Barack Obama's Promised Land by Jack Cashill

Author:Jack Cashill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: N/A
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Published: 2021-04-23T00:00:00+00:00

Above My Pay Grade

During Obama’s appearance at Saddleback, Warren threw the candidate one more curve. Rather than ask Obama what his position was on abortion, the answer to which Obama had been finessing for more than a year on the campaign trail, Warren simply asked when do infants acquire “human rights.” As a constitutional scholar, one whose only published piece in the Harvard Law Review dealt specifically with the civil rights of the unborn, this question should have been in Obama’s wheelhouse. It wasn’t. He whiffed, clumsily responding, “Answering that question with specificity, you know, is above my pay grade.”258

Despite the fact that nearly eight million unborn babies would be denied their human rights during his tenure, more than two million of them black, Obama neglects the issue in his memoir. He fails to mention, for instance, that on just his third day in office he signed an executive order reversing Ronald Reagan’s Mexico City policy, a ban on the funding of international organizations that provided abortions.

Only in one instance does abortion come into play and that is in regard to the passage of what Congress called the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). It was the Tea Party people, writes our prickly memoirist, who gave the ACA—an “abomination” in their eyes—the label “Obamacare.”259 Whatever its name, this was the bill closest to the president’s heart.

Obama focused on health care from the beginning of his campaign. During his second debate with John McCain in 2008, Obama explained why the issue demanded attention. When asked by moderator Tom Brokaw whether health care was a right or a responsibility, Obama answered, “For my mother to die of cancer at the age of 53 and have to spend the last months of her life in the hospital room arguing with insurance companies because they’re saying that this may be a preexisting condition and they don’t have to pay her treatment, there’s something fundamentally wrong about that.”260

Obama was not the first politician to exploit the death of a relative for political gain—Al Gore and Joe Biden come quickly to mind—but few have done so as deviously as Obama. As Janny Scott of the New York Times revealed in her 2011 book, A Singular Woman, Ann Dunham’s employer-provided health policy paid her hospital bills directly.261 In A Promised Land, Obama dials down the mendacity. “I’d never forget my mother in her waning days,” he writes, “fretting not just about her chances of survival but about whether her insurance would keep her solvent during treatment.”262 The actual “insurance” that worried Dunham was a disability policy she had signed up for after being diagnosed with uterine cancer. Cigna denied her claim. Obamacare did not address this peripheral issue in any case. Obama killed off his mother in vain.

In September 2009, Obama addressed a joint session of Congress to explain the wonders of the ACA. In the midst of the speech, a five-term congressman from South Carolina, Joe Wilson, shouted out, “You lie.” This incident obviously got to Obama.

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