Obama Suggests Meeting With Trump Wasn't All It Was Cracked Up To Be
Source: Talking Points Memo
President Barack Obama acknowledged in a New Yorker profile published online Thursday that his first meeting with Donald Trump may not have actually lived up to its sunny official description.
“I think I can’t characterize it without…” Obama began before stopping. “At some point over a beer—off the record.” It was a noticeably different tone than the one employed by the White House after the meeting: That it was "a little less awkward" than the media might have imagined, in the words of Press Secretary Josh Earnest.
For much of the wide-ranging profile, which draws from several interviews, Obama discussed the slanted media and political environment which led to last week's victory of President-elect Trump. He highlighted the effect of fake and distorted news sites that profited handsomely from Trump’s candidacy, and to which the President-elect may owe part of his success.
“An explanation of climate change from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist looks exactly the same on your Facebook page as the denial of climate change by somebody on the Koch brothers’ payroll,” Obama said. “And the capacity to disseminate misinformation, wild conspiracy theories, to paint the opposition in wildly negative light without any rebuttal—that has accelerated in ways that much more sharply polarize the electorate and make it very difficult to have a common conversation.”
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Read more: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/obama-new-yorker-profile-trump-meeting
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"...we’re going to have to redesign the social compact in some fairly fundamental ways over the next twenty years. And I know how to build a bridge to that new social compact. It begins with all the things we’ve talked about in the past—early-childhood education, continuous learning, job training, a basic social safety net, expanding the earned-income tax credit, investments in infrastructure—which, by definition, aren’t shipped overseas. All of those things accelerate growth, give you more of a runway. But at some point, when the problem is not just Uber but driverless Uber, when radiologists are losing their jobs to A.I., then we’re going to have to figure out how do we maintain a cohesive society and a cohesive democracy in which productivity and wealth generation are not automatically linked to how many hours you put in, where the links between production and distribution are broken, in some sense. Because I can sit in my office, do a bunch of stuff, send it out over the Internet, and suddenly I just made a couple of million bucks, and the person who’s looking after my kid while I’m doing that has no leverage to get paid more than ten bucks an hour.”
Much more work to be done!
