PrintMr. and Mrs. Obama Keep Up Pretense of Growing Up Poor
Let's get this straight. Barack Obama never knew a life of financial hardship. Ditto for Michelle. But the First Couple keeps bringing up their impoverished childhoods and student loan debts in stump speeches.
In 2008 Obama reeled in the MTV crowd with an unproven spiel about how he and Michelle's first mortgage was less than their monthly loan payments.
I went to college having to take out student loans, went to law school having to take out student loans. Michelle took out student loans. When we got married, I think together our total loan payments every month was more than our mortgage when we bought a house, and that lasted for about 10 years.
Here's Michelle selling the same old tripe 4 years later at Princeton University, her alma mater.
"When it comes to giving our kids the education they deserve, Barack knows that like me and like so many of you, he never - never - could have attended college without financial aid. Without financial aid, we wouldn't be here," she said. "In fact, when we were first married - I mentioned this - our combined monthly student loan bills were actually higher than our mortgage."
She appears to use the same speech everywhere she goes. She told similar anecdotes in her DNC speech and at visit to NC Central University in Durham last week.
Where are the promissory notes, Michelle and Barack? Show us the financial records of your student loans. Where's the documentation?
Obama's tale of being raised by a "teenage" mother on food stamps and getting all the way through Harvard Law on student loans is playing again across America. He deceives by conflating events removed from each other in time. Take for example his words relayed to Joe Klein in a Time Magazine article in 2006:
"I had to reconcile a lot of different threads growing up--race, class," he told me. "For example, I was going to a fancy prep school, and my mother was on food stamps while she was getting her Ph.D."
Except Obama was in prep school during the 70's and his mother didn't get her PhD until 1992.
Stanley Ann Dunham sent Barry to live with his well-off grandparents when he was a teenager and she somehow had enough income to pursue a PhD after divorcing husband number two; albeit having resorted to food stamps.
Obama went to a fancy private school in Hawaii, his grandmother was Vice-President of a bank, and his stepfather worked for Exxon in Jakarta. From fifth grade through high school he attended the elite college-prep Punahou School.
Michelle's story of economic misfortune is no more believable than her husband's. She was middle class all the way. Her father's yearly salary as a city worker exceeded the average teacher's income. Mrs. Obama lived in a middle-class neighborhood with a stay-at-home mom. If she went to Princeton and Harvard Law on student loans, she should show us the darn proof.
Or stop perpetrating this deprived childhood hoax on young people who really are low-income and bogged down in debt. You know, the ones who aren't hiding their college transcripts?
How did these two pay their tuition? Reports hitting the new media blogs today indicate there's something to the story that Obama's education at both Columbia and Harvard were financed by Saudi money. If this is true, it would mean that what the Obamas have said about living through financial hardship has been less than honest.
It will be shame on Americans if they are fooled twice by this act.
Read more M. Catharine Evans at Potter Williams Report
