President Obama’s remarks on Wednesday in Elkhart, Indiana, appear to have been drafted long before the current political season began in earnest. Obama claimed, for example, that the Republican party is “beholden to China,” the New York Times reported. That revelation comes as a surprise to those of us who may have noticed that one Donald J. Trump—the most anti-China presidential candidate of the modern era—recently wrapped up the GOP presidential nomination.
The president also said the Republicans are pawns of the “big banks.” This too sounded a bit of out date, given that in the upcoming Trump versus Clinton contest, the Democratic candidate is manifestly the choice of Wall Street. It’s as if the president’s speech were written months ago about any old generic Republican nominee. Given Trump’s victory, Obama should have sent it back and demanded a re-write.
On second thought, the speech may actually have been written decades ago, not mere months. Because President Obama also claimed that Republicans stigmatize “welfare queens.” A cursory search of LexisNexis confirms my suspicion: In the decades since the advent of the term in the 1970s by a Chicago Tribune journalist, “welfare queen” has been used almost exclusively by either elected Democrats or liberal pundits to characterize how Republicans supposedly talk about recipients of public aid. No prominent Republican has used the term in memory. And the idea itself is bizarrely anachronistic: In the two decades since President Bill Clinton signed a bill drastically curtailing welfare spending, has anybody really gotten “wee-weed” up about “welfare queens?”
President Obama also used his speech to bemoan talk radio hosts. Presumably he was thinking of Joe Pyne and Bob Grant.
