President Obama assured working-class Ohioans that he wasn’t born into a wealthy family, in an apparent shot at Republican rival Mitt Romney.
“Somebody gave me an education,” Obama said today. “I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth. Michelle wasn’t. But somebody gave us a chance.”
Recommended Stories
The president, calling as he was for increased government investment in student aid, seemed to be implying that receiving an education paid for by family is less legitimate than receiving it due to government support.
Obama moved in with his grandmother, a bank vice president in Hawaii, when he was 10 years old. He attended a private college preparatory academy.
The president described his grandmother as “a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed her by on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”
