Saturday, September 08, 2012

Do you remember Velma Hart?

I blogged about her back in September 25, 2010.  She was at a Town hall meeting with President Obama and calmly confronted him with her concerns about the economy.  She made a big media splash, and frankly, I didn’t buy it.  I thought she was a plant so he could look caring and reasonable.  But. . . I followed up on my own story, and it seems I was wrong.  She lost her job with a non-profit (I was wrong in my blog about her job—I thought she worked for the government but it was AmVets)  in November 2010, just 2 months later.  However, I kept poking around, and found that in 2011 she did indeed have another job with a different non-profit, and I thought her resume looked extremely good and the title of the position was impressive, although I don’t know if the salary matched what she had before.

Then I kept looking, wondering if she still supported Obama in 2012 and for the next four years and found out someone else wondered too.

I still don’t feel like I have enough. I still don’t know that any of us have enough,” Hart said in an interview Monday with Gut Check. “I just wish there were some banner, some lighting rod that we could point to that has happened in the last 3½ years that showed how he changed things for the good.

“I am just a regular person trying to make ends meet,” Hart continued. “I still very much appreciate the president but I really am worried though that I don’t see enough traction for the average person. I worry about the people. I worry about the ineffectiveness on the Democratic side and the meanness on the Republican side.”

There she does it again. Hart has a way of putting her finger on the weakness of the current political debate: connecting with the middle class, especially a middle class weathering a tough economy.

When asked how she is doing now, Velma Hart answered quickly, “Struggling to figure out what is going on. ... Everything is so uncertain.”

When asked whom she believes she speaks for, she said: “I am talking for everyone who cares like me; everyone who has kids like me; everyone who like me is thinking about retirement or wondering if we have to work until we die.”

But there is hope. Hart has no regrets about leaving the cloak of anonymous citizenry to brave the open microphone and klieg lights of the political spectrum, “I always tell my daughter if we really don’t stand for something, we’ll fall for anything.”

It’s my guess she’ll still vote for him.  Sigh. Come on, Velma.  Mitt can’t do worse and he just might do better.  What have you got to lose? Except a broken heart, failed promises, and a guy totally stuck on himself.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

If she's looking for something positive Obama has done, she's going to be very disappointed. It's sad, really.

Pamela Cone said...

I originally thought the same thing too--that she was a plant by the Republican party. And I have seen it done by them before so knew it was a possibility.

I understand frustration, what I don't understand is people expecting President Obama to perform miracles. The amount of pressure some has placed on him is far above any they have placed on any president and/or political figure.

He's my President not my GOD.

Norma said...

He had so much support, I actually think he could have performed miracles if he had tackled the economy with judicious tax cuts and reduced government spending, and not tried to take over the health care industry. Instead, he used socialist tactics of using a crisis to creat a different type of social system, one very few were asking for. Clinton didn't get his "booming" economy from raising taxes, he got it from reducing government spending. Obama had so many examples of how NOT TO DO IT, but chose to use the tired, outmoded plans of FDR that kept us mired in a Depression for a decade.

Anonymous said...

Murray sez:
Pamela...pressure? From who?? He received a free pass from the MSM and that was BIG!