President Obama wasn’t trying to get into a game of one-upmanship over who was exposed to more lead as a kid when he said he might have eaten lead paint, and instead was trying to make the point that kids in Flint, Mich., should be fine now that the government is taking steps to address the city’s lead water crisis, the White House explained Thursday.
In visiting Flint, Mich., Wednesday Obama noted that growing up in the ’60s and ’70s he was likely exposed to lead, as probably all American children were then. “I might have ingested some lead paint when I was two or three years old,” he said, adding that the health hazard did not prevent him from growing up healthy and able to accomplish whatever he set out to.
When asked whether Obama really did eat lead paint, spokesman Josh Earnest said Obama was “making the point that the effort to remove lead from gasoline and from paint is a relatively recent phenomena; that before 1980, it was common for even young children to be exposed to lead.”
Lead’s negative health consequences, particularly on child development, were not widely known when Obama was growing up, Earnest said.
“The message the president was trying to deliver is a critically important one,” Earnest said. Flint parents are right to worry about their children’s health, but as long as they seek and follow the medical advice the federal government has made available to them, the kids should be all right, Earnest paraphrased Obama.
“And the reason I can say that with some confidence is not just based on science, but based on the fact that keep in mind that it wasn’t until the ’80s where we started banning lead in paint, lead in toys, lead in gasoline,” Obama said on Wednesday. “So if you are my age, or older, or maybe even a little bit younger, you got some lead in your system when you were growing up.”
Obama doesn’t want Flint residents to “disparage about the future opportunities for their children,” Earnest said. Obama was exposed but still “had a very bright future,” he added.
“The point here is that being exposed to lead is not going to limit the potential of these kids,” Earnest said.
