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.
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