Matthews: Obama was never middle class, does not "have that experience that most Americans have"

[DeepModem Mom]

Media Matters for America: Matthews suggested Obama was never middle class, does not "have that experience that ... most Americans have"

During the 7 p.m. ET hour of MSNBC's June 3 special election coverage, anchor Chris Matthews asked Democratic Leadership Council chairman Harold Ford Jr. if there was "something missing" in Sen. Barack Obama's "biography that people can identify with." Matthews continued: "He's gone from being a poor kid, growing up in Hawaii, in Indonesia, part of his youth, mixed family background, had to struggle, worked with community organizations; went to these incredibly elite schools, Columbia and Harvard Law, making Law Review and all that. He missed the middle part. Most Americans don't know anything about being dirt poor and don't know anything about the Ivy League. They're sort of in this struggling class. The people in the middle worried about paying bills, for whom going to the movies, paying 35, 40 bucks for the whole cost of going to the movies with your wife, is just too much money, OK?" Matthews went on to state: "Does he have that experience that people -- most Americans have? Does he connect on the basic struggling-class level? And I'm not sure he does." But Obama's biography, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (Crown, 1995), directly rebuts Matthews' assertion that Obama "missed the middle part."

Matthews himself noted that Obama worked with "community organizations." Indeed, in describing in Dreams from My Father his work as a community organizer in Chicago prior to attending Harvard Law School, Obama wrote that his salary started at "ten thousand dollars the first year, with a two-thousand-dollar travel allowance to buy a car." According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' inflation calculator, Obama's 1985 starting salary translates to $19,964.96 in 2008 dollars, with an additional $3,992 travel allowance. Obama also wrote in the 2004 preface of Dreams from My Father that since the book's initial publication in 1995, "my wife and I bought a house, were blessed with two gorgeous, healthy, and mischievous daughters, and struggled to pay the bills."

Additionally, in his biography of Obama, Obama: From Promise to Power (Amistad, 2007), Chicago Tribune reporter David Mendell wrote of Obama's middle-class upbringing:

Beyond his advice not to be loose with his money, Lolo imparted a store of tough-minded, masculine wisdom to young Barry. Amid the widespread privation of Third World Indonesia, Lolo had lived a hard existence, extremely different from the relatively comfortable, middle-class American experience to which Obama and his mother were accustomed.

<...>

Obama's grandparents maneuvered him into Punahou; his grandfather's boss, an alumnus, intervened to have Obama accepted. And Madelyn's job at the bank helped pay the steep tuition. By living in a modest apartment and sending Obama (and eventually Maya) to private school, his grandparents had sacrificed their own prosperity for the sake of Obama and his sister. "We never suffered," Madelyn answered when I asked what specific things were given up to send her grandchildren to Punahou. "As you can see, we live in an apartment instead of a house. ... But I think we could have done the other if we had wanted. But I traveled, you know, and spent money on the kids -- the kids and traveling were priorities. We're not poverty-stricken."...

http://mediamatters.org/items/200806040004?f=h_latest

[Drunken Irishman]

1. Wait, first he's too elitist and now too poor?

[HawkerHurricane]

3. Well, yes.

He's too elite, too poor, too black, too white, too inexperienced, too much a insider, too Muslim, too radical Christian, too midwest, too coastal...

Looks like the Goopers can't decide who to run against.

[aquart]

2. What did Obama's mother pay?

The one who abandoned him like his father did?

[ladjf]

4. America has suffered from Mathews inane commentary long enough.

In some ways he is worse than Limbaugh and Hanity. At least they are clear which side they are on.

[sinkingfeeling]

5. Could Mr. Matthews do a comparison between Obama and McSame's financial histories?

I think he'd find that McSame has even less experience with the middle class or poor!

[barack the house]

6. Says the multi-millionaire matthews.