do with economic performance. Fair or unfair, it's his economy!
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