Carlson - Feeling Your Pain

Margaret Carlson

We don’t get many do-overs in life. President Barack Obama got one on Monday, a chance to correct the impression that he can’t identify with Joe and Josephine Six Pack except when telling them to eat their spinach and not be upset that the bankers who got us into this mess are dining on caviar. His opening came in the form of a long, compelling question from Velma Hart at a town hall meeting at the Newseum in Washington. As an exemplar of the middle class, sitting at the kitchen table at the end of the month asking why it’s going so wrong, you couldn’t do better than Hart. You just know she plays by the rules, wakes early to get to her job as chief financial officer of the veterans’ group Amvets, and raced to the polls in November 2008 to vote for Obama. Velma told the president that she’s “exhausted of defending you,” “deeply disappointed with where we are right now,” and waiting for him finally “to change things in a meaningful way for the middle class.” Read more here:

Carlson - Feeling Your Pain