“Everybody is impatient and trying to figure out why we haven’t transformed the world overnight.” (ap)
When Obama was in New Orleans on Thursday, a little kid at a town hall meeting asked him, “Why does everyone hate you?”
Obama waxed philosophical, explaining that getting the blame is part of the job when people are worried and unhappy. But then, at a DNC fundraising speech later that night in San Francisco, Obama warmed to the subject: You pay the cost to be the boss, as James Brown said.
“Washington, unfortunately, I think over the last several years has been engulfed with a climate that isn’t just partisan, because we don’t want to romanticize the past — things have always been partisan; that’s the nature of democracy — but rather a sense that partisanship overrides the national interest,” Obama said. “There’s always been politics, but there’s been a sense lately that goes beyond just the run of the mill politics; a sense that we are going to slash and burn and go after folks just because we want to win, as opposed to because we’re trying to get something done.”
Obama listed all the problems he inherited when he took over the White House (we won’t list them here) and added, “Change is hard.”
Hold me! (reuters)
