This past weekend kicked off lots of stories pertaining to Barack Obama’s first 100 days in office. Naturally, the left-wing mainstream media outlets have been propping up President Can’t-Do-No-Wrong, while the right-leaning internet sites and radio have been critical.
So how is Obama really doing? Let’s ask the folks in Greenwood, S.C. It probably was not the intention, but this article from yesterday’s Washington Post [h/t/ Drudge] almost makes me weep for my country. It’s a telling anecdote about this economically disadvantaged Southern town which was gung ho for Obama on January 20, now not so much. Why? Their plight has not changed. What’s really sad is that they don’t realize it’s not going to. These citizens drank the Kool-Aid, just as many easily duped Americans have since LBJ’s Democrat-benefiting Great Society scheme.
The piece is mainly from the perspective of a councilwoman, Edith Childs, who is working around the clock to help her struggling town. Unfortunately, she’s looking for that help in all the wrong places, starting with a certain messianic figure who occupies 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. Here are significant parts of the long, depressing piece. I feel bad for Ms. Childs, because writer Eli Saslow makes this clearly decent and well-meaning woman look like a real dupe ... because she is:
A Hundred Anxious Days
In a South Carolina Town Where the Downturn Has Deepened Since the Inauguration, Two Obama Supporters Have Struggled, Going From ‘Fired Up’ to Tired Out
By Eli Saslow
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 26, 2009
GREENWOOD, S.C. Her cordless phone stores 17 voice messages, and tonight the inbox is full. Edith Childs, 60, grabs a bottle of water, tosses her hat on the living room floor and scowls at the blinking red light. A county councilwoman, she spent the past 12 hours driving rural roads in her 2001 Toyota Camry, trying to solve Greenwood’s problems, but only now begins the part of each day that exhausts her. Childs slumps into an armless chair and steels herself for a 13-minute confessional.
“Hi, Ms. Edith, this is Rose, and I’m calling about my light bill. It’s $420. . . . There’s no way I can pay that.”
“Edith, it’s Francine. . . . They stopped by my house again today, talking about foreclosure. I don’t know what to do. Can you call me?”
Childs leans her head back against the wall and closes her eyes. Her hair is matted down with sweat, and thin-rimmed glasses sink low on her nose. Every few minutes, she stirs to jot notes on a to-do list that fills most of a notebook. She has to remind herself that she ran for county council in 1998 because she coveted this role: unofficial protector, activist and psychologist for her home town. Back then, the hardships of Greenwood—22,000 people separated from the nearest interstate by 40 miles—struck Childs as contained. Now she sometimes wonders aloud to her husband, Charles: “When does it stop?”
“Yes, councilwoman, this is Joe Thompson calling. Uh, I’m having a bit of an emergency.”
Across the dark living room, one of Childs’s favorite pictures is displayed on a worn coffee table. It shows Childs with her arms wrapped around Barack Obama, his hand on her back, her eyes glowing. They met at a rally attended by 37 supporters on a rainy day in 2007, when Childs responded to Obama’s sluggishness on stage with an impromptu chant: “Fired up! Ready to go!” She repeated it, shouting louder each time, until Obama laughed and dipped his shoulders to the rhythm. The chant caught on. “Fired up!” people began saying at rallies. “Ready to go,” Obama chanted back. He told audiences about Childs, “a spirited little lady,” and invited her onstage at campaign appearances. By the day of his inauguration, when Childs led a busload of strangers bound for the Mall in her now-iconic chant, her transformation was complete. She was Edith Childs, fired up and ready to go.
But now, as Obama nears the 100-day milestone of his presidency, Childs suffers from constant exhaustion. In a conservative Southern state that bolstered Obama’s candidacy by supporting him early in the Democratic primaries, she awakens at 2:30 a.m. with stress headaches and remains awake mulling all that’s befallen Greenwood since Obama’s swearing-in.
On Day 4 of his presidency, the Solutia textile plant laid off 101 workers. On Day 23, the food bank set a record for meals served. On Day 50, the hospital fired 200 employees and warned of further job cuts. On Day 71, the school superintendent called a staff meeting and told his principals: “We’re losing 10 percent of our budget. That means some of us won’t have jobs next year, and the rest should expect job changes and pay cuts.” On Day 78, the town’s newly elected Democratic mayor, whose campaign was inspired partly by his admiration for Obama, summarized Greenwood’s accelerating fragility. “This is crippling us, and there’s no sign of it turning around,” Welborn Adams said.
On Day 88, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that South Carolina had set a record for its highest unemployment rate in state history, at 11.4 percent. Greenwood’s unemployment is 13 percent—more than twice what it was when Childs first started chanting.
“We have a lot of people who live in cold houses, with no jobs and no food,” Childs says.
Hundreds of them call her, and the most desperate travel to Childs’s single-story house on Old Ninety-Six Highway outside of town and knock on her front door. A retired nurse living with her husband on modest savings, she makes $725 a month for serving on the county council and uses that money to pay other people’s bills: $240 for her brother’s electricity, because he can’t find a job; $300 for a young family’s rent in a two-bedroom apartment, because they have a 5-year-old boy and no income; $168 for a friend’s water bill, because the county threatened to shut it off. When the $725 runs out—and it always does—Childs dips into savings and tells Charles she spent the money on a new outfit.
“Always a fighter.” That’s how Childs describes herself. She disapproved of how her first husband wasted money on liquor, so she called him into the living room and lit a $20 bill on fire to emphasize her point. She disliked Greenwood’s plans to build a road between her neighborhood and a new housing project, so she filed a lawsuit and dragged it out for five years until she won. She thought Obama would make a good president, so, she says, “this mouthy black lady knocked on doors in the whitest, most Republican neighborhoods in town and told them what was on my mind.”
Now Obama is president, and she still believes he will help rescue Greenwood County. But her enthusiasm has faded into a wary optimism. “He’s only one man, and there’s a lot to get done,” she says, a predicament she knows all too well.
“I never used to get tired, but I’m running out of energy,” she says. “It’s stressful. Maybe one problem gets fixed, but it’s not fixed for long, and while you’ve been doing that, four other people have called asking for help.” […]
Working on her daily to-do list one April morning, Childs visits an unemployed friend in Promised Land, a town of trailers 10 miles outside Greenwood, and then drops off a bag of food for a 92-year-old woman whose cupboard has emptied of everything but grits.
“Somebody probably needs something in every house we pass,” Childs says as she drives. “A lot have problems too big to solve.”
Just before 1 p.m., she pulls into Greenwood’s normally deserted downtown for a few more errands and notices a large crowd gathered in front of the courthouse. More than 200 people are dressed in red, white and blue and are waving miniature American flags. Childs asks a friend for details and learns that it is a “tea party” to protest Obama’s economic policies, one of about 1,000 similar events coordinated on Tax Day across the country.
“Of course it’s going to be a lot of white Republicans, and mostly men,” Childs says as she walks through the crowd and finds a spot alone at the rear of the plaza. “I want to see this, but I’m keeping my distance.”
In a state that voted 54 percent for Republican presidential candidate John McCain, Childs has heard plenty of anti-Obama rhetoric. “Most people around here know where I stand and let me be,” she says. “People are too polite to be nasty.” So she shakes her head in disbelief as she reads the angry messages scrawled on the poster boards in front of her.
“Say NO to Obama and Socialism!”
“OBAMA’NATION.”
“Who cares what Obama says? America IS a Christian nation.”
Childs puckers her lips and listens as Greenwood residents take turns stepping to the podium and shouting through a megaphone. Their speeches revolve around the same themes Childs hears in her phone messages, except what she identified as the solution to Greenwood’s problems is what these speakers now disparage as the cause.
“We all know this president is the major problem,” David O. Davis III says. “I’ve got friends with families who are losing their jobs, getting laid off.”
“We’re struggling to pay our bills and get by,” Cathy Heitzenrater says. “We’re feeling disenfranchised from our own country and disappointed about who’s running it.”
“Vote the bum out,” R.J. Fife says.
After each speaker finishes, Childs retreats a few steps farther from the crowd. A part of her would like to go grab the bullhorn and tell these people to “keep their mouths shut and give Obama a little time,” she says. But she woke up at 3 a.m. again this morning, and she can’t go home for a nap until she pays $100 on a constituent’s bill at the water company and stops by a city office to inquire about possible job openings for Hackett.
“Let them have their tea party,” Childs says. “They’re just looking for somebody to blame. My ears are full.”
She walks away from the courthouse as the crowd joins into chorus to sing the national anthem.
Sure, Mr. Saslow, bash tea partiers even two weeks after, why don’t you? Real classy.
Ms. Childs, I appreciate where your heart is and applaud your efforts. You’re a person who clearly means well but you are a salmon swimming against a tide you yourself helped make stronger. Your anger at the “tea partiers” is misdirected. Your anger should be directed where theirs is. The tea partiers refused to drink the Kool-Aid, and are now angry that the man you were warned not to vote for is now in the White House, where he won’t be able to do a single thing to help your town’s situation. Indeed, President Obama’s demonstrably unsustainable economic plans will most likely make your situation worse.
I’m not saying towns like Greenwood, S.C. are in their situation because of Obama (and as much as a liberal//Democrat might want to believe, they’re not there because of eight years of Bush either). They are a town whose citizenry has been brainwashed for apprently quite a while that government is the answer to their problems: Government will help them, save them, find them a job, help pay their bills, and put their kids in college.
It’s been a hundred days and no sign of President Obama on his white horse handing out great paying jobs with health benefits. The only ones who can do that are those whom Obama has specifically targeted for punishment: Businesses. Companies. Employers. But employers are Public Enemy #1 to President Obama. As one WaPo reader commented:
Gee … Sounds to me like what Greenwood needs is some of those evil corporations and privately held companies that offer, you know, JOBS. But of course, anyone who employs people is rich, greedy and not paying “their fair share.” It is any wonder why there are no jobs? The people who create jobs are cast as the bad guys. It’s also obvious government cannot give jobs to very many. Government produces nothing. It doesn’t create wealth. Ms. Childs is impotent to help people.
It’s so damn obvious that only a writer for the Washington Post like Eli Saslow would be incapable of realizing it.
President Obama isn’t coming to help you any time, Ms. Childs. In fact, your town is right where Obama and the Democrats want you: Poor, embittered, angry at white men (as depicted by Saslow’s gratuitous dig at the tea partiers), and wholly dependent on government.
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