The Cost of Barack Obama’s Speech
“I
found myself spending time with people of means — law firm partners and
investment bankers, hedge fund managers and venture capitalists,”
Senator Barack Obama wrote in his book “The Audacity of Hope.” “As a
rule, they were smart, interesting people. But they reflected, almost
uniformly, the perspectives of their class: the top 1 percent or so of
the income scale.”
He
wrote in 2006: “I know that as a consequence of my fund-raising I
became more like the wealthy donors I met. I spent more and more of my
time above the fray, outside the world of immediate hunger,
disappointment, fear, irrationality, and frequent hardship of … the
people that I’d entered public life to serve.”
Is it a betrayal of that sentiment for the former president to have accepted a reported $400,000
to speak to a Wall Street firm? Perhaps not, but it is disheartening
that a man whose historic candidacy was premised on a moral examination
of politics now joins almost every modern president in cashing in. And
it shows surprising tone deafness, more likely to be expected from the
billionaires the Obamas have vacationed with these past months than from
a president keenly attuned to the worries and resentments of the 99
percent.
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