Nashville @ a week ago..Michelle Obama says...
"We are so blessed....This President has brought us out of the dark and into
the light."
(She has a bottomless taxpayer credit card, what a wonderful
light!)
Just thought I'd try to shed a little light on the situation.
Blue-collar voter resentment building over Obama vacations?
posted at 3:21 pm on April 27, 2012 by Ed Morrissey
It's a tempting target against a demagogue who insists on making "fairness"
an issue in every speech he makes, but will attacking Barack Obama over the
costs of his family's 17 vacations in three years resonate with voters? The
Washington Examiner reports on some focus-group testing performed by
Republican pollsters among blue-collar Democrats in Ohio and Pennsylvania,
two important battleground states, who claim that resentment is building
over what is seen as a lavish lifestyle at taxpayer expense:
Blue collar Democratic voters, stuck taking depressing "staycations" because
they can't afford gas and hotels, are resentful of the first family's 17
lavish vacations around the world and don't want their tax dollars paying
for the Obamas' holidays, according to a new analysis of swing voters. .
McLaughlin handled blue collar and Catholic voters in Pittsburgh on April 3
and Cleveland on March 20. He found that they are very depressed about the
economy and feel that their tax dollars are being sucked up by both the rich
and those living on government assistance.
During the focus group discussions about debt and spending cuts, many in his
group volunteered criticism of the presidential vacations as something that
should be cut. Among the lines McLaughlin wrote down was one from a
Democratic woman who said, "Michelle Obama spends $1 million to take the
kids to Hawaii," and another who said, "President Obama was the only
president to take so many trips."
The theme, said McLaughlin, is that the first family "is out of touch" with
working class voters.
The pollsters conducted their focus-group testing well before Judicial Watch
calculated the cost to taxpayers of just one of those vacations, Michelle
Obama's in Spain. That trip cost nearly a half-million dollars to service
the needs of the Obamas and their several guests:
Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and fights
government corruption, announced today that it obtained documents from the
United States Air Force and the United States Secret Service detailing costs
associated with Michelle Obama's controversial August 2010 vacation to
Spain. According to a Judicial Watch analysis, the records indicate a total
combined cost of at least $467,585. .
.According to U.S. Department of Defense's 2010 published hourly rates, the
total cost of flying Michelle Obama and her guests from Camp Andrews to
Malaga and then to Mallorca and back to the United States was $199,323.75.
This is based on approximately 17 hours and 15 minutes of total flying time.
.The 15-member flight crew stayed at Tryp Guadalmar, a nearby motel.
Lodging cost was $10,290.60 and car rental cost was $2,633.50. Food cost was
$876.30, including $57.68 for four bottles of maple syrup and a package of
pancake mix. .
Secret Service records, meanwhile, show that the costs to the agency for the
vacation were $254,461.20. This total includes $26,670.61 for a chauffeur
tour of Costa del Sol and $50,078.78 for a travel planning company SET P&V,
S.L. (George Soros is 50% owner of the travel company.) Taxpayers also paid
the bill for separate lodging for a dog and its handler.
In August 2010, Michelle Obama, her daughter and friends embarked on what
the press described as a "whirlwind tour of Spain," which included visits to
the coastal towns, shopping and a lunch date with the country's King and
Queen. While the White House claims the Obamas "paid their own way" for the
vacation, the records detail some of the required security and other costs
to taxpayers for the private trip.
The New York Times' Caucus Blog acknowledged the political risk yesterday:
The White House said then that Mrs. Obama and her friends paid for their own
rooms, food and transportation. The first lady reimbursed the government for
the equivalent of first-class commercial tickets for herself and her
daughter, Sasha, with the rest of the seats on her government plane occupied
mainly by Secret Service employees. Her friends flew on separate commercial
flights, the White House said at the time.
But as with every first lady, the cost of actually flying the government
plane far exceeded the money Mrs. Obama reimbursed, and security is paid for
by the government. Secret Service agents travel with any first lady when she
leaves the White House, and they typically insist on government
transportation to better secure her. Some aides came along as well because
Mrs. Obama paid a courtesy call on King Juan Carlos I and Queen Sofia on the
island of Majorca.
Obama told a reporter earlier this month that he has a growing family that
needs to get out of the White House on occasion, which is both an assertion
that no one disputes and is also missing the point. Few families take more
than one such vacation a year, not even families managing to do well in the
stagnant economy. Taking an average of five a year, with the considerable
taxpayer expense involved, is something that most people will find
excessive, especially when those vacations involve significant travel -
like, say, to Spain, rather than Camp David, which exists for a retreat for
Presidents and their families. The Bushes, for instance, mainly vacationed
at their Texas ranch, and even with that, Democrats used to gripe about
Bush's supposedly excessive vacationing then.
Hypocrisy is a powerful argument, especially against a politician attempting
to play the populist card in an election. Still, I wouldn't necessarily
count on this being a big hindrance to Obama garnering votes from committed
Democrats, even in blue-collar states. The economy will make more of an
impact than Obama's vacations. The only impact this might have would be to
blunt Obama's attacks on Romney as an out-of-touch rich man, because I'd bet
that even the Romneys haven't taken 17 vacations in the last three years -
and theirs would have been funded out of their own pockets.
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