I donât think so.
I think he meant 47 and it came out as 57.
Counting territories there are only 56 âstatesâ anyway, so subtracting out the one he didnât visit and Alaska and Hawaii and youâve only got 53. And if Hawaii was too far then I assume Guam, American Samoa, and Northern Marianas were all way too far, so really at most 50. (47 actual states plus DC, Puerto Rico, and USVI possibly. Although Iâm not sure USVI gets enough delegates to justify the trip, but I have no actual idea if Obama visited USVI in 2008. Puerto Rico and DC seem more likely.)
Iâm not saying that Obama was making a secret Muslim reference, Iâm saying it was blown up for being that.
I guesss Obama was speaking the truth about the 57 states.
You are aware, probably, that Barack Obama lost his bearings recently and said that he was going to campaign in all 57 states. You heard this? And everybody chalked it up to, âWell, heâs tired.â
Barack Obama says heâs gonna go out and campaign in 57 states, he was just tired, you know, itâs been such a long campaign, heâs been so many places, he probably thinks there are 57 states. Well, I have here a printout from a website called the International Humanist and Ethical Union. And here is how the second paragraph of an article on that website begins. âEvery year from 1999 to 2005 the organization of the Islamic conference representing the 57 Islamic states presented a resolution to the United Nations commission on human rights called combating.â And the title of the piece here is, âHow the Islamic states dominate the UN human rights council,â and there are 57 of them.
Obama said heâs going to campaign in 57 states, and it turns out that there are 57 Islamic states. There are 57 Islamic states. So did Obama just lose his bearings, or was this a more telling slip, ladies and gentlemen?
That sounds incredibly dumb, even by Fox standards. Although there was the bowling incident⌠but Clinton attempted to capitalize on that so it seemed fair enough to cover it.
I think the gist was that he bowled a 37 at a campaign event, causing Hillary to suggest that they have a bowling tournament to determine the primary winner. But actually he had only bowled 7 frames and the last was a spare and hadnât been scored so he wasnât actually quite as bad a bowler as the 37 on the scoreboard suggested, but not good by any means.
Thatâs from memory, so I might have a detail or two wrong, but it was something along those lines.
By 2016 my stepfather had passed, so I was no longer subjected to Fox News at all waking hours of the day when I visited my mother. I have much less familiarity with their crazy claims after he passed.
Do we know if he knew he was lying? I donât remember those days well enough, but the legislation did include grandfathering plans. The issue was needing to extend the grandfathering period backwards, which is kind of esoteric. Presumably someone in his circle understood?
Agree it was much more empty-promise than âgaffeâ.
In my opinion, anyone with half a brain, which I do credit Obama as having, should have been able to see the writing on the wall. Namely that the non-Obamacare individual market was going to essentially disappear and people would not be able to keep their plans because the government created conditions that made it not worthwhile for the insurers to continue offering the old plans.
So yeah⌠IMO he knew or at least should have known.
But ⌠we agree itâs different from a gaffe.
It didnât go over well because it was shown without any of the context of what he was saying. Any additional context he could have added to the statement could just as easily have been trimmed, as was done with the original statement.
Was that the issue? How many insurers offered old plans? And what were the profits like on grandfathered plans?
I thought the bigger issue is simply that nobody really âkeepsâ a plan. Benefits change, people change, employers change, etc. So many people and employers had already failed to âkeepâ their plan before ACA even started.
This is basically exactly what he said.
"If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If youâve got a business, you didnât build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didnât get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.
The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we donât do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires."
His meaning is extremely clear, the only possible complaint is that he used vague words like âthatâ instead of making his words more stilted and precise.
I honestly think if heâd tacked on the words âin a vacuumâ it wouldnât have caused such an uproar. The rest of the quote is too verbose for people to sift through but if a partial sentence had been quoted (without the âin a vacuumâ) I think people would have had more understanding that he was cut off.
But whatever. I donât feel like arguing further about something from what⌠2008? 2012 maybe? I dunno, losing interest fast.
Sure, it could have prevented any uproar. But that means you are expecting the highest level politician, who is constantly talking to people, to never make even the tiniest error in clarity when talking. Itâs pretty much an impossible task. It reminds me of the âbinders full of womenâ comment from Romney, that was apparently a terrible thing to say.
Yeah, binders full of women is an apt comparison.
And as a reminder, I did say the following about Obama:
I always thought that reference was to employer plans. Not individual market.
My understanding was that it was not specific to either and could be reasonably be interpreted to apply to both. Certainly the individual market is where there was the most disruption, causing it to be the most false.
Insurers stopped offering the old plans and peopleâs premiums went up ⌠in some cases by humongous amounts as they transitioned from a fully underwritten to a guaranteed issue plan. Those were the people screaming bloody murder. My father was one of them.
Not all that much changed in the group space. Birth control had to be covered and lifetime caps went away but the impact wasnât that much. Probably something else Iâm forgetting.
This is an interesting topic to me right now. Humana has made a significant investment in Microsoftâs cloud stack for analytics moving forward, but company wide our analytics executive leadership used SAS and Excel to get where they are. Now they are supposed to come up with strategy to make these transitions. Itâs such a different data landscape that itâs really hard to even bring them along on conversations about the technology.
It seems exhausting to be a politician without exploding the media machine.
His quote was completely comprehensible but easily taken out of context.
Heâd have to say like, âYou alone, though you worked hard and accomplished much, did not create that by yourself. Many people worked together to help you.â
And that person will never be elected because nuance is dead in modern US political discourse.
Thereâs plenty of things to criticize about Obama, but his public speaking isnât one of them. As awful a president as I thought him to be, I always thought of him as an eloquent speaker.
Correct. And with something like that thereâs essentially no room for error.
Naw, I truly think the exact same speech but change âyou didnât build thatâ to âyou didnât build that in a vacuumâ would have been fine.
This rehashed debate over the âyou didnât build thatâ thing makes me think of my commute to work today. Different one of our locations; took me through part of Amish country. I encountered a back-to-back horse and buggy, followed by a single horse and buggy. Made me think of how they donât pay taxes, but (at least for some Amish communities) theyâre okay with using the outsidersâ highways. Iâm generally for maintaining legit tax exempt statuses, but this seems like kind of an unfair having it both ways. Something something repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, etc. (They also end up skewing things for school funding formula purposes by making it look like the region has more income than it actually does.)
Lol OH or PA Iâm guessing? Worked in that area for a while. Not mad at specific Amish people but they were just⌠so annoying.
Was always interesting when I was 14-16ish y/o and the Amish would come into McDonaldâs where I worked. I know thereâre different⌠strictness guidelines for various conclaves, but it was just funny to see.