Yesterday MSNBC contributers bitterly denounced Mitt Romney for giving $50 to a unemployed woman who approached him on the campaign trail.
MSNBC contributor Joy-Ann Reid said that Romney was enforcing the worse stereotypes playing into a “conservative meme, that you don’t need actual programs that the government puts in place to help people in need, we’ll just give them charity, I’ll just give him 50 bucks.”
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In the same segment, MSNBC contributor Janell Ross was dismayed that the woman had become a “mascot for the campaign . . . affirming all sorts of conservative ideas.”
Flashback to October 2011, when it was revealed that President Obama sends personal checks in the mail to suffering Americans who wrote letters to him at the White House.
Washington Post staff writer Eli Saslow wrote that “the process of governing the nation was so slow that Obama sometimes felt powerless to help them” and revealed that the president “admitted” sending needy people personal checks in response.
“It’s not something I should advertise, but it has happened,” Obama said.
“Some of these letters you read and you say, ‘Gosh, I really want to help this person, and I may not have the tools to help them right now,’ ” the president added. “And then you start thinking about the fact that for every one person that wrote describing their story, there might be another hundred thousand going through the same thing. So there are times when I’m reading the letters and I feel pained that I can’t do more, faster, to make a difference in their lives.”
