Obama and Black History

Obama completely misrepresented himself in his campaign in 2008. He sold himself as an advocate of the poor and promised to bring "change". But he is a centre-right politician. He is closer to Wall Street than Main Street.

Here's a post by Paul Krugman on his NY Times blog that has my blood boiling. Obama purposefully misrepresents the history of Social Security in the US:

Social Insurance History

Hmm. Paul Rosenberg catches the president rewriting history — and, revealingly, doing so in a way that makes the case for timid, incremental action, while waving away the actual history of bold strokes.

Specifically, Obama said this:

This is why FDR, when he started Social Security, it only affected widows and orphans. You did not qualify. And yet now it is something that really helps a lot of people. When Medicare was started, it was a small program. It grew.

Under the criteria that you just set out, each of those were betrayals of some abstract ideal.

This is all wrong: both programs were huge from the start. From the beginning, Social Security applied to all private-sector workers, except those in agriculture, domestic service, or casual employment — and yes, those exceptions happened to exclude the majority of African-Americans. Still, it was by no means a small program that grew big. Medicare covered everyone 65 and older right from the beginning, although initially it only provided hospital insurance.

It is, as Rosenberg says, odd that Obama doesn’t know this history.

The stuff in bold is what I marked out. This is Paul Krugman, his wife is African-American and I'm sure she keeps him informed about how things were skewed against blacks in the US.

The shocking thing is that Obama doesn't know history, doesn't know progressive left wing history, doesn't know black history, and that his wife isn't filling him in on the details of black history!