OPINION:
Van Jones, former green czar for Barack Obama, suggested during a CNN interview the ex-president ought not have jumped at the chance to earn a cool $400,000 for a planned speech on health care to a Wall Street audience. Rather, Van Jones said, he should’ve gone on a “poverty tour” of the nation instead.
Maybe. But then again, optics was never Obama’s strong suit — or concern.
Remember how the former president in 2014 stood before cameras to declare himself “heartbroken” at the ISIS beheading of American journalist James Foley — and then skipped off to the golf course?
Even the adoring New York Times wrote in August of that year, “A Terrorist Horror, Then Golf: Incongruity Fuels Obama Critics.” The opening lines?
“[Obama] had just hung up the telephone with the devastated parents before heading in front of the cameras [to announced the news],” the newspaper reported. “But as soon as the cameras went off, Mr. Obama headed to his favorite golf course on Martha’s Vineyard … [and] spent the rest of the afternoon on the links even as a firestorm of criticism erupted over what many saw as a callous indifference to the slaughter he had just condemned.”
Yes indeed, that was a bad optics moment for the then-president.
But he suffered many more — brought on by his own bumblings and stumbling. The famous crowd wave with Raul Castro during a Tampa Bay Rays game with Cuba’s national team. His inappropriately-timed tango in Argentina on the heels of the terrorist attack in Brussels. His flirty show and giggling selfie with Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, in the middle of Nelson Mandela’s funeral — alongside a tight-lipped Michelle Obama.
No Drama Obama?
No Clue Obama is more like it.
Even his liberal fawners are raising eyebrows with his latest tone-deaf escapade.
On “State of the Union,” Van Jones said: “I hope [Obama] will do a tour — go to Appalachia, go to Native American reservations, where they’re shoving these pipelines down their throats and they don’t even have clean, running water. Go to South Center, go to the Arizona border where you have a lot of poverty. If he would do a poverty tour first … from a moral point of view, it would be great for him to do.”
Yes, but this is Obama — so why bother with the moral route?
“Obama goes Clinton as he accepts huge speaking fee,” writes the News and Observer.
And from the Daily Beast: “Bill Maher Criticizes Obama for His $400,000 Wall Street Speech.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, meanwhile, found the fee a bit curious as well, particularly from a president who spoke for frequently about the blasted “fat cats” on Wall Street and in Big Business, so-called stealing from the little people.
But this is liberalism — another word for hypocrisy. You know it’s pretty flagrant, though, when even your hard-core leftist admirers are calling you out for it.
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